“Why did you let him leave the room?” I asked. “If I can’t go to him, why don’t you bring him here to me?”
The doctor appeared to be at a loss how to reply to me. He looked at Benjamin, and said, “Will you speak to Mrs. Woodville?”
Benjamin, in his turn, looked at Major Fitz-David, and said, “Will you?” The Major signed to them both to leave us. They rose together, and went into the front room, pulling the door to after them in its grooves. As they left us, the girl who had so strangely revealed my husband’s secret to me rose in her corner and approached the sofa.
“I suppose I had better go too?” she said, addressing Major Fitz-David.
“If you please,” the Major answered.
He spoke (as I thought) rather coldly. She tossed her head, and turned her back on him in high indignation. “I must say a word for myself!” cried this strange creature, with a hysterical outbreak of energy. “I must say a word, or I shall burst!”
With that extraordinary preface, she suddenly turned my way and poured out a perfect torrent of words on me.
“You hear how the Major speaks to me?” she began. “He blames me—poor Me—for everything that has happened. I am as innocent as the new-born babe. I acted for the best. I thought you wanted the book. I don’t know now what made you faint dead away when I opened it. And the Major blames Me! As if it was my fault! I am not one of the fainting sort myself; but I feel it, I can tell you. Yes! I feel it, though I don’t faint about it. I come of respectable parents—I do. My name is Hoighty—Miss Hoighty. I have my own self-respect; and it’s wounded. I say my self-respect is wounded, when I find myself blamed without deserving it. You deserve it, if anybody does. Didn’t you tell me you were looking for a book? And didn’t I present it to you promiscuously, with the best intentions? I think you might say so yourself, now the doctor has brought you to again. I think you might speak up for a poor girl who is worked to death with singing and languages and what not—a poor girl who has nobody else to speak for her. I am as respectable as you are, if you come to that. My name is Hoighty. My parents are in business, and my mamma has seen better days, and mixed in the best of company.”
There Miss Hoighty lifted her handkerchief again to her face, and burst modestly into tears behind it.
It was certainly hard to hold her responsible for what had happened. I answered as kindly as I could, and I attempted to speak to Major Fitz-David in her defense. He knew what terrible anxieties were oppressing me at that moment; and, considerately refusing to hear a word, he took the task of consoling his young prima donna entirely on himself. What he said to her I neither heard nor cared to hear: he spoke in a whisper. It ended in his pacifying Miss Hoighty, by kissing her hand, and leading her (as he might have led a duchess) out of the room.