Part 61 (2/2)
”Your mind does not, as a rule, work so slowly!” he said with some asperity; but she paid no heed to his tone.
”Amherst, for instance--how long has he known of this?” she continued.
”A week or two only--she made that clear.”
”And what is his att.i.tude?”
”Ah--that, I conjecture, is just what she means to keep us from knowing!”
”You mean she's afraid----?”
Mr. Langhope gathered his haggard brows in a frown. ”She's afraid, of course--mortally--I never saw a woman more afraid. I only wonder she had the courage to face me.”
”Ah--that's it! Why _did_ she face you? To extenuate her act--to give you her version, because she feared his might be worse? Do you gather that that was her motive?”
It was Mr. Langhope's turn to hesitate. He furrowed the thick Turkey rug with the point of his ebony stick, pausing once or twice to revolve it gimlet-like in a gap of the pile.
”Not her avowed motive, naturally.”
”Well--at least, then, let me have that.”
”Her avowed motive? Oh, she'd prepared one, of course--trust her to have a dozen ready! The one she produced was--simply the desire to protect her husband.”
”Her husband? Does _he_ too need protection?”
”My G.o.d, if he takes her side----! At any rate, her fear seemed to be that what she had done might ruin him; might cause him to feel--as well he may!--that the mere fact of being her husband makes his situation as Cicely's step-father, as my son-in-law, intolerable. And she came to clear him, as it were--to find out, in short, on what terms I should be willing to continue my present relations with him as though this hideous thing had not been known to me.”
Mrs. Ansell raised her head quickly. ”Well--and what were your terms?”
He hesitated. ”She spared me the pain of proposing any--I had only to accept hers.”
”Hers?”
”That she should disappear altogether from my sight--and from the child's, naturally. Good heaven, I should like to include Amherst in that! But I'm tied hand and foot, as you see, by Cicely's interests; and I'm bound to say she exonerated him completely--completely!”
Mrs. Ansell was again silent, but a swift flight of thoughts traversed her drooping face. ”But if you are to remain on the old terms with her husband, how is she to disappear out of your life without also disappearing out of his?”
Mr. Langhope gave a slight laugh. ”I leave her to work out that problem.”
”And you think Amherst will consent to such conditions?”
”He's not to know of them.”
The unexpectedness of the reply reduced Mrs. Ansell to a sound of inarticulate interrogation; and Mr. Langhope continued: ”Not at first, that is. She had thought it all out--foreseen everything; and she wrung from me--I don't yet know how!--a promise that when I saw him I would make it appear that I cleared him completely, not only of any possible complicity, or whatever you choose to call it, but of any sort of connection with the matter in my thoughts of him. I am, in short, to let him feel that he and I are to continue on the old footing--and I agreed, on the condition of her effacing herself somehow--of course on some other pretext.”
”Some other pretext? But what conceivable pretext? My poor friend, he adores her!”
Mr. Langhope raised his eyebrows slightly. ”We haven't seen him since this became known to him. _She_ has; and she let slip that he was horror-struck.”
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