Tell me, said Vincent, with an earnestness he was himself surprised at, who was that man?
His companion started as if she had received a blow, turned round upon him with a glance in her dark eyes such as he had never seen there before, and in a sudden momentary passion drew her breath hard, and stopped short on the way. But the spark of intense and passionate emotion was as shortlived as it was vivid. I do not suppose he is anything to interest you, she answered the next moment, with a movement of her thin mouth, letting the hands that she had clasped together drop to her side. Nay, make yourself quite easy; he is not a lover of my ladys. He is only a near relation: and, she continued, lingering on the words with a force of subdued scorn and rage, which Vincent dimly apprehended, but could not understand, a very fascinating fine gentleman a man who can twist a woman round his fingers when he likes, and break all her heartstrings if she has any so daintily afterwards, that it would be a pleasure to see him do it. Ah, a wonderful man!
You know him then? I saw you knew him, said the young man, surprised and disturbed, thrusting the first commonplace words he could think of into the silence, which seemed to tingle with the restrained meaning of this brief speech.
I dont think we are lucky in choosing our subjects to-night, said the strange woman. How about the ladies in Lonsdale, Mr. Vincent? They dont keep a school? I am glad they dont keep a school. Teaching, you know, unless when one has a vocation for it, as you had a few weeks ago, is uphill work. I am sorry to see you are not so sure about your work as you were then. Your sister is pretty, I suppose? and does your mother take great care of her and keep her out of harms way? Lambs have a silly faculty of running directly in the wolfs road. Why dont you take a holiday and go to see them, or have them here to live with you?
You know something about them, said Vincent, alarmed. What has happened? tell me. It will be the greatest kindness to say it out at once.
Hush, said Mrs. Hilyard; now you are absurd. I speak out of my own thoughts, as most persons do, and you, like all young people, make personal applications. How can I possibly know about them? I am not a fanciful woman, but there are some things that wake ones imagination. In such a dark night as this, with such wet gleams about the streets, when I think of people at a distance, I always think of something uncomfortable happening. Misfortune seems to lie in wait about those black corners. I think of women wandering along dismal solitary roads with babies in their shameful arms and of dreadful messengers of evil approaching unconscious houses, and looking in at peaceful windows upon the comfort they are about to destroy; and I think, she continued, crossing the road so rapidly (they were now opposite Lady Westerns house) that Vincent, who had not anticipated the movement, had to quicken his pace suddenly to keep up with her, of evil creatures pondering in the dark vile schemes against the innocent Here she broke off all at once, and, looking up in Vincents face with that gleam of secret mockery in her eyes and movement of her mouth to which he was accustomed, added, suddenly changing her tone, Or of fine gentlemen, Mr. Vincent, profoundly bored with their own society, promenading in a dreary garden and smoking a disconsolate cigar. Look there!
The young minister, much startled and rather nervous, mechanically looked, as she bade him, through the little grated loophole in Lady Westerns garden-door. He saw the lights shining in the windows, and a red spark moving about before the house, as, with a little shame for his undignified position, he withdrew his eyes from that point of vantage. But Mrs. Hilyard was moved by no such sentiment. She planted herself opposite the door, and, bending her head to the little grating, gazed long and steadfastly. In the deep silence of the night, standing with some uneasiness at her side, and not insensible to the fact that his position, if he were seen by anybody who knew him, would be rather absurd and slightly equivocal, Vincent heard the footsteps of the man inside, the fragrance of whose cigar faintly penetrated the damp air. The stranger was evidently walking up and down before the house in enjoyment of that luxury which the feminine arrangements of the young Dowagers
household would not permit indoors; but the steady eagerness with which this strange woman gazed the way in which she had managed to interweave Mrs. Vincent and pretty Susan at Lonsdale into the conversation the suggestions of coming danger and evil with which her words had invested the very night, all heightened by the instinctive repugnance and alarm of which the young man had himself been conscious whenever he met the eye of Lady Westerns companion filled him with discomfort and dread. His mind, which had been lately too much occupied in his own concerns to think much of Susan, reverted now with sudden uneasiness to his mothers cottage, from which Susans betrothed had lately departed to arrange matters for their speedy marriage. But how Lady Westerns near relation this man whom Mrs. Hilyard watched with an intense regard which looked like hatred, but might be dead love could be connected with Lonsdale, or Susan, or himself, or the poor needlewoman in Back Grove Street, Vincent could not form the remotest idea. He stood growing more and more impatient by that dark closed door, which had once looked a gate of paradise which, he felt in his heart, half-a-dozen words or a single smile could any day make again a gate of the paradise of fools to his bewildered feet the steps of the unseen stranger within, and the quick breath of agitation from the watcher by his side, being the only sounds audible in the silence of the night. At last some restless movement he made disturbed Mrs. Hilyard in her watch. She left the door noiselessly and rapidly, and turned to recross the wet road. Vincent accompanied her without saying a word. The two walked along together half the length of Grange Lane without breaking silence, without even looking at each other, till they came to the large placid white lamp at Dr. Marjoribankss gate, which cleared a little oasis of light out of the heart of the gloom. There she looked up at him with a face full of agitated life and motion kindled eyes, elevated head, nostril and lips swelling with feelings which were totally undecipherable to Vincent; her whole aspect changed by an indescribable inspiration which awoke remnants of what might have been beauty in that thin, dark, middle-aged face.