“You were here when I fainted, were you not?” Mercy began. “You must think me a sad coward, even for a woman.”
He shook his head. “I am far from thinking that,” he replied. “No courage could have sustained the shock which fell on you. I don’t wonder that you fainted. I don’t wonder that you have been ill.”
She paused in rolling up the ball of wool. What did those words of unexpected sympathy mean? Was he laying a trap for her? Urged by that serious doubt, she questioned him more boldly.
“Horace tells me you have been abroad,” she said. “Did you enjoy your holiday?”
“It was no holiday. I went abroad because I thought it right to make certain inquiries —” He stopped there, unwilling to return to a subject that was painful to her.
Her voice sank, her fingers trembled round the ball of wool; but she managed to go on.
“Did you arrive at any results?” she asked.
“At no results worth mentioning.”
The caution of that reply renewed her worst suspicions of him. In sheer despair, she spoke out plainly.
“I want to know your opinion —” she began.
“Gently!” said Julian. “You are entangling the wool again.”
“I want to know your opinion of the person who so terribly frightened me. Do you think her —”
“Do I think her — what?”
“Do you think her an adventuress?”
(As she said those words the branches of a shrub in the conservatory were noiselessly parted by a hand in a black glove. The face of Grace Roseberry appeared dimly behind the leaves. Undiscovered, she had escaped from the billiard-room, and had stolen her way into the conservatory as the safer hiding-place of the two. Behind the shrub she could see as well as listen. Behind the shrub she waited as patiently as ever.)
“I take a more merciful view,” Julian answered. “I believe she is acting under a delusion. I don’t blame her: I pity her.”
“You pity her?” As Mercy repeated the words, she tore off Julian’s hands the last few lengths of wool left, and threw the imperfectly wound skein back into the basket. “Does that mean,” she resumed, abruptly, “that you believe her?”
Julian rose from his seat, and looked at Mercy in astonishment.
“Good heavens, Miss Roseberry! what put such an idea as that into your head?”
“I am little better than a stranger to you,” she rejoined, with an effort to assume a jesting tone. “You met that person before you met with me. It is not so very far from pitying her to believing her. How could I feel sure that you might not suspect me?”
“Suspect you!” he exclaimed. “You don’t know how you distress, how you shock me. Suspect you! The bare idea of it never entered my mind. The man doesn’t live who trusts you more implicitly, who believes in you more devotedly, than I do.”
His eyes, his voice, his manner, all told her that those words came from the heart. She contrasted his generous confidence in her (the confidence of which she was unworthy) with her ungracious distrust of him. Not only had she wronged Grace Roseberry — she had wronged Julian Gray. Could she deceive him as she had deceived the others? Could she meanly accept that implicit trust, that devoted belief? Never had she felt the base submissions which her own imposture condemned her to undergo with a loathing of them so overwhelming as the loathing that she felt now. In horror of herself, she turned her head aside in silence and shrank from meeting his eye. He noticed the movement, placing his own interpretation on it. Advancing closer, he asked anxiously if he had offended her.
“You don’t know how your confidence touches me,” she said, without looking up. “You little think how keenly I feel your kindness.”
She checked herself abruptly. Her fine tact warned her that she was speaking too warmly — that the expression of her gratitude might strike him as being strangely exaggerated. She handed him her work-basket before he could speak again.
“Will you put it away for me?” she asked, in her quieter tones. “I don’t feel able to work just now.”
His back was turned on her for a moment, while he placed the basket on a side-table. In that moment her mind advanced at a bound from present to future. Accident might one day put the true Grace in possession of the proofs that she needed, and might reveal the false Grace to him in the identity that was her own. What would he think of her then? Could she make him tell her without betraying herself? She determined to try.
“Children are notoriously insatiable if you once answer their questions, and women are nearly as bad,” she said, when Julian returned to her. “Will your patience hold out if I go back for the third time to the person whom we have been speaking of?”
“Try me,” he answered, with a smile.
“Suppose you had not taken your merciful view of her?”
“Yes?”
“Suppose you believed that she was wickedly bent on deceiving others for a purpose of her own — would you not shrink from such a woman in horror and disgust?”
“God forbid that I should shrink from any human creature!” he answered, earnestly. “Who among us has a right to do that?”
She hardly dared trust herself to believe him. “You would still pity her?” she persisted, “and still feel for her?”
“With all my heart.”
“Oh, how good you are!”
He held up his hand in warning. The tones of his voice deepened, the luster of his eyes brightened. She had stirred in the depths of that great heart the faith in which the man lived — the steady principle which guided his modest and noble life.
“No!” he cried. “Don’t say that! Say that I try to love my neighbor as myself. Who but a Pharisee can believe that he is better than another? The best among us to-day may, but for the mercy of God, be the worst among us tomorrow. The true Christian virtue is the virtue which never despairs of a fellow-creature. The true Christian faith believes in Man as well as in God. Frail and fallen as we are, we can rise on the wings of repentance from earth to heaven. Humanity is sacred. Humanity has its immortal destiny. Who shall dare say to man or woman, ‘There is no hope in you?’ Who shall dare say the work is all vile, when that work bears on it the stamp of the Creator’s hand?”
He turned away for a moment, struggling with the emotion which she had roused in him.
Her eyes, as they followed him, lighted with a momentary enthusiasm — then sank wearily in the vain regret which comes too late. Ah! if he could have been her friend and her adviser on the fatal day when she first turned her steps toward Mablethorpe House! She sighed bitterly as the hopeless aspiration wrung her heart. He heard the sigh; and, turning again, looked at her with a new interest in his face.
“Miss Roseberry,” he said.
She was still absorbed in the bitter memories of the past: she failed to hear him.
“Miss Roseberry,” he repeated, approaching her.
She looked up at him with a start.
“May I venture to ask you something?” he said, gently.
She shrank at the question.
“Don’t suppose I am speaking out of mere curiosity,” he went on. “And pray don’t answer me unless you can answer without betraying any confidence which may have been placed in you.”
“Confidence!” she repeated. “What confidence do you mean?”
“It has just struck me that you might have felt more than a common interest in the questions which you put to me a moment since,” he answered. “Were you by any chance speaking of some unhappy woman — not the person who frightened you, of course — but of some other woman whom you know?”
Her head sank slowly on her bosom. He had plainly no suspicion that she had been speaking of herself: his tone and manner both answered for it that his belief in her was as strong as ever. Still those last words made her tremble; she could not trust herself to reply to them.
He accepted the bending of her head as a reply.
“Are you interested in her?” he asked next.
She faintly answered this time. “Yes.”
“Have you encouraged her?”
“I have not dared to encourage her.”
His face lighted up suddenly with enthusiasm. “Go to her,” he said, “and let me go with you and help you!”
The answer came faintly and mournfully. “She has sunk too low for that!”
He interrupted her with a gesture of impatience.
“What has she done?” he asked.
“She has deceived — basely deceived — innocent peop............