“Why not?”
“Because—well, because if he knows you are here with me he will hesitate to act in the manner I am trying to induce him to act. Fear of you will prevent him.”
“What are you inducing him to do?” I asked.
“I am trying to prevail upon him to assist me in performing a certain service—one by which I hope to gain my release from these torturing fears that hold me. It is my last resource. If my project fails, death alone remains to me.”
She spoke with a deep breathless earnestness which told me plainly that her words were no idle ones. True she had spoken of self-destruction many times, but it was with the firm conviction of a woman hounded to her own destruction.
The world, curiously enough, regards a wealthy woman of title as though she were a different being to themselves, believing her to possess attributes denied to the commoner, and a mind devoid of any of the cares of the weary workaday existence. Yet if the truth be told, the woman who is dressed by Laferrier, Raudnitz or Callot often has a far uglier skeleton in her cupboard than she who is compelled to go bargain-hunting in Oxford Street at sales for her next season’s gown. The smart victoria, the matched pair, the liveried servants and the emblazoned panels form the necessary background of the woman who is chic, but, alas! how often she hates the very sight of all that hollow show of wealth and superiority, and how she longs for the quiet of obscurity. How very true it is that wealth does not bring happiness; that there is no pleasure in this world without the gall of pain, that love finds sanctuary in the heart of the princess just as it does in that of the factory-girl. There is no peace on this side of eternity, therefore we must forever court the illusions which evade us.
What could I say? If it were to her interest to see this man alone—this man of whom the police were in such active search—then to serve her I ought not to object. I felt indignant that my well-beloved should be polluted by the presence of such an adventurer, and yet I recollected how they had walked together in the wood, and what was more—that the man must be aware of her secret, whatever it was! He had walked and spoken to her; he had seen her, her white dress of the previous night wet, mud-stained and bedraggled—he must know, or at least guess, the truth!
Did she hold him in fear on that account? Was she beneath the thrall of this adventurer?
For a long time we stood talking, until as though in fear that the man whose call had been so unwelcome and disturbing should grow tired of waiting in the hall below, she urged me gently to take leave of her.
“Go, Willoughby—for my sake—do!” she implored of me with those soft pleading blue eyes that were so resistless. “Let me see him alone. Let me do this—if—if you wish to save me,” she urged.