Thorpe's lips pouted over a reply. "Well--no," he said, with a kind of reluctance. "He got strictly what he was entitled to--precisely what I had promised him--and he wrung up his nose at that--and then I actually gave him 15,000 pounds he wasn't entitled to at all.""I hardly see what it proves, then," Edith Cressage remarked, and the subject was dropped.
Some two hours later, Thorpe took his departure.
It was not until he was getting into the hansom which had been summoned, that it all at once occurred to him that he had not for a moment been alone with his betrothed.
Upon reflection, as the cab sped smoothly forward, this seemed odd to him. He decided finally that there was probably some social rule about such things which he didn't understand.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *In the drawing-room of the house in Grafton Street which he had quitted, the two ladies sat with faces averted from each other, in constrained silence.
Edith Cressage rose at last, and took a few aimless steps, with her hands at her hair. "Well--I'm embarked--fairly under way!" she said, in clear-cut, almost provocative tones.
"I don't at all know what to say," her companion replied, slowly. "I fancy that you exaggerate my disapproval.
Perhaps it ought not even to be called disapproval at all.
It is only that I am puzzled--and a little frightened.""Oh, I am frightened too," said the other, but with eagerness rather than trepidation in her voice. "That is why I did not give you the signal to leave us alone.
I couldn't quite get up the nerve for it. But would you believe it?--that is one of the charms of the thing.
There is an excitement about it that exhilarates me.
To get happiness through terror--you can't understand that, can you?""I'm trying. I think I'm beginning to understand,"said Miss Madden, vaguely.
"Did you ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married Bothwell?" asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating fixity. "You have it all--all there. Marie got tired of the smooth people, the usual people. There was the promise of adventure, and risk, and peril, and the grand emotions with the big, dark brute.""It isn't a happy story--this parallel that you pick out,"commented Celia, absently.
"Happy! Pah!" retorted Edith, with spirit. "Who knows if it wasn't the only really happy thing in her life? The snobs and prigs all scold her and preach sermons at her--they did it in her lifetime: they do it now----"Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig," put in Celia, looking up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone--"Idon't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her.
I never was even able to mind about her killing Darnley.
You see I take an extremely liberal view. One might almost call it broad. But if I had been one of her ladies--her bosom friends--say Catherine Seton--and she had talked with me about it--I think I should have confessed to some forebodings--some little misgivings.""And do you know what she would have said?"
Edith's swift question, put with a glowing face and a confident voice, had in it the ring of assured triumph.
"She would have answered you: 'My dearest girl, all my life I have done what other people told me to do. In my childhood I was given in marriage to a criminal idiot.
In my premature widowhood I was governed by a committee of scoundrels of both sexes until another criminal idiot was imposed upon me as a second husband.
My own personality has never had the gleam of a chance.
I have never yet done any single thing because I wanted to do it. Between first my politician-mother and her band of tonsured swindlers, and then my cantankerous brother and his crew of snarling and sour-minded preachers, and all the court liars and parasites and spies that both sides surrounded me with, I have lived an existence that isn't life at all. I purport to be a woman, but I have never been suffered to see a genuine man.
And now here is one--or what I think to be one--and I'm given to understand that he is a pirate and a murderer and an unspeakable ruffian generally--but he takes my fancy, and he has beckoned to me to come to him, and so you will kindly get me my hat and jacket and gloves.'
That's what she would have said to you, my dear.""And I"--said Celia, rising after a moment's pause, and putting her hand upon Edith's arm--"I would have answered, 'Dearest lady, in whatever befalls, I pray you never to forget that I am to the end your fond and devoted and loyal servant.'"
