“I do not know,” again said Judith, and became grave. Her heart fluttered. She would like to be at the ball—and dance three dances with Oliver—but would Captain Coppinger suffer her? Would he expect to dance with her all the evening? If that were so, she would not like to go. “I really do not know,” again she said, clasped her hands on her knees, and sighed.
“Why that sigh, Judith?”
She looked up, dropped her eyes in confusion, and said faintly, “I do not know,” and that was her first lie.
CHAPTER XL.
THE DIAMOND BUTTERFLY.
Poor little fool! Shrewd in maintaining her conflict with Cruel Coppinger—always on the defensive, ever on guard, she was sliding unconsciously, without the smallest suspicion of danger, into a state that must eventually make her position more desperate and intolerable. In her inexperience she had never supposed that her own heart could be a traitor within the city walls. She took pleasure in the society of Oliver, and thought no wrong in so doing. She liked him, and would have reproached herself had she not done so.
Her relations with Coppinger remained strained. He was a good deal from home; indeed, he went on a cruise in his vessel, the Black Prince, and was absent for a month. He hoped that in his absence she might come to a better mind. They met, when he was at home, at meals; at other times not at all. He went his way, she went hers. Whether the agitation of men’s minds relative to the loss of the merchantman, and the rumors concerning the manner of its loss, had made Captain Cruel think it were well for him to absent himself for a while, till they had blown away, or whether he thought that his business required his attention elsewhere, or that by being away from home his wife might be the readier to welcome him, and come out of her vantage castle, and lay down her arms, cannot be said for certain; probably all these motives combined to induce him to leave Pentyre for five or six weeks.
While he was away Judith was lighter in heart. He returned shortly before Christmas, and was glad to see her more like her old self, with cheeks rounder, less livid, eyes less sunken, less like those of a hunted beast, and with a step that had resumed its elasticity. But he did not find her more disposed to receive him with affection as a husband. He thought that probably some change in the monotony of life at Pentyre might be of advantage, and he somewhat eagerly entered into the scheme for the ball at Wadebridge. She had been kept to books and to the society of her father too much, in days gone by, and had become whimsical and prudish. She must learn some of the enjoyments of life, and then she would cling to the man who opened to her a new sphere of happiness.
“Judith,” said he, “we will certainly go to this ball. It will be a pleasant one. As it is for a charitable purpose, all the neighborhood will be there. Squire Humphrey Prideaux of Prideaux Place, the Matthews of Roscarrock, the Molesworths of Pencarrow, and every one worth knowing in the country round for twelve miles. But you will be the queen of the ball.”
Judith at first thought of appearing at the dance in her simplest evening dress; she was shy and did not desire to attract attention. Her own position was anomalous, because that of Coppinger was anomalous. He passed as a gentleman in a part of the country not very exacting that the highest culture should prevail in the upper region of society. He had means, and he owned a small estate. But no one knew whence he came, or what was the real source whence he derived his income. Suspicion attached to him as engaged in both smuggling and wrecking, neither of which were regarded as professions consonant with gentility. The result of this uncertainty relative to Coppinger was that he was not received into the best society. The gentlemen knew him and greeted him in the hunting-field, and would dine with him at his house. The ladies, of course, had never been invited, because he was an unmarried man. The gentlemen probably had dealings with him about which they said nothing to their wives. It is certain that the Bodmin wine-merchant grumbled that the great houses of the north of Cornwall did not patronize him as they ought, and that no wine-merchant was ever able to pick up a subsistence at Wadebridge. Yet the country gentry were by no means given to temperance, and their cellars were being continually refilled.