Another silence. Then Sir Roger speaks again, and this time his words seem as slow and difficult of make as mine were just now.

"Nancy!" he says, in a low voice, not looking at me, but still facing the flowers and the sunshiny autumn sward, "do you believe that--that--_this fellow_ cares about her really?--she is too good to be made--to be made--a mere _cat's-paw_ of!"

"A _cat's-paw_!" cry I, turning quickly round with raised voice; the blood that so lately retired from it rushing again headlong all over my face; "I do not know--what you mean--what you are talking about!"

He draws his breath heavily, and pauses a moment before he speaks.

"G.o.d knows," he says, looking solemnly up, "that I had no wish to broach this subject again--G.o.d knows that I meant to have done with it forever--but now that it has been forced against my will--against both our wills--upon me, I must ask you this one question--tell me, Nancy--tell me truly _this_ time"--(with an accent of acute pain on the word "_this_")--"can you say, _on your honor--on your honor_, mind--that you believe this--this man loves Barbara, as a man should love his wife?"

If he had worded his interrogation differently, I should have been sorely puzzled to answer it; as it is, in the form his question takes, I find a loop-hole of escape.

"As a man should love his wife?" I reply, with a derisive laugh, "and how is that? I do not think I quite know!--very dearly, I suppose, but not quite so dearly as if she were his neighbor's--is that it?"

As I speak, I look up at him, with a malicious air of pseudo-innocence.

But if I expect to see any guilt--any conscious shrinking in his face--I am mistaken. There is pain--infinite pain--pain both sharp and long-enduring in the grieved depths of his eyes; but there is no guilt.

"You will not answer me?" he says, in an accent of profound disappointment, sighing again heavily. "Well, I hardly expected it--hardly hoped it!--so be it, then, since you will have it so; and yet--" (again taking up the note, and reading over one of its few sentences with slow attention), "and yet there is one more question I must put to you, after all--they both come to pretty much the same thing. Why"--(pointing, as he speaks, to the words to which he alludes)--"why should _you_ have taken on yourself the blame of--of his departure from Tempest? what had _you_ to say to it?"

In his voice there is the same just severity; in his eyes there is the same fire of deep yet governed wrath that I remember in them six months ago, when Mrs. Huntley first threw the firebrand between us.

"I do not know," I reply, in a half whisper of impatient misery, turning my head restlessly from side to side; "how should I know? I am _sick_ of the subject."

"Perhaps!--so, G.o.d knows, am I; but _had_ you any thing to say to it?"

He does not often touch me now; but, as he asks this, he takes hold of both my hands, more certainly to prevent my escaping from under his gaze, than from any desire to caress me.

It is my last chance of confession. I little thought I should ever have another. Late as it is, shall I avail myself of it? Nay! if not before, why _now_? Why _now_?--when there are so much stronger reasons for silence--when to speak would be to knock to atoms the newly-built edifice of Barbara's happiness--to rake up the old and nearly dead ashes of Frank's frustrated, and for aught I know, sincerely repented sin? So I answer, faintly indeed, yet quite audibly and distinctly:

"Nothing."

"NOTHING?" (in an accent and with eyes of the keenest, wistfulest interrogation, as if he would wring from me, against my will, the confession I so resolutely withhold).

But I turn away from that heart-breaking, heart-broken scrutiny, and answer:

"Nothing!"

CHAPTER XLI.

"She dwells with beauty--beauty that must die, And joy whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu!"

Thus I accomplished my second lie: I that, at home, used to be a proverb for blunt truth-telling. They say that "_facilis descensus Averni_." I do not agree with them. I have not found it easy. To me it has seemed a very steep and precipitous road, set with sharp flints that cut the feet, and make the blood flow.

I think the second falsehood was almost harder to utter than the first: but, indeed, they were both very disagreeable. I cannot think why any one should have thought it necessary to invent the doctrine of a future retribution for sin.

It appears to me that, in this very life of the present, each little delinquency is so heavily paid for--so exorbitantly overpaid, indeed.

Look, for instance, at my own case. I told a lie--a lie more of the letter than the spirit--and since then I have spent six months of my flourishing youth absolutely devoid of pleasure, and largely penetrated with pain.

I have stood just outside my paradise, peeping under and over the flaming sword of the angel that guards it. I have been near enough to smell the flowers--to see the downy, perfumed fruits--to hear the song of the angels as they go up and down within its paths; but I have been outside.

Now I have told another lie, and I suppose--nay, what better can I hope?--that I shall live in the same state of weary, disproportioned retribution to the end of the chapter.

These are the thoughts, interspersed and diversified with loud sighs, that are employing my mind one ripe and misty morning a few days later than the incidents last detailed.

Barbara is to arrive to-day. She is coming to pay us a visit--coming, like the lady mentioned by Tennyson, in "In Memoriam"--not, indeed, "to bring her babe," but to "make her boast." And how, pray, am I to listen with complacent congratulation to this boast? For the first time in my life I dread the coming of Barbara. How am I, whose acting, on the few occasions when I have attempted it, has been of the most improbably wooden description--how am I, I say, to counterfeit the extravagant joy, the lively sympathy, that Barbara will expect--and naturally expect--from me?

I get up and look at myself in the gla.s.s. a.s.suredly I shall have to take some severe measures with my countenance before it falls under my sister's gaze. Small sympathy and smaller joy is there in it now--it wears only a lantern-jawed, lack-l.u.s.tre despondency. I practise a galvanized smile, and say out loud, as if in dialogue with some interlocutor:

"Yes, _delightful_!--I am _so_ pleased!" but there is more mirth in the enforced grin of an unfleshed skull than in mine.

That will never take in Barbara. I try again--once, twice--each time with less prosperity than the last. Then I give it up. I must trust to Providence.

As the time for her coming draws nigh, I fall to thinking of the different occasions since my marriage, on which I have watched for expected comings from this window--have searched that bend in the drive with impatient eyes--and of the disappointment to which, on the two occasions that rise most prominently before my mind's eye, I became a prey.

Well, I am to be subject to no disappointment--if it _would_ be a disappointment--to-day.

Almost before I expect her--almost before she is due--she is here in the room with me, and we are looking at one another. I, indeed, am staring at her with a black and stupid surprise.

"Good Heavens!" say I, bluntly; "what _have_ you been doing to yourself?

_how_ happy you look!"

I have always known theoretically that happiness was becoming; and I have always thought Barbara most fair.

"Fairer than Rachel by the palmy well, Fairer than Ruth among the fields of corn, Fair as the angel that said, 'Hail!' she seemed,"

but _now_, what a lovely brightness, like that of clouds remembering the gone sun, shines all about her! What a radiant laughter in her eyes!

What a splendid carnation on her cheeks! (How glad I am that I did not tell!)

"Do I?" she says, softly, and hiding her face, with the action of a shy child, on my shoulders. "I dare say."

"_Good_ Heavens!" repeat I, again, with more accentuation than before, and with my usual happy command and variety of e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.

"And _you_?" she says, lifting her face, and speaking with a joyful confidence of antic.i.p.ation in her innocent eyes, "and _you_? you are pleased too, are not you?"

"Of course," reply I, quickly calling to my aid the galvanized smile and the unnatural tone in which I have been perfecting myself all the forenoon, "_delighted_! I never was so pleased in my life. I told you so in my letters, did not I?"

A look of nameless disappointment crosses her features for a moment.

"Yes," she says, "I know! but I want you to tell me again. I thought that you--would have such a--such a great deal to say about it."

"So I have!" reply I, uncomfortably, fiddling uneasily with a paper-knife that I have picked up, and trying how much ill-usage it will bear without snapping, "an immensity! but you see it is--it is difficult to begin, is not it? and you know I never was good at expressing myself, was I?"

We have sat down. I am not facing her. With a complexion that serves one such ill turns as mine does, one is not over-fond of _facing_ people. I am beside her. For a moment we are both silent.

"Well," say I, presently, with an unintentional tartness in my tone, "why do not you begin? I am waiting to hear all about it! Begin!"