“I’m ashamed of you, Jenny Crow. I am; indeed, I am. I could never have believed it of you; indeed, I couldn’t. And the man you speak of is no better than you are, and all his talk of loving the wife is hypocrisy and deceit; and the poor woman herself should know of it, and come down on you both and shame you—indeed, she should,” cried Nelly, and she flounced out of the room in a fury.
Jenny watched her go and thought to herself. “She’ll keep that appointment for me at eight o’clock to-night by the waterfall.” Presently she heard Mrs. Quiggin with a servant of the hotel countermanding the order for the carriage at eleven, and engaging it instead for the extraordinary hour of nine at night. “She intends to keep it,” thought Jenny.
“And now,” she said, settling herself at the writing-table; “now for the other simpleton.”
“Tell D. Q.,” she wrote, addressing Lovibond; “that E. Q. goes home by carriage at nine o’clock to-night, and that you have appointed to meet her for a last farewell at eight by the waterfall in the gardens of Castle Mona. Then meet me on the pier at seven-thirty.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Lovibond received this message while sitting at breakfast, and he caught the idea of it in an instant. Since the supper of the night before he had been pestered by many misgivings, and troubled by some remorse. Capt’n Davy was bent on going away. Overwhelmed by a sense of what he took to be his dastardly conduct he was in that worst position of the man who can forgive neither himself nor the person he has injured. So much had Lovibond done for him by the fine scheme that had brought matters to such a pass. But having gone so far, Lovibond had found himself at a stand. His next step he could not see. Capt’n Davy must not be allowed to leave the island, but how to keep him from going away was a bewildering difficulty. To tell him the truth was impossible, and to concoct a further fable was beyond Lovibond’s invention. And so it was that when Lovi-bond received the letter from Jenny Crow, he rose to the cue it offered like a drowning man to a life-buoy.
“Jealousy—the very thing!” he thought; and not until he was already in the thick of his enterprise as wizard of that passion did he realize that if it was an effectual instrument to his end it was also a cruel one.
He found Capt’n Davy in the midst of the final preparations for their journey. These consisted of the packing of clothes into trunks, bags, sacks, and hampers. On the floor of the sitting-room lay a various assortment of coats, waistcoats, trowsers, great-coats, billycock hats and sou’-westers, together with countless shirts and collars, scarfs and handkerchiefs. At Davy’s order Willie Quarrie had gathered up the garments in armsful out of drawers and wardrobes, and heaped them at his feet for inspection. This process they were undergoing with a view to the selection of such as were suitable to the climate in which it was intended that they should be worn. The hour was 8.30 a.m., the “Snaefell” was announced to sail for Liverpool at nine.
But, as Lovibond entered the room, a scene of yet more primitive interest was actively proceeding. A waiter of the hotel was strutting across the floor and sputtering out protests against this unseemly use of the sitting-room. The person was the same who the night before had haunted Davy’s elbow with his obsequious “Yes, sirs,” “No, sirs,” and “Beg pardon, sirs”; but the morning had brought him knowledge of Davy’s penury, and with that wisdom had come impudence if not dignity.