"What do you mean?" she said, in a voice that was hard yet trembled.
She felt like one that sees the vultures gathering above him, and lifts a moveable finger in defence. Then with sudden haughtiness both of gesture and word:
"You have been acting the spy, sir!"
"No," returned the curate quietly. "The sheath was committed to my care by one whom certain facts that had come to his knowledge—certain words he had overheard—"
He paused. She shook visibly, but still would hold what ground might yet be left her.
"Why did you not give it me before?" she asked.
"In the public street, or in your aunt's presence?"
"You are cruel!" she panted. Her strength was going. "What do you know?"
"Nothing so well as that I want to serve you, and you may trust me."
"What do you mean to do?"
"My best to help you and your brother."
"But to what end?"
"To any end that is right."
"But how? What would you tell him to do?"
"You must help me to discover what he ought to do."
"Not—" she cried, clasping her hands and dropping on her knees before him, "—you WILL not tell him to give himself up? Promise me you will not, and I will tell you everything. He shall do anything you please but that! Anything but that!"
Wingfold's heart was sore at sight of her agony. He would have raised her with soothing words of sympathy and assurance, but still she cried, "Promise me you will not make him give himself up."
"I dare not promise anything." he said. "I MUST do what I may see to be right. Believe me, I have no wish to force myself into your confidence, but you have let me see that you are in great trouble and in need of help, and I should be unfaithful to my calling if I did not do my best to make you trust me."
A pause followed. Helen rose despairingly, and they resumed their walk. Just as they reached the door in the fence which would let them out upon the meadow in sight of the Manor-house, she turned to him and said,
"I will trust you, Mr. Wingfold. I mean, I will take you to my brother, and he shall do as he thinks proper."
They passed out and walked across the meadow in silence. In the passage under the fence, as she turned from closing the door behind them, she stood and pressed her hand to her side.
"Oh! Mr. Wingfold," she cried, "my heart will break! He has no one but me! No one but me to be mother and sister and all to him! He is NOT wicked—my poor darling!"
She caught the curate by the arm with a grasp which left its mark behind it, and gazed appealingly into his face: in the dim tomb-like light, her wide-strained eyes, white agonized countenance, and trembling roseless lips made her look like one called back from death "to speak of horrors."
"Save him from madness," she said, in forced and unnatural utterance. "Save him from the remorse gnawing at his heart. But do not, DO not counsel him to give himself up."
"Would it not be better you should tell me about it," said the curate, "and save him the pain and excitement?"
"I will do so, if he wishes it, not otherwise. Come; we must not stay longer. He can hardly bear me out of his sight. I will leave you for one moment in the library, and then come to you. If you should see my aunt, not a word of all this, please. All she knows is that he has had brain-fever, and is recovering only very slowly. I have never given her even a hint of anything worse. Indeed, honestly, Mr. Wingfold, I am not at all certain he did do what he will tell you. But there is his misery all the same. Do have pity on us, and don't be hard upon the poor boy. He is but a boy—only twenty."
"May God be to me as I am to him!" said Wingfold solemnly.
Helen withdrew her entreating eyes, and let go his arm. They went up into the garden and into the house.
Afterwards, Wingfold was astonished at his own calmness and decision in taking upon him—almost, as it were, dragging to him—this relation with Helen and her brother. But he had felt that not to do so would be to abandon Helen to her grief, and that for her sake he must not hesitate to encounter whatever might have to be encountered in doing so.
Helen left him in the library, as she had said, and there he waited her return in a kind of stupor, unable to think, and feeling as if he were lost in a strange and anxious dream.
CHAPTER XXIV.
WILLING CONFIDENCE.
"Come," said Helen, re-entering, and the curate rose and followed her.
The moment he turned the corner of the bed and saw the face on the pillow, he knew in his soul that Helen was right, and that that was no wicked youth who lay before him—one, however, who might well have been passion-driven. There was the dark complexion and the great soft yet wild eyes that came of tropical blood. Had not Helen so plainly spoken of her brother, however, he would have thought he saw before him a woman. The worn, troubled, appealing light that overflowed rather than shone from his eyes, went straight to the curate's heart.
Wingfold had had a brother, the only being in the world he had ever loved tenderly; he had died young, and a thin film of ice had since gathered over the well of his affections; but now suddenly this ice broke and vanished, and his heart yearned over the suffering youth. He had himself been crying to God, not seldom in sore trouble, and now, ere, as it seemed, he had himself been heard, here was a sad brother crying to him for help. Nor was this all; the reading of the gospel story had roused in his heart a strange yet most natural longing after the face of that man of whom he read such lovely things, and thence, unknown to himself, had come a reverence and a love for his kind, which now first sprang awake to his consciousness in the feeling that drew him towards Leopold.
Softly he approached the bed, his face full of tenderness and strong pity. The lad, weak with protracted illness and mental torture, gave one look in his face, and stretched out both his arms to him. How could the curate give him but a hand? He put his arms round him as if he had been a child.
"I knew you would come," sobbed Lingard.
"What else should I do but come?" returned Wingfold.
"I have seen you somewhere before," said Lingard—"in one of my dreams, I suppose."
Then, sinking his voice to a whisper, he added:
"Do you know you came in close behind HER? She looked round and saw you, and vanished!"
Wingfold did not even try to guess at his meaning.
"Hush, my dear fellow!" he said; "I must not let you talk wildly, or the doctor might forbid my seeing you."
"I am not talking a bit wildly," returned Leopold. "I am as quiet as a mountain-top. Ah! when I AM wild—if you saw me then, you might say so!"
Wingfold sat down on the side of the bed, and took the thin, hot hand next him in his own firm, cool one.
"Come now," he said, "tell me all about it. Or shall your sister tell me?—Come here, please, Miss Lingard."
"No, no!" cried Leopold hastily; "I will tell you myself. My poor sister could not bear to tell it you. It would kill her.—But how am I to know you will not get up and walk out the moment you have a glimpse of what is coming?"
"I would as soon leave a child burning in the fire, and go out and shut the door," said Wingfold.
"You can go now, Helen," said Lingard very quietly.