To bring a woman into focus, by means even of a scandal, has always
been a sure way to bring upon her more than her fair share of the
admiration of the other sex. When, therefore, the object of public
attention is gifted with unusual attractions of person and manner, the
havoc she makes in susceptible masculine hearts is proportionately
great.
Clifford was not a particularly weak man, and he would have scorned, a
week ago, the idea that he could love a woman the more for being under
suspicion of theft. But it is incontestable, for all that, that the
stronger the suspicious circumstances grew which hedged her round, the
stronger also became his own feelings of tender interest.
If she were not the thief, then who could it have been? And if it were
indeed she who had taken his watch and money, and dropped or thrown
away the former on her way between Shingle End and the Blue Lion, what
was the cause which had prompted the act?
The case for somnambulism still seemed strong to Clifford, for this
would have accounted for the frightened look of half-remembrance which
he had seen more than once in her face, when the theft was being
discussed.
On the other hand, she had certainly been wide awake when he saw her
start for Shingle End across the fields that morning, at the very time
when she must have been carrying the watch.
And if not somnambulism, then what other motive could there be for
this yielding to a horrible temptation on the part of a beautiful,
amiable and apparently candid and good girl? Was she the victim to
that doubtful disease invented to afford magistrates an excuse for
discharging well-connected thieves “of superior education?” Was she, in
fact, a “kleptomaniac?”
Or, again: Were the difficulties of her uncle not over, as she
had represented them to be, and was she the victim of a misguided
determination to clear them away, even at the sacrifice of her honesty?
Each supposition seemed to Clifford more improbable than the last;
and when, after compensating Jem Stickels for his roll in the mud by
throwing him a half-crown which had been left in his pocket untouched
by the midnight thief, he caught sight of Nell on the opposite bank of
the river, he was again ready to throw his doubts to the winds.
There was always a boat moored to each side of the river at this point,
so Clifford ran down to the water’s edge, and punted himself across.
Jem Stickels burst into a mocking, insulting laugh, but Clifford did
not care. As his friends, Jordan and Otto Conybeare would have said, he
was by this time “too far gone.”
Nell had disappeared again by the time he got back into the garden, and
he had to look about for some minutes before he perceived her, crossing
the fields, this time in the direction of Fleet, at a great rate. She
had a basket on her arm, and she was walking so quickly that Clifford
could at first scarcely believe that the figure which had got over so
much ground in so few minutes could really be that of the girl he had
seen in her uncle’s garden a few minutes before.
He was determined to show her his recovered watch, always hoping
against hope that a fresh development of the mystery would bring
about the longed-for explanation. But before he could overtake her,
she disappeared from his sight over the crest of the rising ground at
Fleet, and when he got upon the hill, in his turn, she was nowhere to
be seen.
It was not for some time, after exploring right and left, that he
saw Nell, with an old broom in her hand, emerge from a poor little
cottage which stood by itself on the marsh below. She set to work very
vigorously to sweep out the dust of the cottage floor, the doorstep
and the bit of paved ground outside; and Clifford had stood for some
seconds at a little distance, warned by the expression of her face that
she was in no mood for conversation, when she at last raised her eyes
and met his.
A shock of pain convulsed the young man when he saw what a change the
past few hours had made in the girl. Instead of the placid sweetness
of the day before, there was in her eyes such a world of sadness, of
terror, that Clifford’s heart smote him, and he wished that he had
suffered his loss quietly without a word to anybody at the inn.
She stopped in her work when she saw him and stood erect, waiting, in
an attitude which had something of defiance in it.
“You have something to say to me, I suppose?” she said at once, coldly.
Clifford did not immediately answer, but his hand went involuntarily up
to the chain of his watch, which he was now wearing.
In an instant her face became as white as that of a dead person.
“Where--where did you find it?” stammered she.
And she trembled so violently that the broom slipped out of her hand
and fell to the ground.
“I found it on the grass, on the other side of the river,” answered
Clifford, who was quite as much agitated as she.
The blood rushed suddenly back to her cheeks, and she began to breathe
so heavily that Clifford thought she was in danger of a fit of some
sort.
“What--what are you going to do?” she stammered out, waving him back
with a gesture which was almost fierce, as he moved forward as if to
support her.
“Do? Nothing,” said he.
“You are not going to prosecute me for theft?” asked she, in a tone
which she meant to be hard and scoffing, but which was only a pitiful
little make-believe, after all.
“Nell, oh, Nell, how can you say such a thing to me?” cried Clifford,
hoarsely.
He did not even know that he had called her by her Christian name.
But she knew, and in the midst of her agitation she cast at him a
shy glance, in which there was a gleam of something that was neither
displeasure nor annoyance. He saw it, and his heart went out to the
girl; he was ready to kneel at her feet. But she recalled him to his
senses with a very unromantic remark:
“If you will excuse me, then, I’ll go on with my sweeping.”
And with great vigor and energy she resumed her task, leaving Clifford
afraid to come within the range of her operations, yet unwilling to
retire.
“It is very good of you to come and do the old woman’s sweeping for
her,” he remarked presently.
“It isn’t for an old woman, but for a young woman. And I ought to have
warned you not to come so near, for she’s got scarlet fever, and you
know that’s catching,” answered Nell, with a warning gesture to him to
keep away.
“You’re not afraid of catching it, so why should I be?”
“Well, I have to risk it, or there would be nobody to look after her.
And I wouldn’t run the risk just for nothing, as you are doing now.”
“It isn’t for nothing,” said Clifford, hotly. Then, with what seemed to
him an inspiration, he added: “I want to talk to you. I want to know
whom you are shielding.”
Nell started and stopped for a moment in her work again.
“Shielding! I am shielding nobody. I wouldn’t shield a thief!”
If Clifford had been as suspicious of her as he was, on the contrary,
sure of her innocence, he would have had all his doubts swept away by
the burst of superb pride with which she flung these words at him.
It was the very tone he had wished to hear in her, the very scornful
utterance of the pure soul, capable of no wrong. It made the whole
matter more mysterious, but it soothed him. He heaved a great sigh,
and, in spite of her warning gestures, came nearer.
“Nell,” he said, “I had been waiting to hear you speak like that. Those
are the very words I have been longing for you to say.”
“Well, now they are said, you had better go back to Stroan to your
friends,” said she, coolly. “And try to persuade them to take your view
of the story. For certainly it will be all over the place by this time
that Nell Claris is a thief, or the accomplice of a thief.”
And the girl, having flung this speech at him with all the dignity
of outraged pride and innocence, suddenly broke down at the end, and
burst into such bitter sobs that Clifford’s heart was wrung. But as he
sprang toward her, she sprang back and made a rush for the door of the
cottage. Clifford, however, was too quick for her, and placing himself
between the girl and the refuge she wished to reach, he spoke to her
in imploring, passionate tones:
“One moment. You must listen to me. All the world will be against you,
you say? Not all, Nell, not all. I will take your part. I will show
them what to believe. Take me for your husband, Nell, and then who can
dare to think of you except as I think? Who can dare to say a word when
you are my wife?”
The girl stood transfixed. He was pleading as eloquently, as earnestly,
as if it had been for his own life. When he paused, letting his burning
eyes speak his love, as he watched her startled, blushing face, and
fancied he could trace the feelings of amazement, incredulity, pleasure
and doubt as they struggled in her heart, she presently shook her head,
and turned away so that she should not again meet his eyes.
“Do you know what you are saying?” she asked in a matter-of-fact tone,
after a short silence. “And do you really expect me to listen to such
nonsense?”
“It is not nonsense. It is my firm intention to make you my wife--”
“Ah, but it’s my firm intention to be nothing of the kind. I am very
much obliged to you for your good intentions, and I quite see that you
think you are doing rather a fine thing in offering to marry me. But,”
and she drew herself up, and flashed at him a defiant look, “I am not
going to be married like that, and out of pity, too, to a man I never
saw till yesterday!”
These last words came upon Clifford with a shock of surprise. He had
forgotten what a short time it was that his acquaintance with Nell had
lasted; it seemed to him that he had known her for months--years. He
was ready with his answer to this objection.
“As to that, I have known you for a very long time, Nell,” he said,
gravely. “I have known you just as long as I have looked forward to
meeting a girl exactly like you. And I have always intended, when I did
meet her, to take no rest until I had persuaded her to become my wife.
I think you may take that as an answer to the suggestion that there is
any ‘pity’ in the case. The ‘pity’ will be for me if you won’t have me.”
Now this was rather prettily put, and Nell looked mollified. She took
her broom in hand again, and affected to go on with her sweeping,
although the pretense was not a very effectual one.
“Unfortunately,” she said, in a low voice, which was not so flippant as
she could have wished, “I haven’t such a vivid imagination myself, and
I can’t pretend that I have known you long enough to be sure that I
should like you for a husband.”
Her tone was not so discouraging as her words. Clifford, who, much to
his own surprise, was quite in earnest, pressed his suit with proper
eagerness.
“I don’t want to rush you into marrying me,” he said. “Take me on
probation. Let it be known that I have asked you to be my wife; give
way so far as to become engaged to me; and if, before I go back to
town next month, I have bored you so much that you have to break the
engagement in disgust, you send me about my business and refuse to
receive any letters from me. At any rate, people won’t be able to say
unkind things when they know I wanted you to be my wife.”
But Nell persisted.
“I won’t even be engaged to you.”
“Why not? Don’t you like me?”
Although her manner betrayed that she did, Nell stoutly denied it. She
wanted to go on with her work, she said, and he had better go back to
his friends at Stroan. And he must please consider, as she meant to do,
that he had not said any of the silly things to which she had tried not
to listen. She should forget them at once, and she hoped he would do
the same. And it amused her to think how disgusted his relations and
friends would have been if she had really been so silly as to listen
to his idle talk, if he had returned to town engaged to an innkeeper’s
niece.
“And my own friends,” added the girl, with spirit, “would have been
just as disgusted with me for taking advantage of the passing fancy of
a man in your position to marry above my own rank in life.”
But to this Clifford answered with great composure:
“You will marry above your own rank, that is certain, whether you marry
me or not. Beauty like yours has a rank of its own, to begin with. And
as for these wild hordes of relations of mine, they only exist in your
imagination. There is no one to prevent me doing as I like; and even if
there were, they might try, but they wouldn’t succeed.”
To this Nell made no answer. After a short silence, Clifford spoke
again:
“Well, I’m going. I shall come again to-morrow, if not this evening, to
pay my bill and--”
Nell raised her face with an angry flush.
“You will not pay it,” she said, quickly. “Do you think, when you have
lost so much money in the house, that we would allow you to?”
“But that was not your fault nor your uncle’s.”
Again the mysterious trouble, that suggested at least a guilty
half-knowledge, appeared in the girl’s eyes. Clifford turned away his
head that he might not see it.
“I think we ought to bear the responsibility,” she said earnestly.
“But I do not. Why should people who are absolutely good suffer for the
faults of the absolutely bad?”
Nell sighed.
“Absolutely good! We are not that. At least I can answer for myself as
to that.”
“Who could contest the goodness of a girl who can risk her own health,
perhaps even her life, to minister to a sick woman?”
Nell flashed upon him a look of supreme contempt.
“I don’t do this because I am good, but because I am angry and
worried,” she said, glancing at the broom in her hand. “I could have
sent some one to sweep out Mrs. Corbett’s cottage; there are plenty of
people about here poor enough to be glad to do it for a few pence. I do
it because I am miserable and want to make a martyr of myself!”
Now Clifford liked her even better for this show of spirit than he had
done for her courage. It removed her, he felt, out of the gray-faced
ranks of sour women who go through rounds of district-visiting as
a duty oppressive to themselves and still more oppressive to the
unfortunate people they visit.
“There,” ended Nell, with one last defiant, flourishing sweep of the
broom as she returned to the door, “now you do really know me better
than you thought!”
“And like you better too!” cried Clifford in a louder voice, as she
disappeared through the doorway.