“What is it to any one,” she asked, “if I was out of the house last night?”
“It’s little to me,” Mrs. Gilson answered drily. “But it will be much to you if you don’t tell the truth. Your own conscience, my girl, should speak loud enough.”
“My conscience is clear!” Henrietta cried. But her tone, a little too heroic, fitted ill with her appearance.
At any rate Mrs. Gilson, who did not like heroics, thought so. “Then the best thing you can do,” she replied tartly, “is to go and dress yourself! A clear conscience! Umph! Give me clean hands! And if I were you I’d be quite sure about that conscience before I came down to answer questions.”
“I shall not come down.”
“Then they’ll come up,” the landlady retorted. “And ’twon’t be more pleasant. You’d best think twice about that.”
Henrietta was thinking. Behind the sullen, pretty face she was thinking that if she made a clean breast of it, she must betray the man. She must say where she had seen him, and why she had gone to meet him. And that was the thing which she had resolved not to do—the thing which she was still determined not to do. There is a spice of obstinacy in all women: an inclination to abide by a line once taken, or an opinion once formed. And Henrietta, who was naturally head-strong, and who had run some risk the previous night and gone to some trouble that the man might escape, was not going to give him up to-day. They had found her out, they had driven her to bay. But nothing which they could do would wound her half as much as that public ordeal, that confrontation with the man, that exhibition of his unworthiness and her folly, which must follow his capture. For the man himself, she was so far from loving him, that she loathed him, she was ashamed of him. But she was not going to betray him. She was not going to turn informer—a name more hateful then, when blood-money was common, than now! She who had been kissed by him was not going to have his blood on her hands!
Such were her thoughts; to which Mrs. Gilson had no clue. But the landlady read recalcitrancy in the girl’s face, and knowing some things which Henrietta did not know, and being at no time one to brook opposition, she took the girl the wrong way. If she had appealed to her better feelings, if she had used that influence with her which rough but real kindness had won, it is possible that she might have brought Henrietta to reason. But the sight of that sullen, pretty face provoked the landlady. She had proof of gross indiscretion, she suspected worse things, she thought the girl unworthy. And she spoke more harshly to her than she had ever spoken before.
“If you were my girl,” she said grimly, “I’d know what to do with you! I’d shake the humours out of you, if I had to shake you from now till next week! Ay, I would! And you’d pretty soon come to your senses and find your tongue, I warrant! Didn’t you pretend to me and maintain to me a week ago and more that you’d done with the scamp?”
“I have done with him!” Henrietta cried, red and angry.