第100章

"After that I could only set your letter down as a subterfuge," resumed the earl--"a false, barefaced plea, put forth to conceal your real motives, and I told Carlyle so. I inquired how it was he had never detected any secret understanding between you and that--that beast, located, as the fellow was, in the house. He replied that no such suspicion had ever occurred to him. He placed the most implicit confidence in you, and would have trusted you with the creature around the world, aye, with any one else."

She entwined her hands one within the other, pressing them to pain. It would not deaden the pain at her heart.

"Carlyle told me he had been unusually occupied during the stay of that man. Besides his customary office work, his time was taken up with some private business for a family in the neighborhood, and he had repeatedly to see them, more particularly the daughter, after office hours. Very old acquaintances of his, he said, relatives of the Carlyle family; and he was as anxious about the secret--a painful one --as they were. This, I observed to him, may have rendered him unobservant to what was passing at home. He told me, I remember, that on the very evening of the--the catastrophe, he ought to have gone with you to a dinner party, but most important circumstances arose, in connection with the affair, which obliged him to meet two gentlemen at his office, and to receive them in secret, unknown to his clerks."

"Did he mention the name of the family?" inquired Lady Isabel, with white lips.

"Yes, he did. I forgot it, though. Rabbit! Rabit!--some such name as that."

"Was it Hare?"

"That was it--Hare. He said you appeared vexed that he did not accompany you to the dinner; and seeing that he intended to go in afterward, but was prevented. When the interview was over in his office, he was again detained at Mrs. Hare's house, and by business as impossible to avoid as the other."

"Important business!" she echoed, giving way for a moment to the bitterness of former feelings. "He was promenading in their garden by moonlight with Barbara--Miss Hare. I saw them as my carriage passed."

"And you were jealous that he should be there!" exclaimed Lord Mount Severn, with mocking reproach, as he detected her mood. "Listen!" he whispered, bending his head toward her. "While you may have thought, as your present tone would seem to intimate, that they were pacing there to enjoy each other's society, know that they--Carlyle, at any rate--was pacing the walk to keep guard. One was within that house--for a short half hour's interview with his poor mother--one who lives in danger of the scaffold, to which his own father would be the first to deliver him up. They were keeping the path against that father--Carlyle and the young lady. Of all the nights in the previous seven years, that one only saw the unhappy son at home for a half hour's meeting with his mother and sister. Carlyle, in the grief and excitement caused by your conduct, confided so much to me, when mentioning what kept him from the dinner party."

Her face had become crimson--crimson at her past lamentable folly. And there was no redemption!

"But he was always with Barbara Hare," she murmured, by way of some faint excuse.

"I have mentioned so. She had to see him upon this affair, her mother could not, for it was obliged to be kept from the father. And so, you construed business interviews into assignations!" continued Lord Mount Severn with cutting derision. "I had given you credit for better sense. But was /this/ enough to hurl you on the step you took? Surely not. You must have yielded in the persuasions of that wicked man."

"It is all over now," she wailed.

"Carlyle was true and faithful to you, and to you alone. Few women have the chance of happiness, in their married life, in the degree that you had. He is an upright and good man; one of nature's gentlemen; one that England may be proud of as having grown upon her soil. The more I see of him, the greater becomes my admiration of him, and of his thorough honor. Do you know what he did in the matter of the damages?"

She shook her head.