While these words were being prettily spoken, Ladywell’s face became pale as death. On Ethelberta’s bosom were the stem and green calyx of a rose, almost all its flower having disappeared. It had been a Harlequin rose, for two or three of its striped leaves remained to tell the tale.
She could not help noticing his fixed gaze, and she said quickly, ‘Yes, I have lost my pretty rose: this may as well go now,’ and she plucked the stem from its fastening in her dress and flung it away.
Poor Ladywell turned round to meet Mr. and Mrs. Belmaine, whose voices were beginning to be heard just within the church door, leaving Neigh and Ethelberta together. It was a graceful act of young Ladywell’s that, in the midst of his own pain at the strange tale the rose-leaves suggested—Neigh’s rivalry, Ethelberta’s mutability, his own defeat—he was not regardless of the intense embarrassment which might have been caused had he remained.
The two were silent at first, and it was evident that Ethelberta’s mood was one of anger at something that had gone before. She turned aside from him to follow the others, when Neigh spoke in a tone somewhat bitter and somewhat stern.
‘What—going like that! After being compromised together, why don’t you close with me? Ladywell knows all: I had already told him that the rose-leaves were given me by my intended wife. We seem to him to be practising deceptions all of a piece, and what folly it is to play off so! As to what I did, that I ask your forgiveness for.’
Ethelberta looked upon the ground and maintained a compressed lip. Neigh resumed: ‘If I showed more feeling than you care for, I insist that it was not more than was natural under the circumstances, if not quite proper. Opinions may differ, but my experience goes to prove that conventional squeamishness at such times as these is more talked and written about than practised. Plain behaviour must be expected when marriage is the question. Nevertheless, I do say—and I cannot say more—that I am sincerely sorry to have offended you by exceeding my privileges. I will never do so again.’
‘Don’t say privileges. You have none.’
‘I am sorry that I thought otherwise, and that others will think so too. Ladywell is, at any rate, bent on thinking so. . . . It might have been made known to him in a gentle way—but God disposes.’
‘There is nothing to make known—I don’t understand,’ said Ethelberta, going from him.
By this time Ladywell had walked round the gravel walks with the two other ladies and Mr. Belmaine, and they were all turning to come back again. The young painter had deputed his voice to reply to their remarks, but his understanding continued poring upon other things. When he came up to Ethelberta, his agitation had left him: she too was free from constraint; while Neigh was some distance off, carefully examining nothing in particular in an old fragment of wall.