"Mamma, I can go to Mr. Leigh as well as you. I can go better, for I shall not suffer as you will, and I can bring you home a faithful account of what I hear."

"Darling, all this is new to you. I have had to serve a long apprenticeship to learn self-restraint."

Lucia laughed bitterly. "See the advantage of my Indian blood," she said. "Trust me, mother, I will be as steady as those ancestors of mine who bore torture without flinching."

Mrs. Costello bent down and kissed her child's forehead.

"Yours is a better heroism, Lucia; for mental pain is harder to bear than physical, and you would suffer to save me."

"We suffer together, mamma. I must take my share. To-morrow I shall go, as usual, to Mr. Leigh's, and bring back all I can learn. But he will wonder to see me, and still more if he hears that we are not going away."

"You must simply tell him our journey is put off. He will ask no questions, and only think I am very dilatory and changeable. No one else is likely to think of us at all for a day or two to come."

They were silent again for a little while. Lucia's thoughts, relieved from the first heavy pressure on them by the very fact of having spoken, began to turn from the criminal to the victim; from their own share in the horror to that of others. One thing seemed to stand out clear and plain from the confusion which still enveloped all else. She, the daughter of the murderer, could never again meet the wife of the murdered man as a friend. If the punishment of the father descended to the children, did not their guilt descend too? Already she seemed to feel the stain of blood upon her hand, and to shrink from herself, as all innocent persons ought to do, henceforward. And Bella, her old companion and friend, must shrink from her most of all; the very spirit of the dead would surely rise up to forbid all intercourse between them.

Lucia had not boasted of her self-command without reason. A mind naturally strong, and supported both by pride and affection, had enabled her to meet with courage the bitterness and misery of the past weeks.

But she was only a girl still, and had not learned to rule her thoughts as well as her looks and words. So if they grew morbid, and her dreary imagination sometimes tortured her uselessly and cruelly, it was no great wonder. She could suffer and be silent; but she had not yet learnt so to rule her spirit as to save herself needless suffering.

Thus the very intensity of her sympathy for Bella only reacted in loathing and horror of herself; and she had begun to try to devise means for carrying out that avoidance of all most nearly connected with the dead, which seemed to her an imperative duty, when she was startled by her mother's voice.

"If it is he," she said--and it seemed that they both shrank from any plainer expression of their thoughts than these vague phrases--"if it is he our hardest task is before us. How will you bear, Lucia, to meet them all again?"

"Mother, I cannot! Surely you do not think of it. How can _we_"--she shuddered as she spoke--"how can we go again among any innocent people?"

"My child, we _must_. More than that, we must keep our secret, if we can, still."

"But Bella? Mother, how can I look at her--a widow--and know who I am, and who has done it?"

"Listen to me, Lucia. My poor child, your burden has been heavy lately; do not make it heavier than it need be. The crime and the horror are bad enough, but we have no share in them. No; think of it reasonably. The wife and child of a criminal, even where there has been daily association between them, are not condemned, but rather pitied. No mind, but one cruelly prejudiced, would brand them with his guilt. Do not punish yourself, then, where others would acquit you. But, indeed, I need not tell you how our very separation is a safeguard to us--to you especially. Think of these things; and do not suffer yourself to imagine that there is a bar between you and Bella just now, when I know you love her more than ever."

Lucia's head lay upon her mother's knee. Mrs. Costello's touch on the soft hair, her tone of gentle reproof, and the thoughts her words called up, brought tears, fast and thick, to her child's eyes. Lucia had shed few tears in her life. Until lately she had known no cause for them; and lately they had not come. With dry eyes and throbbing temples she had gone through the most sorrowful hours; but now the spell seemed broken, and a sense of calm and relief came with the change. Mrs. Costello went on,--

"There is another reason why we must appear as we have always done.

Suspicion is not proof. Margery's story, and more, may be true, and yet it may be that, three months hence, all, as regards ourselves, will be just as it has been. We must not, through a blind fear of one calamity, put ourselves in the way of another. Neither of us can look much at the future to-night; but we must not forget that there is a future. So it is still the old task which is before us, to keep our secret."

The voice had been very steady until the last word; but as that was spoken, it faltered and failed so suddenly that Lucia looked up. She sprang to her feet, but just in time. The over-tried strength had given way, and Mrs. Costello had fallen back in a deep fainting fit.

CHAPTER IV.

Lucia dared not call Margery to her assistance. The consciousness of having something to conceal made her dread the smallest self-betrayal.

She hastened, therefore, to do alone all that she could do for her mother's recovery; but it was so long before she succeeded that she grew almost wild with terror. At last, however, the deathly look passed away, and with the very first moment of returning animation, the habit of self-control returned also. Mrs. Costello smiled at her daughter's anxious face.

"I am afraid," she said, "that you will have to get used to these attacks. Do not be frightened; you see they pass off again."

"But you never used to have them?"

"No; but youth and strength cannot last for ever."

"Mamma! you are not old; you are not much more than forty yet."

"Forty-two in years; but there are some years that might count for ten."

"It is this horrible pressure upon you; you are being tortured to death!"

"Hush, my child. What I suffer is but the just and natural consequence of what I did. Be patient, both for me and for yourself. By-and-by we shall see that all is right."

Hard doctrine! and only to be learnt by long endurance. Lucia rebelled against it, but she could not argue with her mother's pale face and faintly spoken words to oppose her. She busied herself softly in such little offices as her anxiety suggested, and they spoke no more that night of the subjects nearest to their hearts.

But when Mrs. Costello was alone, she began to think of Maurice. She felt, even before she began to think, that something which had been a stay and prop to her hitherto had suddenly been snatched away, and she had now to realize that this support was her confidence in him. For a long time she had grown accustomed to rest upon the idea that a safe and honourable future was secured for her child, and this had made present trials and difficulties endurable. She had seen Percy's courtship with bitter disappointment, although she had miscalculated its issue, and through all her sympathy with Lucia, she had secretly rejoiced at his dismissal; she had felt no scruples in hearing from Maurice, at the very moment when his prospects had suddenly changed and brightened, the assurance of his attachment, and she had received his note that very day with a joy which almost resembled that which a girl feels who hears from his own lips that her absent lover is faithful to her. To this mother, cut off from every tie but that of motherhood, her child was the one only absorbing interest; she had loved Maurice, but she knew now that she had loved him chiefly as the representative of Lucia's future safety and happiness. It had never occurred to her that her own strange marriage, that the race or the character of her husband, which had been recognized by both mother and daughter as insuperable obstacles in Percy's case, would estrange the nobler and truer nature.

The whole miserable story would have to be told, she had thought, when the time came, but she had neither feared its effect on Maurice nor felt any compunction at the idea of his carrying into an honourable family a wife whose parentage was her terror and disgrace.

But now that the disgrace had grown immeasurably darker, now that her story might have to be told, not privately and with extenuation, but in coarse hard words, and to the whole of the little world that knew her; now that every one who would, might be able to point at her as the daughter of a murderer,--how would it be?

With the feeling that at length she was indeed left alone and helpless, Mrs. Costello put from her the last fragment of her dream. There was still, it is true, the want of positive knowledge that Christian was the criminal, but in her own heart she had already accepted the evidence against him, and it seemed to her that all which remained to be done with regard to Maurice was to write and tell him, not all the truth--there was no need for that, and he might hear it soon enough from other sources--but that the hopes they had both indulged in had deceived them, and must be laid aside and forgotten.

And when her long meditation came to an end, she said softly to herself,

"Thank God, _she_ does not know. And I have been ready to complain of the very unconsciousness which has saved her this!"

Mr. Leigh was surprised, as Lucia had expected, when she went next day, just as usual, to pay him her morning visit. He was easily satisfied, however, with the slight reasons she gave him for their delay, and glad of anything that kept them still at the Cottage.

There was no need for her to ask any questions about the event of yesterday. All that was known by every one had been told to Mr. Leigh already by an early visitor, and he, full of horror and sympathy, was able to tell the terrible story over again to a listener, whose deep and agonizing interest in it he never suspected.

But to stay, after the certainty she sought for was obtained; to talk indifferently of other matters; to regulate face and voice so as to show enough, but not too much, of the tumult at her heart, was a task before which Lucia's courage almost gave way. Yet it was done. No impatience betrayed her, no sign of emotion beyond that of natural feeling for others was allowed to escape her; only her hands, which lay quietly clasped together in her lap, gradually tightened and contracted till the pressure of her slight fingers was like that of iron.

At last she was released; and exhausted as if with hard physical exertion, she came back to the Cottage with her news.

There was no need to tell it. The hopeless look which, when she dared be natural, settled in her eyes, told plainly enough that there was no mistake of identity. Only one hope remained, and that so feeble that neither dared to acknowledge it in her heart, though she might speak of it as existing--the hope that after all the prisoner might be innocent.

Mrs. Costello wrote that day to her faithful friend and counsellor, Mr.

Strafford.

"I am in a terrible strait," she said, "and it is to you only in this world that I can look for aid. My whole life, as you know, has been given to my daughter--for her I have thought and planned, and in her I have had my daily consolation. But now I begin to remember that I am not a mother only, but also a wife. Have I a right to forget it? Can anything excuse a wife who does so? Tell me what I ought to do; for if ever I am to think of my husband it must be now.

"Yet it seems to me that, for Lucia's sake, I must still, if possible, keep my secret. I long to send her away from me, at this moment, but she has no friends at a distance from Cacouna, and besides, our separation would certainly excite notice. I might, indeed, send her to England; my cousin, I believe, would receive her for a while; but there, you know, I cannot follow her, and a long parting is more than I have courage to think of. So I come back to the same point from which I started. I am almost bewildered by this new wretchedness that has fallen upon us; and I wait for your sympathy and counsel with most impatient eagerness."

She had not, however, to wait long. The country post, always irregular, for once favoured her anxiety, and only two days afterwards came a hurried note, bringing the best possible answer. Mr. Strafford wrote,

"The fact of one of my people being in such trouble would bring me to Cacouna if I had no other reason for coming. I shall be with you, therefore, the day after you receive this. No one, I should think, need, for the present at least, know of any connection whatever between your family affairs and my visit. My errand is to try what can be done for the unhappy prisoner, and, as an old friend, I shall ask your hospitality during my stay. Then I will give you what advice and help I can; of my truest and warmest sympathy I know I need give you no assurance."

To both mother and daughter this note brought comfort, though Lucia had no knowledge whatever of the many thoughts regarding her father which had begun to occupy her mother's mind. To her, strange and unnatural as it may seem, he was simply an object of fear and abhorrence. She hated him as the cause of her mother's sufferings, of their false and insecure position, and of the self-loathing which possessed her when she thought of their relationship. The idea of any wifely duty owing to him could never have struck her, for what visions of married life she had, belonged to a world totally unlike that of her parents' experience, and she regarded what she knew of that as something beyond all reach of ordinary rules or feelings.

Yet much as she would have wondered had she known it, her mother's thoughts were coming to be hour by hour more occupied with that long unseen and dreaded husband, who had indeed been her tyrant, but who was still bound to her by ties of her own weaving, and who was the father of her child. A strange mixture of feelings had taken the place of her old fear and disgust; there was still horror, especially of the new guilt which separated him more than ever from her purer world, but there was a deep and yearning pity also. She felt sure, before Mr. Strafford arrived, that he would tell her she was right; that Christian--even by the very act which had put him out of the ranks of ordinary men, out of the place, low and degraded as it was, which he had filled among his own people--had recovered a claim upon her, and that she must not fail to give him in his need what succour might be possible. She was right, and Lucia heard with dismay that their secret was about to be betrayed to the very person from whom most of all it had hitherto been kept.

Nothing, however, was to be done rashly. Mr. Strafford arrived late in the evening, and next day he proposed to go to the jail to see Christian, which he knew there would be no difficulty in doing, and to bring back to Mrs. Costello such an account as would enable her to judge how far her interference might or might not be useful. There was still a chance that it might be useless, and to that hope Lucia clung with a pertinacity which added to her mother's anxieties.