Page:All the Year Round - Series 1 - Volume 13.djvu/88

78 leave me. Put the seas between us. It is the only chance. And take her with you. She must not be sacrificed."

He was amazed. "Put the seas between us," he said. "And you ask me to do this?"

"I do! I do!" she said. "I would repair the mischief I have done. I should have kept away from your household, but some miserable late has driven me on. I thought I was doing what was right; but I was blind—stone blind—and I was wicked, too. But you will go?"

(Other passers-by now looking in curiously, and seeing Pauline's sparkling eyes, said within themselves, "Here is a gallant little quarrel going on in this public-private place.")

He shook his head. There was a bewildered pleasure beaming in his eyes. "Anything but that," he said. "You can't ask me that. I could not do it. It is hard to ask me. Now, too, that we are beginning to know each other, and to understand each other."

"Ah, that is it!" she said, with a groan. "You don't understand me. No one does. No one knows what I am, or what I have been doing. I dare not even hint it to you. But I tell you, it is the only chance for me. You will go, will you not?"

Again the look of triumph was in his eye. "You know," he said, "my position. I am only a slave in that house. I can neither go nor stay. They bought me, and I must stand by the terms of the bargain."

She seemed to see this, and covered her face up in her hands. A man passing, who had read a good deal of French romance at his club, looked back with extraordinary interest, and thought it very like a scene in the Ames Perdus, by Charles Loupgarou.

"Then we are lost," she said, despairingly, "all of us!" She told the coachman to drive on.

"Wait, wait," said he, hastily; "we shall see. We must talk of this—I must see you"

"Think! Talk!" she said, angrily. "There has been too much of that. We must do now—act. But it is all too late."

Miss Manuel went home miserable, and almost distracted, In her drawing-room she Hung herself on the sofa with her face to the cushions. "What am I to do?" she groaned. "Some curse is on me. Some fury is driving me onward."

So it seemed, indeed. She was so bound up, so encompassed about. She could dare turn back. An iron fate, cruel and pitiless as ever lived in a Greek tragedy, was hurrying her on. She thought of the soft suffering face of her lost sister, as it lay before her on that final Sunday morning.

"Fool that I was," said Pauline, in a fresh agony, "wicked fool! to have thought that so sweet a soul could have required to be soothed or laid, by savage and unchristian vengeance," and she shuddered as she thought of the awful character of the retribution she had heaped on the head of that poor artless, impetuous, but innocent Mrs. Fermor. "What is to be done?" she said, distractedly. "Who is there to help me?" Who indeed! Not one in that house, not her brother, who was watching jealously, suspiciously, and now panting for prompter vengeance.

There was scarcely any equivoque here, such as takes place in a play, because Pauline could not bring herself to tell Fermor how she had been behaving to his wife. Nor, in fact, would she have cared now, had she even suspected the view he took of her agitated requests. Every other consideration was sunk in the one aim and object—the undoing of what she had done. A skeleton in a cupboard! Here was a decaying mouldering corpse, locked up decomposing, and mottled over with the black spots of a plague. Day and night she could not shut out the image of that pretty, impetuous, fresh young creature, whose ruin she had so craftily—"devilishly," she said to herself—planned.

Motion—action was her only resource. At home there was no hope. Those gloomy eyes of her brother—now more gloomy and more truculent than ever—were upon her. They were suspicious, and brought her to account. Hanbury she saw again.

"What can you do for me?" she said, almost on her knees. "Help me! Save me! You once loved us, and loved her. O, I dare not tell you what I have done. You cannot guess it even, and you will not ask it. But you will help me—help her—save that poor child!"

In such wild accusations John Hanbury had no faith. She was one of his Saints. He thought long and wistfully of what he was to do.

"I would give the world," he said, earnestly, "and not the world only—for that would be no sacrifice—but my blood, heart, life—everything for you! But I am not quick at planning. If I saw her—that poor girl"

"Ah, yes!" said Pauline, eagerly, "she will trust you, she will listen to you. Speak to her in your own natural honest way, and she will listen. She has not this horrible distrust of you, though, indeed, it is not her fault. It is only natural that she should shrink from me."

"Ah," said Hanbury, sadly, "if she only knew her interest, she would fly to you, she would"

"No, no," said she, hastily; "she is right there. You do not know me either. I am not a woman for the young and innocent to fly to."

Hanbury's eyes were turned on her, wondering and inquiring. This was the too-scrupulous self-accusation of his Saint.

"You will go to her," went on Pauline. "Get them away—secretly; get them to leave this dreadful London. All of them—father, husband, all. It is the only chance. I know that wicked Romaine; his Will gives him power. He has done everything that he has laid out, and he has laid this out. Go quickly," she said, hurriedly, and in terror, as if it might be already too late. "Persuade her. See her father. He wishes to leave