“Yes, ma’am, I did,” replied the girl, hiding her eyes in the apron she wore, and bursting into tears. “I was so angry with her and with him, because he would not even speak to me that last day, but shook my hand off his sleeve, that I said the worst I could. And truly I never saw no worse than him and her walking up the Broad Walk yonder hand in hand. It was the old lady saw him kissing her through the window, and standing by his bedroom door in the middle of the night. I didn’t see that, but I was there in the garden before,—it was I who took her to the window of his room, but I didn’t look, I couldn’t bear to. But I invented worse, and all I said, I told the lawyer I would swear to in Court.”
“How very awful!” said Egidia. “But if you write and say that you are not prepared to swear this then the chances are that the case will fall to the ground, and you will not have to appear in Court at all.”
“But then I shan’t even see him!” exclaimed Jane Anne.
“See him—no, not then, but if there isn’t any trial, you will have him back here painting as usual next spring, I should think.”
Jane Anne seized Egidia’s hand and kissed it.
“Oh, ma’am, ma’am, you know I never wanted nothing but that. I knew well enough he could never be anything to such as me, but I didn’t want him to marry anyone else.”
. . . . . . . .
“I did not expect him to marry me, but oh, I could not bear him to marry any one else!”
That phrase of the country girl’s was in Egidia’s ears all day as the train bore her southwards, her mission accomplished, and Phœbe Elles and Rivers for ever divided, by her means.
She had done it, and for what motive? Now that it was done, the spirit of self-analysis tormented the woman of letters skilled in the art of heart-searching. The happiness of Rivers was her object, and that she had been convinced lay in his continued celibacy. She herself had nothing to gain by it, wished to gain nothing by it. “I do not, I do not, if I have to go into a convent to prove it!” she said out aloud, in the solitude of the railway carriage. “I am glad we are cousins!” she added, mentally. “All women are dogs in the manger, when the man they love is concerned!” was her reflection with reference to Jane Anne’s pathetic speech. The devotion of the servant for the artist revolted while it touched her. “I wonder how many more there are of us?” she wondered bitterly. “And his method—indifference, and innate incapacity to make any woman really happy. Those are the men who are beloved.... Phœbe Elles is saved—but she won’t think so. So is Edmund—but he won’t admit it, perhaps. At any rate, I do not profit. If I did, I would kill myself!”