Only eighteen, but from that moment, a woman. Sunk in horror as I was,
I yet had wit enough to clap my hands to my head and say I had been
dazzled by the sun.
Ambrose, who, in the week I had been with them, had shown himself
delighted with the change my coming had made in the house, looked
alarmed at this and wanted to call Mr. Allison; but I forbade him, and
said I would go in by myself, which I did under a stress of will-power
rarely exercised, I dare believe, by a girl so young and so miserable.
“What shall I say to him? how shall I meet him? how can I hide my
knowledge and act as if this thing had never been?” For even in that
rush of confusing emotions I recognized one fact; that I must not betray
by look or word that I knew his dreadful secret. If he were villain
enough to keep a woman, and that woman the rightful owner of the
property he was himself enjoying, in a prison he had made for her in
her own house, then he was villain enough to strangle the one who had
discovered this fact, were she the cherished darling of his seared and
calculating heart. I was afraid of him now that I knew him, yet I never
thought of flying his presence or revealing his crime. He was, villain
or no villain, my husband, and nothing could ever undo that fact or make
it true that I had never loved him.
So I went in, but went in slowly and with downcast eyes. The bead and
the paper I had dropped into my _vinaigrette_, which fortunately hung at
my side.
“Humphrey,” I said, “when are we going to leave this house? I begin to
find it lonesome.”
He was preparing to gather up his papers for his accustomed trip down
town, but he stopped as I spoke, and look at me curiously.
“You are pale,” he remarked, “change and travel will benefit you.
Dearest, we will try to sail for Europe in a week.”
A week! What did he mean? Leave his prisoners--alas, I understood his
journeys to the top of the house now--and go away to Europe? I felt
myself grow livid at the thought, and caught a spray of lilac from the
table where I stood and held it to my face.
“Will your business affairs warrant it?” I asked. “Are you sure Mrs.
Ransome’s affairs will not suffer by your absence?” Then, as I saw him
turn white, I made a ghastly effort, happily hid by the flowers I held
pressed against my face, and suggested, laughingly, “How, if she
should come back after your departure! would she meet the greeting she
deserves?”
He was half the room away from me, but I heard the click of subdued
passion in his throat, and turned sick almost to the point of fainting.
“It is four days since you mentioned Mrs. Ransome’s name,” he said.
“When we are gone from here you must promise that it shall never again
pass your lips. Mrs. Ransome is not a good woman, Delight.”
It was a lie yet his manner of speaking it, and the look with which he
now approached me, made me feel helpless again, and I made haste to rush
from the room, ostensibly to prepare for our trip down town, in order
to escape my own weakness and gain a momentary self-possession before we
faced the outside world. Only eighteen years old and confronted by such
a diabolical problem!