“I say yes,” replied Magdalen, after a moment’s consideration. “On the understanding that I am to take her out walking, as you propose.”
Captain Wragge bowed, and recovered his suavity of manner. “What are our plans?” he inquired. “Shall we start our enterprise this afternoon? Are you ready for your introduction to Mrs. Lecount and her master?”
“Quite ready.”
“Good again. We will meet them on the Parade, at their usual hour for going out—two o’clock. It is not twelve yet. I have two hours before me—just time enough to fit my wife into her new Skin. The process is absolutely necessary, to prevent her compromising us with the servant. Don’t be afraid about the results; Mrs. Wragge has had a copious selection of assumed names hammered into her head in the course of her matrimonial career. It is merely a question of hammering hard enough—nothing more. I think we have settled everything now. Is there anything I can do before two o’clock? Have you any employment for the morning?”
“No,” said Magdalen. “I shall go back to my own room, and try to rest.”
“You had a disturbed night, I am afraid?” said the captain, politely opening the door for her.
“I fell asleep once or twice,” she answered, carelessly. “I suppose my nerves are a little shaken. The bold black eyes of that man who stared so rudely at me yesterday evening seemed to be looking at me again in my dreams. If we see him to-day, and if he annoys me any more, I must trouble you to speak to him. We will meet here again at two o’clock. Don’t be hard with Mrs. Wragge; teach her what she must learn as tenderly as you can.”
With those words she left him, and went upstairs.
She lay down on her bed with a heavy sigh, and tried to sleep. It was useless. The dull weariness of herself which now possessed her was not the weariness which finds its remedy in repose. She rose again and sat by the window, looking out listlessly over the sea.
A weaker nature than hers would not have felt the shock of Frank’s desertion as she had felt it—as she was feeling it still. A weaker nature would have found refuge in indignation and comfort in tears. The passionate strength of Magdalen’s love clung desperately to the sinking wreck of its own delusion-clung, until she tore herself from it, by plain force of will. All that her native pride, her keen sense of wrong could do, was to shame her from dwelling on the thoughts which still caught their breath of life from the undying devotion of the past; which still perversely ascribed Frank’s heartless farewell to any cause but the inborn baseness of the man who had written it. The woman never lived yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of that love was unworthy of her. All she can do is to struggle against it in secret—to sink in the contest if she is weak; to win her way through it if she is strong, by a process of self-laceration which is, of all moral remedies applied to a woman’s nature, the most dangerous and the most desperate; of all moral changes, the change that is surest to mark her for life. Magdalen’s strong nature had sustained her through the struggle; and the issue of it had left her what she now was.