The man uttered the most horrid imprecations. 'You noisy slut,' he growled, shoving his face, hideous in its crape mask, into the coach, and speaking in a voice husky with liquor, 'will you stop your whining? Or must I blow you to pieces with my Toby? For you, you white-livered sneak,' he continued, addressing the tutor, 'give me any more of your piping and I'll cut out your tongue! Who is hurting you, I'd like to know! As for you, my fine lady, have a care of your skin, for if I pull you out into the road it will be the worse for you! D'ye hear me? he continued, with a volley of savage oaths. 'A little more of your music, and I'll have you out and strip the clothes off your back! You don't hang me for nothing. D--n you, we are three miles from anywhere, and I have a mind to gag you, whether or no! And I will too, if you so much as open your squeaker again!'
'Let me go,' she cried faintly. 'Let me go.'
'Oh, you will be let go fast enough--the other side of the water,' he answered, with a villainous laugh. 'I'm bail to that. In the meantime keep a still tongue, or it will be the worse for you! Once out of Bristol, and you may pipe as you like!'
The girl fell back in her corner with a low wail of despair. The man seeing the effect he had wrought, laughed his triumph, and in sheer brutality passed his light once or twice across her face. Then he closed the door with a crash and mounted; the carriage bounded forward again, and in a trice was travelling onward as rapidly as before.
Night had set in, and darkness, a darkness that could almost be felt, reigned in the interior of the chaise. Neither of the travellers could now see the other, though they sat within arm's length. The tutor, as soon as they were well started, and his nerves, shaken by the man's threats, permitted him to think of anything save his own safety, began to wonder that his companion, who had been so forward before, did not now speak; to look for her to speak, and to find the darkness and this silence, which left him to feed on his fears, strangely uncomfortable. He could almost believe that she was no longer there. At length, unable to bear it longer, he spoke.
'I suppose you know,' he said--he was growing vexed with the girl who had brought him into this peril--'who is at the bottom of this?'
She did not answer, or rather she answered only by a sudden burst of weeping; not the light, facile weeping of a woman crossed or over-fretted, or frightened; but the convulsive heart-rending sobbing of utter grief and abandonment.
The tutor heard, and was at first astonished, then alarmed. 'My dear, good girl, don't cry like that,' he said awkwardly. 'Don't! I--I don't understand it. You--you frighten me. You--you really should not. I only asked you if you knew whose work this was.'
'I know! I know only too well!' she cried passionately. 'God help me! God help all women!'
Mr. Thomasson wondered whether she referred to the future and her own fate. In that case, her complete surrender to despair seemed strange, seemed even inexplicable, in one who a few minutes before had shown a spirit above a woman's. Or did she know something that he did not know? Something that caused this sudden collapse. The thought increased his uneasiness; the coward dreads everything, and his nerves were shaken. 'Pish! pish!' he said pettishly. 'You should not give way like that! You should not, you must not give way!'
'And why not?' she cried, arresting her sobs. There was a ring of expectation in her voice, a hoping against hope. He fancied that she had lowered her hands and was peering at him.
'Because we--we may yet contrive something' he answered lamely. 'We--we may be rescued. Indeed--I am sure we shall be rescued,' he continued, fighting his fears as well as hers.
'And what if we are?' she cried with a passion that took him aback. 'What if we are? What better am I if we are rescued? Oh, I would have done anything for him! I would have died for him!' she continued wildly. 'And he has done this for me. I would have given him all, all freely, for no return if he would have it so; and this is his requital! This is the way he has gone to get it. Oh, vile! vile!'
Mr. Thomasson started. Metaphorically, he was no longer in the dark. She fancied that Sir George, Sir George whom she loved, was the contriver of this villainy. She thought that Sir George--Sir George, her cousin--was the abductor; that she was being carried off, not for her own sake, but as an obstacle to be removed from his path. The conception took the tutor's breath away; he was even staggered for the moment, it agreed as well with one part of the facts. And when an instant later his own certain information came to his aid and showed him its unreality, and he would have blurted out the truth--he hesitated. The words were on the tip of his tongue, the sentence was arranged, but he hesitated.
Why? Simply because he was Mr. Thomasson, and it was not in his nature to do the thing that lay before him until he had considered whether it might not profit him to do something else. In this case the bare statement that Mr. Dunborough, and not Sir George, was the author of the outrage, would go for little with her. If he proceeded to his reasons he might convince her; but he would also fix himself with a fore-knowledge of the danger--a fore-knowledge which he had not imparted to her, and which must sensibly detract from the merit of the service he had already and undoubtedly performed.
This was a risk; and there was a farther consideration. Why give Mr. Dunborough new ground for complaint by discovering him? True, at Bristol she would learn the truth. But if she did not reach Bristol? If they were overtaken midway? In that case the tutor saw possibilities, if he kept his mouth shut--possibilities of profit at Mr. Dunborough's hands.
In intervals between fits of alarm--when the carriage seemed to be about to halt--he turned these things over. He could hear the girl weeping in her corner, quietly, but in a heart-broken manner; and continually, while he thought and she wept, and an impenetrable curtain of darkness hid the one from the other, the chaise held on its course up-hill and down-hill, now bumping and rattling behind flying horses, and now rumbling and straining up Yatesbury Downs.
At last he broke the silence. 'What makes you think,' he said, 'that it is Sir George has done this?'
She did not answer or stop weeping for a while. Then, 'He was to meet me at sunset, at the Corner,' she said. 'Who else knew that I should be there? Tell me that.'
'But if he is at the bottom of this, where is he?' he hazarded. 'If he would play the villain with you--'
'He would play the thief,' she cried passionately, 'as he has played the hypocrite. Oh, it is vile! vile!'
'But--I don't understand,' Mr. Thomasson stammered; he was willing to hear all he could.
'His fortune, his lands, all he has in the world are mine!' she cried. 'Mine! And he goes this way to recover them! But I could forgive him that, ah, I could forgive him that, but I cannot forgive him--'
'What?' he said.
'His love!' she cried fiercely. 'That I will never forgive him! Never!'
He knew that she spoke, as she had wept, more freely for the darkness. He fancied that she was writhing on her seat, that she was tearing her handkerchief with her hands. 'But--it may not be he,' he said after a silence broken only by the rumble of wheels and the steady trampling of the horses.
'It is!' she cried. 'It is!'
'It may not--'
'I say it is!' she repeated in a kind of fury of rage, shame, and impatience. 'Do you think that I who loved him, I whom he fooled to the top of my pride, judge him too harshly? I tell you if an angel from heaven had witnessed against him I would have laughed the tale to scorn. But I have seen--I have seen with my own eyes. The man who came to the door and threatened us had lost a joint of the forefinger. Yesterday I saw that man with _him_; I saw the hand that held the pistol to-day give _him_ a note yesterday. I saw _him_ read the note, and I saw him point me out to the man who bore it--that he might know to-day whom he was to