"Bless my soul!" murmured Mr. Fogo, cowering more closely.
"This country teems with extraordinary people!"
He held his breath as the deeper voice answered--
"Had I thought--"
"Stop! I know what you would say, and it is untrue. Be frank as I am. You had half-guessed my secret, and were bound to convince yourself: and why? Shall I tell you, or will you copy my candour and speak for yourself?"
Dead silence followed this question. After some seconds the woman"s voice resumed--
"Ah! all men are cowards. Well, I will tell you. Your question implied yet another, and it was, Do I, hating my husband, love you?"
"Geraldine!"
"Do you still wish that question answered? I will do you that favour also: Listen: for the life of me--I don"t know."
And the speaker laughed--a laugh full of amused tolerance, as though her confession had left her a careless spectator of its results.
Mr. Fogo shuddered.
"In heaven"s name, Geraldine, don"t mock me!"
"But it is true. How _should_ I know? You have talked to me, read me your verses--and, indeed, I think them very beautiful. You have with comparative propriety, because in verse, invited me to fly with thee to a desolate isle in the Southern Sea--wherever that is--and forgetting my shame and likewise blame, while you do the same with name and fame and its laurel-leaf, go to moral grief on a coral reef--"
"Geraldine, you are torturing me."
"Do I not quote correctly? My point is this:--A woman will listen to talk, but she admires action. Prove that you are ready, not to fly to a coral reef, but to do me one small service, and you may have another answer."
"Name it."
Mr. Fogo, peering through the bushes as one fascinated, saw an extremely beautiful woman confronting an extremely pale youth, and fancied also that he saw a curious flash of contempt pa.s.s over the woman"s features as she answered--
"Really unless you kill the Admiral next time he makes a pun, I do not know that just now I need such a service. By to-morrow, though, or the next day, I may think of one. Until then"--she held out her hand--"wait patiently, and be kind to Sophia."
Mr. Moggridge started as though stung by a snake; but, recollecting himself, imprinted a kiss upon the proffered fingers. Again Mrs.
Goodwyn-Sandys laughed with unaffected mirth, and again the hidden witness saw that curious gleam of scorn--only now, as the young man bent his head, it was not dissembled.
They were gone. Mr. Fogo sank back against the bushes, drew a long breath, and pa.s.sed his hand nervously over his eyes; but though the scene had pa.s.sed as a dream, the laugh still rang in his ears.
"It is a judgment on me!" muttered the poor man--"a judgment!
They are all alike."
Curiously enough, his next reflection appeared to contradict this view of the s.e.x.
"An extraordinary woman! But every fresh person I meet in this place is more eccentric than the last. Let me see," he continued, checking off the list on his fingers; "there"s Caleb, and that astounding Admiral, and the Twins, and Tamsin--"
Mr. Fogo stared very hard at the water for some seconds.
"And Tamsin," he repeated slowly. "Hullo! my feet seem to be in the water--and, bless my soul! what has become of the boat?"
He might well ask. The tide had been steadily rising as he crouched under the banks, and was now lapping his boots. Worse than this, it had floated off the boat, which he had carelessly forgotten to secure, and drifted it up the river, at first under cover of the trees, afterwards more ostentatiously into mid-channel.
Mr. Fogo rushed up the patch of shingle until brought to a standstill by its sudden declension into deep water. There was no help for it.
Not a soul was in sight. He divested himself rapidly of his clothes, piled them in a neat little heap beyond reach of the tide, and then with considerable spirit plunged into the flood and struck out in pursuit of the truant.
CHAPTER XIV.
OF A LADY OF SENSIBILITY THAT, BEING AWKWARDLY PLACED, MIGHT EASILY HAVE SET MATTERS RIGHT, BUT DID NOT: WITH MUCH BESIDE.
It is hardly necessary by this time to inform my readers that Miss Priscilla Limpenny was a lady of sensibility. We have already seen her obey the impulse of the heart rather than the cool dictates of judgment: her admiration of natural beauty she has herself confessed more than once during the voyage up the river. But lest more than a due share of this admiration should be set down to patriotism, I wish to put it on record that she possessed to an uncommon degree an appreciative sense of the poetic side of Nature. She was familiar with the works of Mrs. Hemans and L. E. L., and had got by heart most of the effusions in "Affection"s Keepsake" and "Friendship"s Offering." Nay, she had been, in her early youth, suspected, more than vaguely, of contributing fugitive verse to a periodical known as the _Household Packet_. She had even, many years ago, met the Poet Wordsworth "at the dinner-table," as she expressed it, "of a common friend," and was never tired of relating how the great man had spoken of the prunes as "pruins," and said "Would you obleege me with the salt?"
With such qualifications for communion with nature it is not wonderful that, on this particular afternoon, Miss Limpenny should have wandered pensively along the river"s bank, and surrendered herself to its romantic charm. Possessed by the spirit of the place and hour, she even caught herself straying by the extreme brink, and repeating those touching lines from "Affection"s Keepsake":--
"The eye roams widely o"er glad Nature"s face, To mark each varied and delightful scene; The simple and magnificent we trace, While loveliness and brightness intervene; Oh! everywhere is something found to--"
At this point Miss Limpenny"s gaze lost its dreamy expansiveness, and grew rigid with horror. Immediately before her feet, and indelicately confronting her, lay a suit of man"s clothing.
It is a curious fact, though one we need not linger to discuss, that while clothes are the very symbol and first demand of decency, few things become so flagrantly immodest when viewed in themselves and apart from use. The crimson rushed to Miss Limpenny"s cheek.
She uttered a cry and looked around.
Inexorable fate, whose compulsion directed that gaze! If raiment apart from its wearer be unseemly, how much more--
About thirty yards from her, wading down the stream, and tugging the painter of his recovered boat, advanced Mr. Fogo.
To add a final touch of horror, that gentleman, finding that the damp on his spectacles completely dimmed his vision, had deposited them in the boat, and was therefore blind to the approaching catastrophe.
Unconscious even of observation, he advanced nearer and nearer.
Miss Limpenny"s emotion found vent in a squeal.
Mr. Fogo, heard, halted, and gazed blankly around.
"How singular!" he murmured. "I could have sworn I heard a cry."
He made another step. The sound was repeated, more shrilly.
"Again! And, dear me, it sounds human--as of some fellow-creature in distress."
"Go away! Go away at once!"
"Eh? Bless my soul, what can it be?" Mr. Fogo stared in the direction whence the voice proceeded, but of course without seeing anything.
"I beg your pardon?" he observed mildly.
"Go away!"