The alternative would not have been so awful if she had possessed the faintest shadow of a city of refuge. But the circumstances were very much the same as when her uncle, Mr. Godwin, had taunted her with her dependence, she had no place to turn to, no friend to espouse her cause or to afford her shelter.
She would never go back to her uncle Godwin and her aunt Die in the lurid light of their wasted fortunes.
She would die rather than have recourse to Mrs. Walsh and Sally, even if that had been to any purpose so far as escaping from the Squire was concerned. On the contrary, they would be certain to hand her over immediately to justice and her husband, with no farther plea for mercy than might be contained in the extorted pledge, that in place of killing her outright and being hung for it, as Earl Ferrars had killed his servant and been hung in the last generation, he should be contented with sentencing her to perpetual imprisonment, with his kinswomen to be her jailers.
However, there was a difference between Lady Bell’s past and present trouble. When Squire Trevor had paid her his detested addresses, and it was not in her power to reject them with contumely, there had only been herself to think of, her single interest to consider, and that had not been enough to dissolve the numbing spell of conventionality.
Now her invention was quickened into the liveliest exercise by the urgent necessity of others besides herself. The Sundons—wife and husband—and not Lady Bell alone, were at stake; and if she aided them, there was no choice of evils left her, no deadly dulness of dutiful respectability as opposed to mad defiance and destitution. In her youthful simplicity she honestly believed that she must flee for her life from the aroused fury of Squire Trevor. If there existed a purpose of sacrificing Mr. Sundon, ten times more would she be sacrificed.
When the thought occurred to her that she might write to warn the Sundons, she rejected it as being a step unworthy of the situation, for she was wound up to a tragic pitch. The letter might miscarry; if it were anonymous it had a great chance of being passed over; if it had the name and style of the writer the danger was as great, while the success was less certain than if the communication were made in a personal interview.
Lady Bell seemed driven to a decisive step, the shortness of the time pricking her on. It was on a Sunday evening that the plot of disabling Mr. Sundon was loosely framed at Mr. Trevor’s lodgings, and the mail from London came in on Tuesday.
On Monday morning Lady Bell took the opportunity of a messenger’s going to Trevor Court to send her maid on the pad behind him, to do an errand for her mistress.
Lady Bell then told the woman of the lodging that her head ached, which was true enough, and that she should not come down to Mr. Trevor’s mid-day dinner. But in place of lying down on her bed, as she was understood to do, she put on her least conspicuous walking dress, which happened, oddly, to be a scarlet cloth riding-habit. But this military costume was largely worn by squires’ and clergymen’s wives and daughters of the period; a dozen ladies, similarly attired, might be looked for doing their shopping and showing themselves in Peasmarsh, under the pressure of the brisk hospitalities of the election weeks.
To the scarlet riding-habit Lady Bell added a hat with a thick veil appended to it, and a neckcloth which, in order to protect the under half of the face, was then in use by ladies as well as by gentlemen.