I think I successfully assumed a tranquillity which I was far from really feeling.
“Come, come!” I said, “you mustn’t make Traveler jealous.”
She let me raise her.
Ah, if she could have kissed me—but that was not to be done; she kissed the dog’s head, and then she spoke to me.
I shall not set down what she said in these pages.
While I live, there is no fear of my forgetting those words.
I led her back to her chair.
The letter addressed to me by the Rector of Belhaven still lay on the table, unread.
It was of some importance to Stella’s complete enlightenment, as containing evidence that the confession was genuine.
But I hesitated, for her sake, to speak of it just yet.
“Now you know that you have a friend to help and advise you—” I began.
“No,” she interposed; “more than a friend; say a brother.”
I said it.
“You had something to ask of me,” I resumed, “and you never put the question.”
She understood me.
“I meant to tell you,” she said, “that I had written a letter of refusal to Mr. Romayne’s lawyers.
I have left Ten Acres, never to return; and I refuse to accept a farthing of Mr. Romayne’s money.
My mother—though she knows that we have enough to live on—tells me I have acted with inexcusable pride and folly.
I wanted to ask if you blame me, Bernard, as she does?”
I daresay I was inexcusably proud and foolish too.
It was the second time she had called me by my Christian name since the happy bygone time, never to come again.
Under whatever influence I acted, I respected and admired her for that refusal, and I owned it in so many words. This little encouragement seemed to relieve her.
She was so much calmer that I ventured to speak of the Rector’s letter.
She wouldn’t hear of it.
“Oh, Bernard, have I not learned to trust you yet?
Put away those papers.
There is only one thing I want to know.
Who gave them to you?
The Rector?”
“No.”
“How did they reach you, then?”
“Through Father Benwell.”
She started at that name like a woman electrified.
“I knew it!” she cried.
“It is the priest who has wrecked my married life—and he got his information from those letters, before he put them into your hands.”
She waited a while, and recovered herself.
“That was the first of the questions I wanted to put to you,” she said.
“I am answered.
I ask no more.”
She was surely wrong about Father Benwell?
I tried to show her why.
I told her that my reverend friend had put the letters into my hand, with the seal which protected them unbroken.
She laughed disdainfully.
Did I know him so little as to doubt for a moment that he could break a seal and replace it again?
This view was entirely new to me; I was startled, but not convinced.
I never desert my friends—even when they are friends of no very long standing—and I still tried to defend Father Benwell.
The only result was to make her alter her intention of asking me no more questions.
I innocently roused in her a new curiosity.
She was eager to know how I had first become acquainted with the priest, and how he had contrived to possess himself of papers which were intended for my reading only.
There was but one way of answering her.