The morning sun had chased away the dew on the grass, but the
hedge-rows were giving out their fragrance, and the lark and blackbird sang in the trees. Miss Blake was returning from early service at St. Jerome's; or, as St. Jerome people called it, Matins.
In spite of the nearly sleepless night she had passed, Miss Blake looked well. Her superabundance of hair, freshly washed up with its cunning cosmetics and adorned to perfection, gleamed as if so many golden particles of dust were shining on it: her morning robe was of light muslin, and becoming as fashion could make it. It was very unusual for Miss Blake to get little sleep: she was of too equable a temperament to lie awake: but the previous night's revelation of iniquity had disturbed her in no common degree, and her head had ached when she rose. The headache was passing now, and she felt quite ready for breakfast. A task lay before her that day: the disclosure to Lady Andinnian. It was all cut and dried: how she should make it and when she should make it: even the very words of it were already framed.
She would not so much as turn her eyes on the gate of the Maze: had she been on that side of the road she would have caught up her flounces as she passed it. Never, willingly, would she soil her shoes with that side of the way again by choice--the place had a brand on it. It was quite refreshing to turn her eyes on Clematis Cottage, sheltering the respectable single bachelor who lived there.
Turning her eyes on the cottage, she turned them on the bachelor as well. Mr. Smith in a light morning coat, and his arm as usual in a black sling, was out of doors amidst the rose trees on the little lawn, gazing at one of them through his green spectacles. Miss Blake stopped as he saluted her, and good mornings were exchanged.
"I am no judge of flowers," he said, "have not lived among them enough for that; but it appears to me that this rose, just come out, is a very rare and beautiful specimen."
Obeying the evident wish--given in manner alone, not in words--that she should go in and look at the rose, Miss Blake entered. It was a tea-rose of exquisite tint and sweetness. Miss Blake was warm in her admiration; she had not noticed any exactly like it at the Court. Before she could stop the sacrilege Mr. Smith had opened his penknife, cut off the rose, and was presenting it to her.
"Oh, how could you!" she exclaimed. "It was so beautiful here, in your garden."
"Madam, it will be more beautiful there," he rejoined, as she began to put it in her waistband.
"I should be very sorry, but that I see other buds will soon be out."
"Yes, by to-morrow. Earth dots not deal out her flowers to us with a niggardly hand."
Accompanying the resolution Miss Blake had come to the previous evening and perfected in the night--in her eyes a very righteous and proper resolution; namely, to disclose what she knew to Lady Andinnian--accompanying this, I say, was an undercurrent of determination to discover as many particulars of the ill-savoured matter as she possibly could discover. Standing at this moment on Mr. Smith's grass-plat, that gentleman beside her and the gates of the Maze in full view opposite, an idea struck Miss Blake that perhaps he knew something of the affair.
She began to question him. Lightly and apparently carelessly, interspersed with observations about the flowers, she turned the conversation on the Maze, asking this, and remarking that.
"Lonely it must be for Mrs. Grey? Oh, yes. How long has she lived there, Mr. Smith?"
"She came--let me see. Shortly, I think, before Mrs. Andinnian's death."
"Ah, yes. At the time Sir Karl was staying here."
"Was Sir Karl staying here? By the way, yes, I think he was."
Miss Blake, toying with a spray of the flourishing clematis, happened to look suddenly at Mr. Smith as he gave the answer, and saw his glance turned covertly on her through his green glasses. "He knows all about it," she thought, "and is screening Sir Karl. That last answer, the pretended non-remembrance, was an evasion. Men invariably hold by one another in matters of this kind. Just for a moment there was a silence.
"Mr. Smith, you may trust me," she then said in a low tone. "I fancy that you and I both know pretty well who it was brought the lady here and why she lives in that seclusion. But I could never have believed it of Sir Karl Andinnian."
Mr. Smith in his surprise--and it looked like very genuine
surprise--took off his glasses and gazed at Miss Blake without them. He had rather fine brown eyes, she noticed. Not a word spoke he.
"You wonder that I should speak of this, Mr. Smith--I see that."
"I don't understand you, ma'am, and that's the truth."
"Oh, well, I suppose you will not understand. Sir Karl ought to be ashamed of himself."
Whether it was her tart tone that suddenly enlightened Mr. Smith, or whether he had but been pretending before, there could be no mistake that he caught her meaning now. He put on his green spectacles with a conscious laugh.
"Hush," said he, making believe playfully to hide his face. "We are content, you know, Miss Blake, to ignore these things."
"Yes, I do know it, dear sir: it is the way of the world. But they cannot be ignored in the sight of Heaven."
The striking of nine o'clock inside the house reminded Miss Blake that the morning was getting on, and that she had best make haste if she wanted any breakfast. Mr. Smith held the gate open for her, and shook her offered hand. She stepped onwards, feeling that a mutual, if silent, understanding had been established between them--that they shared the disgraceful secret.
Had Miss Blake wanted confirmation in her belief, this admission of Mr. Smith's would have established it. But she did not. She was as sure of the fact as though an angel had revealed it to her. The sight of her own good eyes, the hearing of her true ears, and the exercise of her keen common sense had established it too surely.
"My task lies all plain before me," she murmured. "It is a disagreeable one, and may prove a thankless one, but I will not shrink from it. Who am I that I should turn aside from an appointed duty? That it has been appointed me, events show. I have been guided in this by a higher power than my own."
An appointed duty! Perhaps Miss Blake thought she had been "appointed" to watch the Maze gates in the shade of the dark night, to track the private steps of her unsuspicious host, Karl Andinnian! There is no sophistry in this world like self-sophistry; nothing else so deceives the human heart: more especially when it is hidden under a guise of piety.
Miss Blake found her opportunity in the course of the morning. A shade of pity crossed her for the happiness she was about to mar, as she saw the husband and wife out together after breakfast, amid the flowers. Now Lucy's arm entwined fondly in his, now tripping by his side, now calling his attention to some rare or sweet blossom, as Mr. Smith had called Miss Blake's in the morning, went they. In Lucy's bright face, as she glanced perpetually at her lord and husband, there was so much of love, so much of trust: and in his, Sir Karl's, there was a whole depth of apparent tenderness for her.
"Men were deceivers ever," angrily cried Miss Blake, recalling a line of the old ballad. "It's enough to make one sick. But I am sorry for Lucy; it will be a dreadful blow. How I wish it could be inflicted on him instead of her! In a measure it will fall on him--for of course Lucy will take active steps."
Later, when Sir Karl, as it chanced, had gone over to Basham, and Lucy was in her pretty little dressing room, writing to some girl friend, Miss Blake seized on the opportunity. Shutting herself in with Lady Andinnian, she made the communication to her. She told it with as much gentle consideration as possible, very delicately, and, in fact, rather obscurely. At first Lady Andinnian did not understand, could not understand; and when she was made to understand, her burning face flashed forth its indignation, and she utterly refused to believe.
Miss Blake only expected this. She was very soothing and tender.
"Sit down, Lucy," she said. "Listen. On my word of honour, I would not have imparted this miserable tale to inflict on you pain so bitter, but that I saw it must be done. For your sake, and in the interests of everything that's right and just and seemly, it would not have done to suffer you to remain in ignorance, a blind victim to the dastardly deceit practised on you by your husband."
"He could not so deceive me, Theresa; he could not deceive any one," she burst forth passionately.
"My dear, I only ask you to listen. You can then judge for yourself. Do not take my word that it is, or must be, so. Hear the facts, and then use your own common sense. Alas, Lucy, there can be no mistake: but for knowing that, should I have spoken, think you? It is, unfortunately, as true as heaven."
From the beginning to the end, Miss Blake told her tale. She spoke out without reticence now. Sitting beside Lucy on the sofa, and holding her hands in hers with a warm and loving clasp, she went over it all. The mystery that appeared to encompass this young lady, living alone at the Maze in strict seclusion with her two old servants, who were man and wife, she spoke of first as an introduction. She said how curiously it had attracted her attention, unaccountably to herself at the time, but that now she knew a divine inspiration had guided her to the instinct. She avowed how she had got in, and that it was done purposely; and that she had seen the girl, who was called Mrs. Grey, and was "beautiful as an angel," and heard her sing the characteristic song (which might well indeed have been written of her), "When lovely woman stoops to folly." Next, she described Sir Karl's secret visits; the key he let himself in with, taken from his pocket; the familiar and affectionate words interchanged between him and the girl, who on the second occasion had come to the gate to wait for him. She told Lucy that she had afterwards had corroborative evidence from Mr. Smith, the agent: he appeared to know all about it, to take it as a common matter of course, and to be content to ignore it after the custom of the world. She said that Sir Karl had brought Mrs. Grey to the Maze during the time he was staying at Foxwood in attendance on his sick mother: and she asked Lucy to recall the fact of his prolonged sojourn here, of his unwillingness to leave it and rejoin her, his wife; and of the very evident desire he had had to keep her altogether from Foxwood. In short, as Miss Blake put the matter--and every syllable she spoke did she believe to be strictly true and unexaggerated--it was simply impossible for the most unwilling listener not to be convinced.
Lady Andinnian was satisfied: and it was as her death-blow. Truth itself could not have appeared more plain and certain. After the first outburst of indignation, she had sat very calm and quiet, listening silently. Trifles excite the best of us, but in a great calamity heart and self alike shrink into stillness. Save that she had turned pale as death, there was no sign.
"Lucy, my poor Lucy, forgive me! I would have spared you if I could: but I believe the task of telling you was laid on me."
"Thank you, yes; I suppose it was right to tell me, Theresa," came the mechanical answer from the quivering lips.
"My dear, what will be your course? You cannot remain here, his wife."
"Would you please let me be alone, now, Theresa? I do not seem to be able to think yet collectedly."
The door closed on Miss Blake, and Lady Andinnian bolted it after her. She bolted the other two doors, so as to make sure of being alone. Then the abandonment began. Kneeling on the carpet, her head buried on the sofa pillow, she lay realizing the full sense of the awful shock. It shook her to the centre. Oh, how dreadful it was! She had so loved Karl, so believed in him: she had believed that man rarely loved a maiden and then a wife as Karl had loved her. This, then, must have been the secret trouble that was upon him!--which had all but induced him to break off his marriage! So she reasoned, and supposed she reasoned correctly. All parts of the supposition, had she thought them well out, might not perhaps have fitted-in to one another: but in a distress such as this, no woman--no, nor man either--is capable of working out problems logically. She assumed that the intimacy must have been going on for years: in all probability long before he knew her.
An hour or so of this painful indulgence, and then Lady Andinnian rose from the floor and sat down to think, as well as she could think, what her course should be. She was truly religious, though perhaps she knew it not. Theresa Blake was ostensibly so, and very much so in her own belief: but the difference was wide. The one had the real gold, the other but the base coin washed over. She, Lucy, strove to think and to see what would be right and best to do; for herself, for her misguided husband, and in the sight of God.
She sat and thought it out, perhaps for another hour. Aglaé came to the door to say luncheon was served, but Lady Andinnian said Miss Blake was to be told that she had a headache and should not take any. To make a scandal and leave her husband's home--as Theresa seemed to have hinted--would have gone well nigh to kill her with the shame and anguish it would entail. And oh, she hoped, she trusted, that her good father and mother, who had yielded to her love for Karl and so sanctioned the marriage, might never, never know of this. She lifted her imploring eyes and hands to Heaven in prayer that it might be kept from them. She prayed that she might be enabled to do what was right, and to bear: to bear silently and patiently, no living being, save Sir Karl, knowing what she had to endure.
For, while she was praying for the way to be made clear before her and for strength to walk in it, however thorny it might be, an idea had dawned upon her that this matter might possibly be kept from the world,--might be held sacred between herself and Sir Karl. Could she? could she continue to live on at the Court, bearing in patient silence--nay, in impatient--the cruel torment, the sense of insult? And yet, if she did not remain, how would it be possible to conceal it all from her father and mother? The very indecision seemed well nigh to kill her.
Visitors drove up to the house in the course of the afternoon--the county families were beginning to call--and Lady Andinnian had to go down. Miss Blake was off to one of St. Jerome's services--of which the Reverend Guy Cattacomb was establishing several daily. Sir Karl came home while the visitors were there. After their departure, when he came to look round for his wife, he was told she had hastily thrown on bonnet and mantle and gone out. Sir Karl rather wondered.
Not only to avoid her husband, but also because she wanted to see Margaret Sumnor, and perhaps gain from her a crumb of comfort in her utter wretchedness, had Lady Andinnian run forth to gain the vicarage. Margaret was lying as before, on her hard couch, or board; doing, for a wonder, nothing. Her hands were clasped meekly before her on her white wrapper, her eyelids seemed heavy with crying. But the eyes smiled a cheerful greeting to Lady Andinnian.
"Is anything the matter, Margaret?"
It was but the old story, the old grievance; Margaret Sumnor was pained by it, more or less, nearly every day of her life--the home treatment of her father: the contempt shown to him by his second family; ay, and by his wife.
"It is a thing I cannot talk of much, Lucy. I should not speak of it at all, but that it is well known to Foxwood, and commented on openly. Caroline and Martha set papa at naught in all ways: the insolence of their answers to him, both in words and manner, brings the blush of pain and shame to his face. This time the trouble was about that new place of Miss Blake's, St. Jerome's. Papa forbid them to frequent it; but it was just as though he had spoken to a stone--in fact, worse; for they retorted and set him at defiance. They wanted daily service, they said, and should go where it was held. So now papa, I believe, thinks of resuming his daily services here, at Trinity, hoping it may counteract the other. There, that's enough of home and my red eyes, Lucy. You don't look well."
Lady Andinnian drew her chair quite close to the invalid, so that she might let her hand rest in the one held out for her. "I have a trouble too, Margaret," she whispered. "A dreadful, sudden trouble, a blow; and I think it has nearly broken my heart. I cannot tell you what it is; I cannot tell any one in the world----"
"Except your husband," interposed Miss Sumnor. "Never have any concealments from him, Lucy."
Lady Andinnian's face turned red and white with embarrassment. "Yes, him; I shall have to speak to him," she said, in some hesitation: and Miss Sumnor's deep insight into others' hearts enabled her to guess that the trouble had something to do with Sir Karl. She suspected it was that painful thing to a young wife--a first quarrel.
"I am not like you, Margaret--ever patient, ever good," faltered poor Lady Andinnian. "I seem to be nearly torn apart with conflicting thoughts--perhaps I ought to say passions--and I thought I would come to you for a word of advice and comfort. There are two ways in which I can act in this dreadful matter; and indeed that word is no exaggeration, for it is very dreadful. The one would be to make a stir in it, take a high tone, and set forth my wrongs; that would be revenge, just revenge; but I hardly know whether it would be right, or bring right. The other would be to put up with the evil in silence, and bear; and leave the future to God. Which must I do?"
Margaret Sumnor turned as much as she could turn without assistance, and laid both her hands imploringly on Lady Andinnian's.
"Lucy! Lucy! choose the latter. I have seen, oh, so much of this revenge, and of how it has worked. My dear, I believe in my honest heart that this revenge was never yet taken but it was repented of in the end. However grave the justifying cause and cruel the provocation, the time would come when it was heartily and bitterly regretted, when its actor would say, Oh that I had not done as I did, that I had chosen the merciful part!"
There was a brief silence. Miss Sumnor resumed.
"'Vengeance is mine; I will repay;' you know who says that, Lucy: but you cannot know what I have seen and marked so often--that when that vengeance is taken into human hands, it somehow defeats itself. It may inflict confusion and ruin on the adversary; but it never fails to tell in some way on the inflictor. It may be only in mental regret: regret that may not set in until after long years; but, rely upon it, he never fails, in his remorseful heart, to wish the past could be undone. A regret, such as this, we have to carry with us to the grave; for it can never be remedied, the revengeful act cannot be blotted out. It has been done; and it stands with its consequences for ever: consequences, perhaps, that we never could have foreseen."
Lady Andinnian sat listening with drooping face. A softer expression stole over it.
"There is one thing we never can repent of, Lucy; and that is, of choosing the path of mercy--of leniency. It brings a balm with it to the sorely-chafed spirit, and heals in time. Do you choose it, my dear. I urge it on you with my whole heart."
"I think I will, Margaret; I think I will," she answered, raising for a moment her wet eyes. "It will mortify my pride and my self-esteem: be always mortifying them; and I shall need a great deal of patience to bear."
"But you will be able to bear; to bear all; you know where to go for help. Do this, Lucy; and see if in the future you do not find your reward. In after years, it may be that your heart will go up with, a great bound of joy and thankfulness. 'I did as Margaret told me,' you will say, 'and bore.' Oh, if men and women did but know the future that they lay up for themselves according as their acts shall be!--the remorse or the peace."
Lucy rose and kissed her. "It shall be so, Margaret," she whispered. And she went away without another word.
She strove to keep the best side uppermost in her mind as she went home. Her resolution was taken; and, perhaps because it was taken, the temptation to act otherwise and to choose revenge, rose up in all manner of attractive colours. She could abandon her ill-doing husband and start, even that night, for her parents' home; reveal the whole, and claim their protection against him. This would be to uphold her pride and her womanly self-respect: but oh, how it would pain them! And they had given their consent to the marriage against their better judgment for her sake; so to say, against their own will. No; she could not, for very shame, tell them, and she prayed again that they might never know it.
"I can take all the pain upon myself, and bear it without sign for their sakes," she mentally cried. "Oh yes, and for mine, for the exposure would kill me. I can bear this; I must take it up as my daily and nightly cross; but I could not bear that my own dear father and mother, or the dear friends of my girlhood, should know he is faithless to me--that he never could have loved me. Theresa, the only one cognisant of it, will be silent for my sake."
Bitter though the decision was, Lucy could but choose it. She had believed Karl Andinnian to be one of the few good men of the earth; she had made him her idol; all had seen it. To let them know that the idol had fallen from his pedestal, and so fallen, would reflect its slighting disgrace on her, and be more than human nature could encounter.
Her interview with Sir Karl took place that evening. She had managed, save at dinner, to avoid his presence until then. It was held in her dressing-room at the dusk hour. He came up to know why she stayed there alone and what she was doing. In truth, she had been schooling herself for this very interview, which had to be got over before she went to rest. The uncertainty of what she could say was troubling her, even the very words she should use caused her perplexity. In her innate purity, her sensitively refined nature, she could not bring herself to speak openly to her husband upon topics of this unpleasant kind. That fact rendered the explanation more incomplete and complicated than it would otherwise have been. He had come up, and she nerved herself to the task. As good enter on it now as an hour later.
"I--I want to speak to you, Sir Karl."
He was standing by the open window, and turned his head quickly. Sir Karl! "What's amiss, Lucy?" he asked.
"I--I--I know all about your secret at the Maze," she said with a great burst of emotion, her chest heaving, her breath coming in gasps.
Sir Karl started as though he had been shot. His very lips turned of an ashy whiteness.
"Lucy! You cannot know it!"
"Heaven knows I do," she answered. "I have learnt it all this day. Oh, how could you so deceive me?"
Sir Karl's first act was to dart to the door that opened on the corridor and bolt it. He then opened the two doors leading to the chambers on either side, looked to see that no one was in either of them, shut the doors again, and bolted them.
"Sir Karl, this has nearly killed me."
"Hush!" he breathed. "Don't talk of it aloud, for the love of God!"
"Why did you marry me?" she asked.
"Why, indeed," he retorted, his voice one of sad pain. "I have reproached myself enough for it since, Lucy."
She was silent. The answer angered her; and she had need of all her best strength, the strength she had so prayed for, to keep her lips from a cruel answer. She sat in her low dressing-chair, gazing at him with reproachful eyes.
He said no more just then. Well-nigh overwhelmed with the blow, he stood back against the window-frame, his arms folded, his face one of pitiful anguish. Lucy, his wife, had got hold of the dreadful secret that was destroying his own peace, and that he had been so cunningly planning to conceal.
"How did you learn it?" he asked.
"I shall never tell you," she answered with quiet firmness, resolved not to make mischief by betraying Theresa. "I know it, and that is enough. Put it down, if you choose, that it was revealed to me by accident--or that I guessed at."
"But, Lucy, it is necessary I should know."
"I have spoken, Sir Karl. I will never tell you." The evening breeze came wafting into that room of pain; cooling, it might be, their fevered brows, though they were not conscious of it. Lady Andinnian resumed.
"The unpardonable deceit you practised on my father and mother----"
Sir Karl's start of something like horror interrupted her. "They must never know it, Lucy. In mercy to us all, you must join with me in concealing it from them."
"It was very wicked in you to have concealed it from them at all. At least, to have married me with such a secret--for I conclude you could not have really dared to tell them. They deserved better at your hands. I was their only daughter: all they had to love."
"Yes, it was wrong. I have reproached myself since worse than you can reproach me. But I did not know the worst then."
She turned from him proudly. "I--I wanted to tell you, Sir Karl, that I for one will never forgive or forget your falsehood and deceit; and, what I am about to say, I say for my father and mother's sake. I will keep it from them, always if I can; I will bury it within my own breast, and remain on here in your home, your ostensible wife. I had thought of leaving your house for theirs, never to return; but the exposure it would bring frightened me; and, in truth, I shrink from the scandal."
"What do you mean?" he exclaimed. "My 'ostensible' wife?"
"I shall never be your wife again in reality. That can be your
room"--pointing to the one they had jointly occupied; "this one is mine," indicating the chamber on the other hand. "Aglaé has already taken my things into it."
Sir Karl stood gazing at her, lost in surprise.
"No one but ourselves need know of this," she resumed, her eyes dropping before the tender, pitiful gaze of his. "The arrangements are looked upon by Aglaé as a mere matter of convenience in the hot weather; the servants will understand it as such. I would spare us both gossip. For your sake and for mine I am proposing this medium course--to avoid the scandal that otherwise must ensue. I shall have to bear, Karl--to bear----" her heart nearly failed her in its bitter grief--"but it will be better than a public separation."
"You cannot mean what you say," he exclaimed. "Live apart from me! The cause cannot justify it."
"It scarcely becomes you to say this. Have you forgotten the sin?" she added, in a whisper.
"The sin? Well, of course it was sin--crime, rather. But that is of the past."
She thought she understood what he wished to imply, and bit her lips to keep down their bitter words.
He was surely treating her as the veriest child, striving to hoodwink her still! That he was agitated almost beyond control, she saw: and did not wonder at.
"The sin is past," he repeated. "No need to recall it or talk of it."
"Be it so," she scornfully said. "Its results remain. This, I presume, was the great secret you spoke of the night before our marriage."
"It was. And you see now, Lucy, why I did not dare to speak more openly. I grant that it would have been enough to prevent our marriage, had you then so willed it: but, being my wife, it is not any sufficient cause for you to separate yourself from me."
And, in answer to a question of mine, he could boast that night of his innocence! ran her indignant thoughts.
"I am the best judge of that," she said aloud, in answer. "Not sufficient cause! I wonder you dare say it. It is an outrage on all the proprieties of life. You must bring--them--to the Maze here, close to your roof, and mine!"
In her shrinking reticence, she would not mention to him the girl in plain words; she would not even say "her," but substituted the term "them," as though speaking of Mrs. Grey and her servants collectively. Sir Karl's answer was a hasty one.
"That was not my doing. The coming to the Maze was the greatest mistake ever made. I was powerless to help it."
Again she believed she understood. That when Sir Karl had wished to shake off certain trammels, he found himself not his own master in the matter, and could not.
"And so you submitted?" she scornfully said.
"I had no other choice, Lucy."
"And you pay your visits there!"
"Occasionally. I cannot do otherwise."
"Does it never occur to you to see that public exposure may come? she continued, in the same contemptuous tone. For the time, Lucy Andinnian's sweet nature seemed wholly changed. Every feeling she possessed had risen up against the bitter insult thrust upon her--and Sir Karl seemed to be meeting it in a coolly insulting spirit.
"The fear of exposure is killing me, Lucy," he breathed, his chest heaving with its painful emotion. "I have been less to blame than you imagine. Let me tell you the story from the beginning, and you will see that----"
"I will not hear a word of it," burst forth Lucy. "It is not a thing that should be told to me. At any rate, I will not hear it."
"As you please, of course; I cannot force it on you. My life was thorny enough before: I never thought that, even if the matter came to your knowledge, you would take it up in this cruel manner, and add to my pain and perplexity."
"It is for the Maze that we have to be economical here!" she rejoined, partly as a question, her hand laid on her rebellious bosom.
"Yes, yes. You see, Lucy, in point of fact----"
"I see nothing but what I do see. I wish to see no further."
Sir Karl looked searchingly at her, as though he could not understand. Could this be his own loving, gentle Lucy? It was indeed difficult to think so.
"In a day or two when you shall have had time to recover from the blow, Lucy--and a blow I acknowledge it to be--you will, I hope, judge me more leniently. You are my wife and I will not give you up: there is no real cause for it. When you shall be calmer you may feel sorry for some things you have said now."
"Sir Karl, listen: and take your choice. I will stay on in your home on the terms I have mentioned, and they shall be perfectly understood and agreed to by both of us; or I will leave it for the protection of my father's home. In the latter case I shall have to tell him why. It is for you to choose."
`"Have you well weighed what your telling would involve?"
"Yes; exposure: and it is that I wish to avoid. If it has to come, it will be your fault. The choice lies with you. My decision is unalterable."
Sir Karl Andinnian wiped his brow of the fever-drops gathered there. It was a bitter moment: and he considered that his wife was acting with most bitter harshness. But no alternative was left him, for he dared not risk exposure and its awful consequences.
And so, that was the decision. They were to live on, enemies, under the same roof-top: or at best, not friends. The interview lasted longer; but no more explicit explanation took place between them: and when they parted they parted under a mutual and total misapprehension which neither of the two knew or suspected. Misapprehension had existed throughout the interview--and was to exist. It was one of those miserable cases that now and then occur in the world--a mutual misunderstanding, for which no one is to blame. Sometimes it is never set right on this side the grave.
Her heart was aching just as much as his. She loved him passionately, and she was calming down from her anger to a softer mood, such as parting always brings. "Will you not send the--the people away?" she whispered in a last word, and with a burst of grief.
"If I can I will," was his answer. "I am hemmed in, Lucy, by all kinds of untoward perplexities, and I cannot do as I would. Goodnight. I never could have believed you would take it up like this."
They shook hands and parted. The affair had been at last amicably arranged, so to say: and the separation was begun.
And so Sir Karl and Lady Andinnian were henceforth divided, and the household knew it not.
Miss Blake did not suspect a word of it. She saw no signs of any change--for outwardly Karl and his wife were civil and courteous to each other as usual; meeting at meals, present together in daily intercourse. After a few days Miss Blake questioned Lady Andinnian.
"Surely you have not been so foolishly soft as to condone that matter, Lucy?"
But Lucy wholly refused to satisfy her. Nay, she smiled, and as good as tacitly let Miss Blake suppose that she might have been soft and foolish. Not even to her, or to any other living being, would Lucy betray what was sacred between herself and her husband.
"I am content to let it rest, Theresa: and I must request that you will do the same. Sir Karl and I both wish it."
Miss Blake caught the smile and the gently evasive words, and was struck mute at Lucy's sin and folly. She quite thought she ought to have an atonement offered up for her at St. Jerome's. Surely Eve was not half so frail and foolish when she took the apple!