In the absorbing, horrified speculation on the broken words and dark hints which reached her, Lady Bell forgot the market-place and the country-town sights which had occupied her when she had arrived at Peasmarsh, and on which the declining September sun was now brooding peacefully.
With her woman’s faculty of leaping at a conclusion, and anticipating every result—painting it in extreme and exaggerated colours—Lady Bell saw the couple whom she had wistfully admired and envied in a new light.
She saw the slim, refined gentleman suddenly set upon in the dusk, by a band of hired and armed ruffians, and brutally mauled and beaten.
She saw his battered, disfigured body carried home to his wife.
She saw the high-spirited, dignified woman flinging herself down, in the abandonment of grief, by the wreck, apostrophizing it under fond names, lifting the unconscious head on her knees, wiping the blood-stains from the face, to leave it white and blank, tearing her hair at the shame and anguish of the sight.
CHAPTER XII.
BETRAYAL.
Lady Bell could no more remain quiet under the knowledge she had acquired than she could help to commit the contemplated deed.
She was wildly at a loss how to proceed, but whatever plans crossed her mind, the idea never entered it to interfere by remonstrating with Squire Trevor. She knew by experience how bitterly hard it would be to turn him from any project. She seemed to know, as well, of how little moment she was to him, so that her opinion would not weigh a feather’s weight in the scale with regard to what he should do or leave undone; nay, that any overture on her part to defend Mr. Sundon, would probably only accelerate his fate.
Lady Bell had very hazy notions of the prerogatives and powers of the Sheriff, who was not to arrive till the last moment, and of the Mayor, whose house, among others, she had invaded. There was the clergyman, another authority on the side of order and humanity, but she had already ascertained that he was a canon of the nearest cathedral, and was then in residence.
She was in dreadful uncertainty as to her course of action, but she held one impression which was not uncertain. She had the persuasion rooted in her from the first, that if she lodged information of the intended assault on Mr. Sundon, and so prevented the wicked stratagem and endangered the tories’ success in the election, she dared never return to Squire Trevor. Her own guilty face would bear evidence against her; she would be condemned to flee for her life before the brutal wrath of her husband.