“You were happier with me, sir,” said the voice, in accents of tender regret.
He looked up with a scream—literally, with a scream—and confronted Mrs. Lecount.
Was it the specter of the woman, or the woman herself? Her hair was white; her face had fallen away; her eyes looked out large, bright, and haggard over her hollow cheeks. She was withered and old. Her dress hung loose round her wasted figure; not a trace of its buxom autumnal beauty remained. The quietly impenetrable resolution, the smoothly insinuating voice—these were the only relics of the past which sickness and suffering had left in Mrs. Lecount.
“Compose yourself, Mr. Noel,” she said, gently. “You have no cause to be alarmed at seeing me. Your servant, when I inquired, said you were in the garden, and I came here to find you. I have traced you out, sir, with no resentment against yourself, with no wish to distress you by so much as the shadow of a reproach. I come here on what has been, and is still, the business of my life—your service.”
He recovered himself a little, but he was still incapable of speech. He held fast by the fence, and stared at her.
“Try to possess your mind, sir, of what I say,” proceeded Mrs. Lecount. “I have come here not as your enemy, but as your friend. I have been tried by sickness, I have been tried by distress. Nothing remains of me but my heart. My heart forgives you; my heart, in your sore need—need which you have yet to feel-places me at your service. Take my arm, Mr. Noel. A little turn in the sun will help you to recover yourself.”
She put his hand through her arm and marched him slowly up the garden walk. Before she had been five minutes in his company, she had resumed full possession of him in her own right.
“Now down again, Mr. Noel,” she said. “Gently down again, in this fine sunlight. I have much to say to you, sir, which you never expected to hear from me. Let me ask a little domestic question first. They told me at the house door Mrs. Noel Vanstone was gone away on a journey. Has she gone for long?”
Her master’s hand trembled on her arm as she put that question. Instead of answering it, he tried faintly to plead for himself. The first words that escaped him were prompted by his first returning sense—the sense that his housekeeper had taken him into custody. He tried to make his peace with Mrs. Lecount.
“I always meant to do something for you,” he said, coaxingly. “You would have heard from me before long. Upon my word and honor, Lecount, you would have heard from me before long!”