The Greatest Works of Anna Katharine Green. Анна Грин
young man followed her hastily.
“Is it good-by, Lucetta?” he pleaded, with a fine, manly ignoring of our presence that roused my admiration.
She did not answer. Her look was enough. William, seeing it, turned furious at once, and, bounding by me, faced the young man with an oath.
“You’re a fool to take no from a silly chit like that,” he vociferated. “If I loved a girl as you say you love Lucetta, I’d have her if I had to carry her away by force. She’d stop screaming before she was well out of the lane. I know women. While you listen to them they’ll talk and talk; but once let a man take matters into his own hands and—” A snap of his fingers finished the sentence. I thought the fellow brutal, but scarcely so stupid as I had heretofore considered him.
His words, however, might just as well have been uttered into empty air. The young man he so violently addressed appeared hardly to have heard him, and as for Lucetta, she was so nearly insensible from misery that she had sufficient ado to keep herself from falling at her lover’s feet.
“Lucetta, Lucetta, is it then good-by? You will not go with me?”
“I cannot. William, here, knows that I cannot. I must wait till——”
But here her brother seized her so violently by the wrist that she stopped from sheer pain, I fear. However that was, she turned pale as death under his clutch, and, when he tried to utter some hot, passionate words into her ear, shook her head, but did not speak, though her lover was gazing with a last, final appeal into her eyes. The delicate girl was bearing out my estimate of her.
Seeing her thus unresponsive, William flung her hand from him and turned upon me.
“It’s your fault,” he cried. “You would come in——”
But, at this, Lucetta, recovering her poise in a moment, cried out shrilly:
“For shame, William! What has Miss Butterworth to do with this? You are not helping me with your roughness. God knows I find this hour hard enough, without this show of anxiety on your part to be rid of me.”
“There’s woman’s gratitude for you,” was his snarling reply. “I offer to take all the responsibilities on my own shoulders and make it right with—with her sister, and all that, and she calls it desire to get rid of her. Well, have your own way,” he growled, storming down the hall; “I’m done with it for one.”
The young man, whose attitude of reserve, mixed with a strange and lingering tenderness for this girl, whom he evidently loved without fully understanding her, was every minute winning more and more of my admiration, had meanwhile raised her trembling hand to his lips in what was, as we all could see, a last farewell.
In another moment he was walking by us, giving me as he passed a low bow that for all its grace did not succeed in hiding from me the deep and heartfelt disappointment with which he quitted this house. As his figure passed through the door, hiding for one moment the sunshine, I felt an oppression such as has not often visited my healthy nature, and when it passed and disappeared, something like the good spirit of the place seemed to go with it, leaving in its place doubt, gloom, and a morbid apprehension of that unknown something which in Lucetta’s eyes had rendered his dismissal necessary.
“Where’s Saracen? I declare I’m nothing but a fool without that dog,” shouted William. “If he has to be tied up another day—” But shame was not entirely eliminated from his breast, for at Lucetta’s reproachful “William!” he sheepishly dropped his head and strode out, muttering some words I was fain to accept as an apology.
I had expected to encounter a wreck in Lucetta, as, this episode in her life closed, she turned toward me. But I did not yet know this girl, whose frailty seemed to lie mostly in her physique. Though she was suffering far more than her defence of me to her brother would seem to denote, there was a spirit in her approach and a steady look in her dark eye which assured me that I could not calculate upon any loss in Lucetta’s keenness, in case we came to an issue over the mystery that was eating into the happiness as well as the honor of this household.
“I am glad to see you,” were her unexpected words. “The gentleman who has just gone out was a lover of mine; at least he once professed to care for me very much, and I should have been glad to have married him, but there were reasons which I once thought most excellent why this seemed anything but expedient, and so I sent him away. To-day he came without warning to ask me to go away with him, after the hastiest of ceremonies, to South America, where a splendid prospect has suddenly opened for him. You see, don’t you, that I could not do that; that it would be the height of selfishness in me to leave Loreen—to leave William——”
“Who seems only too anxious to be left,” I put in, as her voice trailed off in the first evidence of embarrassment she had shown since she faced me.
“William is a difficult man to understand,” was her firm but quiet retort. “From his talk you would judge him to be morose, if not positively unkind, but in action—” She did not tell me how he was in action. Perhaps her truthfulness got the better of her, or perhaps she saw it would be hard work to prejudice me now in his favor.
Chapter XVI.
Loreen
Lucetta had said to her departing lover, that in a week she might be able (were he willing or in a position to wait) to give him a more satisfactory answer. Why in a week?
That her hesitation sprang from the mere dislike of leaving her sister so suddenly, or that she had sacrificed her life’s happiness to any childish idea of decorum, I did not think probable. The spirit she had shown, her immovable attitude under a temptation which had not only romance to recommend it, but everything else which could affect a young and sensitive woman, argued in my mind the existence of some uncompleted duty of so exacting and imperative a nature that she could not even consider the greatest interests of her own life until this one thing was out of her way. William’s rude question of the morning, “What shall we do with the old girl till it is all over?” recurred to me in support of this theory, making me feel that I needed no further confirmation, to be quite certain that a crisis was approaching in this house which would tax my powers to the utmost and call perhaps for the use of the whistle which I had received from Mr. Gryce, and which, following his instructions, I had tied carefully about my neck. Yet how could I associate Lucetta with crime, or dream of the police in connection with the serene Loreen, whose every look was a rebuke to all that was false, vile, or even common? Easily, my readers, easily, with that great, hulking William in my remembrance. To shield him, to hide perhaps his deformity of soul from the world, even such gentle and gracious women as these have been known to enter into acts which to an unprejudiced eye and an unbiased conscience would seem little short of fiendish. Love for an unworthy relative, or rather the sense of duty toward those of one’s own blood, has driven many a clear-minded woman to her ruin, as may be seen any day in the police annals.
I am quite aware that I have not as yet put into definite words the suspicion upon which I was now prepared to work. Up to this time it had been too vague, or rather of too monstrous a character for me not to consider other theories, such as, for instance, the possible connection of old Mother Jane with the unaccountable disappearances which had taken place in this lane. But after this scene, the increased assurance I was hourly receiving that something extraordinary and out of keeping with the customary appearances of the household was secretly going on in some one of the various chambers of that long corridor I had been prevented from entering, forced me to accept and act upon the belief that these young women held in charge a prisoner of some kind, of whose presence in the house they dreaded the discovery.
Now, who could this prisoner be?
Common sense supplied me with but one answer; Silly Rufus, the boy who within a few days had vanished from among the good people of this seemingly guileless community.
This theory once