"Only show me how, and I obey you."

"Do you mean to say that with all your tact and cleverness, you cannot find a means of showing that you have been misapprehended, that you are deeply mortified at being misunderstood, that by an expression of great humility--Do you know how to be humble?"

"I can be abject," said he, with a peculiar smile.

"I should really like to see you abject!" said she, laughingly.

"Do so then," cried he, dropping on his knee before her, while he still held her hand, but with a very different tone of voice,--a voice now tremulous with earnest feeling,--continued: "There can be no humility deeper than that with which I ask your forgiveness for one word I spoke to you this evening. If you but knew all the misery it has caused me!"

"Mr. Maitland, this mockery is a just rebuke for my presence here. If I had not stooped to such a step, you would never have dared this."

"It is no mockery to say what my heart is full of, and what you will not deny you have read there. No, Alice, you may reject my love; you cannot pretend to ignore it."

Though she started as he called her Alice, she said nothing, but only withdrew her hand. At last she said: "I don't think this is very generous of you. I came to ask a great favor at your hands, and you would place me in a position not to accept it."

"So far from that," said he, rising, "I distinctly tell you that I place all, even my honor, at your feet, and without one shadow of a condition.

You say you came here to ask me a favor, and my answer is that I accord whatever you ask, and make no favor of it. Now, what is it you wish me to do?"

"It's very hard not to believe you sincere when you speak in this way,"

said she, in a low voice.

"Don't try," said he, in the same low tone.

"You promise me, then, that nothing shall come of this?"

"I do," said he, seriously.

"And that you will make any amends the Commodore's friend may suggest?

Come, come," said she, laughing, "I never meant that you were to marry the young lady."

"I really don't know how far you were going to put my devotion to the test."

The pleasantness with which he spoke this so amused her that she broke again into laughter, and laughed heartily too. "Confess," said she at last,--"confess it's the only sc.r.a.pe you did not see your way out of!"

"I am ready to confess it's the only occasion in my life in which I had to place my honor in the hands of a lady."

"Well, let us see if a lady cannot be as adroit as a gentleman in such an affair; and now, as you are in my hands, Mr. Maitland,--completely in _my_ hands,--I am peremptory, and my first orders are that you keep close arrest. Raikes will see that you are duly fed, and that you have your letters and the newspapers; but mind, on any account, no visitors without my express leave: do you hear me, sir?"

"I do; and all I would say is this, that if the tables should ever turn, and it would be my place to impose conditions, take my word for it, I 'll be just as absolute. Do you hear me, madam?"

"I do; and I don't understand, and I don't want to understand you," said she, in some confusion. "Now, good-bye. It is almost day. I declare that gray streak there is daybreak!"

"On, Alice, if you would let me say one word--only one--before we part."

"I will not, Mr. Maitland, and for this reason, that I intend we should meet again."

"Be it so," said he, sadly, and turned away. After he had walked a few paces, he stopped and turned round; but she was already gone, how and in what direction he knew not. He hurried first one way, then another, but without success. If she had pa.s.sed into the house,--and, of course, she had,--with what speed she must have gone! Thoughtful, but not unhappy, he returned to his room, if not fully a.s.sured that he had done what was wisest, well disposed to hope favorably for the future.

CHAPTER XXV. JEALOUS TRIALS

When Mrs. Maxwell learned, in the morning, that Mr. Maitland was indisposed and could not leave his room, that the Commodore had gone off in the night, and Mark and Mrs. Trafford had started by daybreak, her amazement became so insupportable that she hastened from one of her guests to the other, vainly asking them to explain these mysteries.

"What a fidgety old woman she is!" said Beck Graham, who had gone over to Bella Lyle, then a prisoner in her room from a slight cold. "She has been rushing over the whole house, inquiring if it be possible that my father has run away with Alice, that your brother is in pursuit of them, and Mr. Maitland taken poison in a moment of despair. At all events, she has set every one guessing and gossiping at such a rate that all thought of archery is forgotten, and even our private theatricals have lost their interest in presence of this real drama."

"How absurd!" said Bella, languidly.

"Yes, it's very absurd to fill one's house with company, and give them no better amus.e.m.e.nt than the chit-chat of a boarding-house. I declare I have no patience with her."

"Where did your father go?"

"He went over to Port-Graham. He suddenly bethought him of a lease--I think it was a lease--he ought to have sent off by post, and he was so eager about it that he started without saying good-bye. And Mark,--what of him and Alice?"

"There's all the information I can give you;" and she handed her a card with one line in pencil: "Good-bye till evening, Bella. You, were asleep when I came in.--Alice."

"How charmingly mysterious! And you have no idea where they 've gone?"

"Not the faintest; except, perhaps, back to the Abbey for some costumes that they wanted for that 'great tableau.'"

"I don't think so," said she, bluntly. "I suspect--shall I tell you what I suspect? But it's just as likely you 'll be angry, for you Lyles will never hear anything said of one of you. Yes, you may smile, my dear, but it's well known, and I 'm not the first who has said it."

"If that be true, Beck, it were best not to speak of people who are so excessively thin-skinned."

"I don't know that. I don't see why you are to be indulged any more than your neighbors. I suppose every one must take his share of that sort of thing."

Bella merely smiled, and Rebecca continued: "What I was going to say was this,--and, of course, you are at liberty to dissent from it if you like,--that, however clever a tactician your sister is, Sally and I saw her plan of campaign at once. Yes, dear, if you had been at dinner yesterday you 'd have heard a very silly project thrown out about my being sent over to fetch Tony Butler, under the escort of Mr. Norman Maitland. Not that it would have shocked me, or frightened me in the least,--I don't pretend that; but as Mr. Maitland had paid me certain attention at Lyle Abbey,--you look quite incredulous, my dear, but it is simply the fact; and so having, as I said, made these advances to me, there would have been considerable awkwardness in our going off together a drive of several hours without knowing--without any understanding--"

She hesitated for the right word, and Bella added, "_A quoi s'en tenir_, in fact."

"I don't know exactly what that means, Bella; but, in plain English, I wished to be sure of what he intended. My dear child, though that smile becomes you vastly, it also seems to imply that you are laughing at my extreme simplicity, or my extreme vanity, or both."

Bella's smile faded slowly away; but a slight motion of the angle of the mouth showed that it was not without an effort she was grave.

"I am quite aware," resumed Beck, "that it requires some credulity to believe that one like myself could have attracted any notice when seen in the same company with Alice Lyle--Trafford, I mean--and her sister; but the caprice of men, my dear, will explain anything. At all events, the fact is there, whether one can explain it or not; and, to prove it, papa spoke to Mr. Maitland on the morning we came away from the Abbey; but so hurriedly--for the car was at the door, and we were seated on it--that all he could manage to say was, that if Mr. Maitland would come over to Port-Graham and satisfy him on certain points,--the usual ones, I suppose,--that--that, in short, the matter was one which did not offer insurmountable obstacles. All this sounds very strange to your ears, my dear, but it is strictly true, every word of it."

"I cannot doubt whatever you tell me," said Bella; and now she spoke with a very marked gravity.

"Away we went," said Rebecca, who had now got into the sing-song tone of a regular narrator,--"away we went, our first care on getting back home being to prepare for Mr. Maitland's visit. We got the little green-room ready, and cleared everything out of the small store-closet at the back, and broke open a door between the two so as to make a dressing-room for him, and we had it neatly papered, and made it really very nice. We put up that water-colored sketch of Sally and myself making hay, and papa leaning over the gate; and the little drawing of papa receiving the French commander's sword on the quarter-deck of the 'Malabar:' in fact, it was as neat as could be,--but he never came. No, my dear,--never."

"How was that?"

"You shall hear; that is, you shall hear what followed, for explanation I have none to give you. Mr. Maitland was to have come over, on the Wednesday following, to dinner. Papa said five, and he promised to be punctual; but he never came, nor did he send one line of apology.

This may be some new-fangled politeness,--the latest thing in that fashionable world he lives in,--but still I cannot believe it is practised by well-bred people. Be that as it may, my dear, we never saw him again till yesterday, when he pa.s.sed us in your sister's fine carriage-and-four, he lolling back this way, and making a little gesture, so, with his hand as he swept past, leaving us in a cloud of dust that totally precluded him from seeing whether we had returned his courtesy--if he cared for it. That's not all," she said, laying her hand on Bella's arm. "The first thing he does on his arrival here is to take papa's rooms. Well,--you know what I mean,--the rooms papa always occupies here; and when Raikes remarks, 'These are always kept for Commodore Graham, sir; they go by the name of the Commodore's quarters,'

his reply is, 'They 'll be better known hereafter as Mr. Norman Maitland's, Mr. Raikes.' Word for word what he said; Raikes told me himself. As for papa, he was furious; he ordered the car to the door, and dashed into our room, and told Sally to put all the things up again,--that we were going off. I a.s.sure you, it was no easy matter to calm him down. You have no idea how violent he is in one of these tempers; but we managed at last to persuade him that it was a mere accident, and Sally began telling him the wonderful things she had heard about Maitland from Mrs. Chetwyn,--his fortune and his family, and what not. At last he consented to take the Chetwyns' rooms, and down we went to meet Mr. Maitland,--I own, not exactly certain on what terms it was to be. Cordial is no name for it, Bella; he was--I won't call it affectionate, but I almost might: he held my hand so long that I was forced to draw it away; and then he gave a little final squeeze in the parting, and a look that said very plainly, 'We, at least, understand each other.' It was at that instant, my dear, Alice opened the campaign."

"Alice! What had Alice to do with it?"

"Nothing,--nothing whatever, by right, but everything if you admit interference and--Well, I'll not say a stronger word to her own sister.