Early the next morning, Rufus rang at the cottage gate.
“Well, Mr. Frenchman, and how do _you_ git along? And how’s Amelius?”
Toff, standing before the gate, answered with the utmost respect, but
showed no inclination to let the visitor in.
“Amelius has his intervals of laziness,” Rufus proceeded; “I bet he’s in
bed!”
“My young master was up and dressed an hour ago, sir--he has just gone
out.”
“That is so, is it? Well, I’ll wait till he comes back.” He pushed by
Toff, and walked into the cottage. “Your foreign ceremonies are clean
thrown away on me,” he said, as Toff tried to stop him in the hall. “I’m
the American savage; and I’m used up with travelling all night. Here’s
a little order for you: whisky, bitters, lemon, and ice--I’ll take a
cocktail in the library.”
Toff made a last desperate effort to get between the visitor and
the door. “I beg your pardon, sir, a thousand times; I must most
respectfully entreat you to wait--”
Before he could explain himself, Rufus, with the most perfect good
humour, pulled the old man out of his way. “What’s troubling this
venerable creature’s mind--” he inquired of himself, “does he think I
don’t know my way in?”
He opened the library door--and found himself face to face with Sally.
She had risen from her chair, hearing voices outside, and hesitating
whether to leave the room or not. They confronted each other, on either
side of the table, in silent dismay. For once Rufus was so completely
bewildered, that he took refuge in his customary form of greeting before
he was aware of it himself.
“How do you find yourself, Miss? I take pleasure in renewing our
acquaintance,--Thunder! that’s not it; I reckon I’m off my head. Do me
the favour, young woman, to forget every word I’ve said to you. If any
mortal creature had told me I should find you here, I should have said
‘twas a lie--and I should have been the liar. That makes a man feel
bad, I can tell you. No! don’t slide off, if you please, into the next
room--_that_ won’t set things right, nohow. Sit you down again. Now I’m
here, I have something to say. I’ll speak first to Mr. Frenchman. Listen
to this, old sir. If I happen to want a witness standing in the doorway,
I’ll ring the bell; for the present I can do without you. Bong Shewer,
as we say in your country.” He proceeded to shut the door on Toff and
his remonstrances.
“I protest, sir, against acts of violence, unworthy of a gentleman!”
cried Toff, struggling to get back again.
“Be as angry as you please in the kitchen,” Rufus answered, persisting
in closing the door; “I won’t have a noise up here. If you know where
your master is, go and fetch him--and the sooner the better.” He turned
back to Sally, and surveyed her for a while in terrible silence. She
was afraid to look at him; her eyes were on the book which she had been
reading when he came in. “You look to me,” Rufus remarked, “as if you
had been settled here for a time. Never mind your book now; you can go
back to your reading after we’ve had a word or two together first.” He
reached out his long arm, and pulled the book to his own side of the
table. Sally innocently silenced him for the second time. He opened the
book, and discovered--the New Testament.
“It’s my lesson, if you please, sir. I’m to learn it where the pencil
mark is, before Amelius comes back.” She offered her poor little
explanation, trembling with terror. In spite of himself, Rufus began to
look at her less sternly.
“So you call him ‘Amelius’, do you?” he said. “I note that, Miss, as an
unfavourable sign to begin with. How long, if you please, has Amelius
turned schoolmarm, for your young ladyship’s benefit? Don’t you
understand? Well, you’re not the only inhabitant of Great Britain who
don’t understand the English language. I’ll put it plainer. When I last
saw Amelius, you were learning your lessons at the Home. What ill wind,
Miss, blew you in here? Did Amelius fetch you, or did you come of your
own accord, without waiting to be whistled for?” He spoke coarsely but
not ill-humouredly. Sally’s pretty downcast face was pleading with him
for mercy, and (as he felt, with supreme contempt for himself) was not
altogether pleading in vain. “If I guessed that you ran away from the
home,” he resumed, “should I guess right?”
She answered with a sudden accession of confidence. “Don’t blame
Amelius,” she said; “I did run away. I couldn’t live without him.”
“You don’t know how you can live, young one, till you’ve tried the
experiment. Well, and what did they do at the Home? Did they send after
you, to fetch you back?”
“They wouldn’t take me back--they sent my clothes here after me.”
“Ah, those were the rules, I reckon. I begin to see my way to the end of
it now. Amelius gave you house-room?”
She looked at him proudly. “He gave me a room of my own,” she said.
His next question was the exact repetition of the question which he
had put to Regina in Paris. The only variety was in the answer that he
received.
“Are you fond of Amelius?”
“I would die for him!”
Rufus had hitherto spoken, standing. He now took a chair.
“If Amelius had not been brought up at Tadmor,” he said, “I should take
my hat, and wish you good morning. As things are, a word more may be a
word in season. Your lessons here seem to have agreed with you, Miss.
You’re a different sort of girl to what you were when I last saw you.”
She surprised him by receiving that remark in silence. The colour left
her face. She sighed bitterly. The sigh puzzled Rufus: he held his
opinion of her in suspense, until he had heard more.
“You said just now you would die for Amelius,” he went on, eyeing her
attentively. “I take that to be a woman’s hysterical way of mentioning
that she feels interest in Amelius. Are you fond enough of him to leave
him, if you could only be persuaded that leaving him was for his good?”
She abruptly left the table, and went to the window. When her back was
turned to Rufus, she spoke. “Am I a disgrace to him?” she asked, in
tones so faint that he could barely hear them. “I have had my fears of
it, before now.”
If he had been less fond of Amelius, his natural kindness of heart might
have kept him silent. Even as it was, he made no direct reply. “You
remember how you were living when Amelius first met with you?” was all
he said.
The sad blue eyes looked at him in patient sorrow; the low sweet voice
answered--“Yes.” Only a look and a word--only the influence of an
instant--and, in that instant, Rufus’s last doubts of her vanished!
“Don’t think I say it reproachfully, my child! I know it was not your
fault; I know you are to be pitied, and not blamed.”
She turned her face towards him--pale, quiet, and resigned. “Pitied, and
not blamed,” she repeated. “Am I to be forgiven?”
He shrank from answering her. There was silence.
“You said just now,” she went on, “that I looked like a different girl,
since you last saw me. I _am_ a different girl. I think of things that
I never thought of before--some change, I don’t know what, has come over
me. Oh, my heart does hunger so to be good! I do so long to deserve what
Amelius has done for me! You have got my book there--Amelius gave it
to me; we read in it every day. If Christ had been on earth now, is it
wrong to think that Christ would have forgiven me?”
“No, my dear; it’s right to think so.”
“And, while I live, if I do my best to lead a good life, and if my last
prayer to God is to take me to heaven, shall I be heard?”
“You will be heard, my child, I don’t doubt it. But, you see, you have
got the world about you to reckon with--and the world has invented
a religion of its own. There’s no use looking for it in this book of
yours. It’s a religion with the pride of property at the bottom of it,
and a veneer of benevolent sentiment at the top. It will be very
sorry for you, and very charitable towards you: in short, it will do
everything for you except taking you back again.”
She had her answer to that. “Amelius has taken me back again,” she said.
“Amelius has taken you back again,” Rufus agreed. “But there’s one thing
he’s forgotten to do; he has forgotten to count the cost. It seems to
be left to me to do that. Look here, my girl! I own I doubted you when I
first came into this room; and I’m sorry for it, and I beg your pardon.
I do believe you’re a good girl--I couldn’t say why if I was asked, but
I do believe it for all that. I wish there was no more to be said--but
there is more; and neither you nor I must shirk it. Public opinion won’t
deal as tenderly with you as I do; public opinion will make the worst
of you, and the worst of Amelius. While you’re living here with
him--there’s no disguising it--you’re innocently in the way of the boy’s
prospects in life. I don’t know whether you understand me?”
She had turned away from him; she was looking out of the window once
more.
“I understand you,” she answered. “On the night when Amelius met with
me, he did wrong to take me away with him. He ought to have left me
where I was.”
“Wait a bit! that’s as far from my meaning as far can be. There’s a
look-out for everybody; and, if you’ll trust me, I’ll find a look-out
for _you.”_
She paid no heed to what he said: her next words showed that she was
pursuing her own train of thought.
“I am in the way of his prospects in life,” she resumed. “You mean that
he might be married some day, but for me?”
Rufus admitted it cautiously. “The thing might happen,” was all he said.
“And his friends might come and see him,” she went on; her face still
turned away, and her voice sinking into dull subdued tones. “Nobody
comes here now. You see I understand you. When shall I go away? I had
better not say good-bye, I suppose?--it would only distress him. I could
slip out of the house, couldn’t I?”
Rufus began to feel uneasy. He was prepared for tears--but not for such
resignation as this. After a little hesitation, he joined her at the
window. She never turned towards him; she still looked out straight
before her; her bright young face had turned pitiably rigid and pale. He
spoke to her very gently; advising her to think of what he had said, and
to do nothing in a hurry. She knew the hotel at which he stayed when he
was in London; and she could write to him there. If she decided to begin
a new life in another country, he was wholly and truly at her service.
He would provide a passage for her in the same ship that took him back
to America. At his age, and known as he was in his own neighbourhood,
there would be no scandal to fear. He could get her reputably and
profitably employed, in work which a young girl might undertake. “I’ll
be as good as a father to you, my poor child,” he said, “don’t think
you’re going to be friendless, if you leave Amelius. I’ll see to that!
You shall have honest people about you--and innocent pleasure in your
new life.”
She thanked him, still with the same dull tearless resignation. “What
will the honest people say,” she asked, “when they know who I am?”
“They have no business to know who you are--and they shan’t know it.”
“Ah! it comes back to the same thing,” she said. “You must deceive the
honest people, or you can do nothing for me. Amelius had better have
left me where I was! I disgraced nobody, I was a burden to nobody,
_there._ Cold and hunger and ill-treatment can sometimes be merciful
friends, in their way. If I had been left to them, they would have laid
me at rest by this time.” She turned to Rufus, before he could speak to
her. “I’m not ungrateful, sir; I’ll think of it, as you say; and I’ll
do all that a poor foolish creature can do, to be worthy of the interest
you take in me.” She lifted her hand to her head, with a momentary
expression of pain. “I’ve got a dull kind of aching here,” she said; “it
reminds me of my old life, when I was sometimes beaten on the head. May
I go and lie down a little, by myself?”
Rufus took her hand, and pressed it in silence. She looked back at him
as she opened the door of her room. “Don’t distress Amelius,” she said;
“I can bear anything but that.”
Left alone in the library, Rufus walked restlessly to and fro, driven by
a troubled mind. “I was bound to do it,” he thought; “and I ought to
be satisfied with myself. I’m not satisfied. The world is hard on
women--and the rights of property is a darned bad reason for it!”
The door from the hall was suddenly thrown open. Amelius entered the
room. He looked flushed and angry--he refused to take the hand that
Rufus offered to him.
“What’s this I hear from Toff? It seems that you forced your way in when
Sally was here. There are limits to the liberties that a man may take in
his friend’s house.”
“That’s true,” said Rufus quietly. “But when a man hasn’t taken
liberties, there don’t seem much to be said. Sally was at the Home, when
I last saw you--and nobody told me I should find her in this room.”
“You might have left the room, when you found her here. You have been
talking to her. If you have said anything about Regina--”
“I have said nothing about Miss Regina. You have a hot temper of your
own, Amelius. Wait a bit, and let it cool.”
“Never mind my temper. I want to know what you have been saying to
Sally. Stop! I’ll ask Sally herself.” He crossed the room to the inner
door, and knocked. “Come in here, my dear; I want to speak to you.”
The answer reached him faintly through the door. “I have got a bad
headache, Amelius. Please let me rest a little.” He turned back to
Rufus, and lowered his voice. But his eyes flashed; he was more angry
than ever.
“You had better go,” he said. “I can guess how you have been talking to
her--I know what her headache means. Any man who distresses that dear
little affectionate creature is a man whom I hold as my enemy. I spit
upon all the worldly considerations which pass muster with people like
you! No sweeter girl than poor Sally ever breathed the breath of life.
Her happiness is more precious to me than words can say. She is sacred
to me! And I have just proved it--I have just come from a good woman,
who will teach her an honest way of earning her bread. Not a breath of
scandal shall blow on her. If you, or any people like you, think I will
consent to cast her adrift on the world, or consign her to a prison
under the name of a Home, you little know my nature and my principles.
Here”--he snatched up the New Testament from the table, and shook it at
Rufus--“here are my principles, and I’m not ashamed of them!”
Rufus took up his hat.
“There’s one thing you’ll be ashamed of, my son, when you’re cool enough
to think about it,” he said; “you’ll be ashamed of the words you have
spoken to a friend who loves you. I’m not a bit angry myself. You remind
me of that time on board the steamer, when the quarter-master was going
to shoot the bird. You made it up with him--and you’ll come to my hotel
and make it up with me. And then we’ll shake hands, and talk about
Sally. If it’s not taking another liberty, I’ll trouble you for a
light.” He helped himself to a match from the box on the chimney-piece,
lit his cigar, and left the room.
He had not been gone half an hour, before the better nature of Amelius
urged him to follow Rufus and make his apologies. But he was too anxious
about Sally to leave the cottage, until he had seen her first. The tone
in which she had answered him, when he knocked at her door, suggested,
to his sensitive apprehension, that there was something more serious
the matter with her than a mere headache. For another hour, he waited
patiently, on the chance that he might hear her moving in her room.
Nothing happened. No sound reached his ears, except the occasional
rolling of carriage-wheels on the road outside.
His patience began to fail him, as the second hour moved on. He went to
the door, and listened, and still heard nothing. A sudden dread struck
him that she might have fainted. He opened the door a few inches, and
spoke to her. There was no answer. He looked in. The room was empty.
He ran into the hall, and called to Toff. Was she, by any chance,
downstairs? No. Or out in the garden? No. Master and man looked at each
other in silence. Sally was gone.