'Awful, awful, too awful,' murmured Laura, with intense gravity, still looking at herlooking all the more fixedly that she knew how little Selina liked it.
'My dear, you do indulge in a style of innuendo, for a respectable young woman!' Mrs. Berrington exclaimed, with an angry laugh. 'You have ideas that when I was a girl' She paused, and her sister saw that she had not the assurance to finish her sentence on that particular note.
'Don't talk about my innuendoes and my ideasyou might remember those in which I have heard you indulge! Ideas? what ideas did I ever have before I came here?' Laura Wing asked, with a trembling voice. 'Don't pretend to be shocked, Selina; that's too cheap a defence. You have said things to meif you choose to talk of freedom! What is the talk of your house and what does one hear if one lives with you? I don't care what I hear now (it's all odious and there's little choice and my sweet sensibility has gone God knows where!) and I'm very glad if you understand that I don't care what I say. If one talks about your affairs, my dear, one mustn't be too particular!' the girl continued, with a flash of passion.
Mrs. Berrington buried her face in her hands. 'Merciful powers, to be insulted, to be covered with outrage, by one's wretched little sister!' she moaned.
'I think you should be thankful there is one human beinghowever wretchedwho cares enough for you to care about the truth in what concerns you,' Laura said. 'Selina, Selinaare you hideously deceiving us?'
'Us?' Selina repeated, with a singular laugh. 'Whom do you mean by us?'
Laura Wing hesitated; she had asked herself whether it would be best she should let her sister know the dreadful scene she had had with Lionel; but she had not, in her mind, settled that point. However, it was settled now in an instant. 'I don't mean your friendsthose of them that I have seen. I don't think they care a strawI have never seen such people. But last week Lionel spoke to mehe told me he knew it, as a certainty.'
'Lionel spoke to you?' said Mrs. Berrington, holding up her head with a stare. 'And what is it that he knows?'
'That Captain Crispin was in Paris and that you were with him. He believes you went there to meet him.'
'He said this to you?'
'Yes, and much moreI don't know why I should make a secret of it.'
'The disgusting beast!' Selina exclaimed slowly, solemnly. 'He enjoys the rightthe legal rightto pour forth his vileness upon me; but when he is so lost to every feeling as to begin to talk to you in such a way!' And Mrs. Berrington paused, in the extremity of her reprobation.
'Oh, it was not his talk that shocked meit was his believing it,' the girl replied. 'That, I confess, made an impression on me.'
'Did it indeed? I'm infinitely obliged to you! You are a tender, loving little sister.'
'Yes, I am, if it's tender to have cried about youall these daystill I'm blind and sick!' Laura replied. 'I hope you are prepared to meet him. His mind is quite made up to apply for a divorce.'
Laura's voice almost failed her as she said thisit was the first time that in talking with Selina she had uttered that horrible word. She had heard it however, often enough on the lips of others; it had been bandied lightly enough in her presence under those somewhat austere ceilings of Mellows, of which the admired decorations and mouldings, in the taste of the middle of the last century, all in delicate plaster and reminding her of Wedgewood pottery, consisted of slim festoons, urns and trophies and knotted ribbons, so many symbols of domestic affection and irrevocable union. Selina herself had flashed it at her with light superiority, as if it were some precious jewel kept in reserve, which she could convert at any moment into specie, so that it would constitute a happy provision for her future. The ideaassociated with her own point of viewwas apparently too familiar to Mrs. Berrington to be the cause of her changing colour; it struck her indeed, as presented by Laura, in a ludicrous light, for her pretty eyes expanded a moment and she smiled pityingly. 'Well, you are a poor dear innocent, after all. Lionel would be about as able to divorce meeven if I were the most abandoned of my sexas he would be to write a leader in the Times.'
'I know nothing about that,' said Laura.
'So I perceiveas I also perceive that you must have shut your eyes very tight. Should you like to know a few of the reasonsheaven forbid I should attempt to go over them all; there are millions!why his hands are tied?'
'Not in the least.'
'Should you like to know that his own life is too base for words and that his impudence in talking about me would be sickening if it weren't grotesque?' Selina went on, with increasing emotion. 'Should you like me to tell you to what he has stoopedto the very gutterand the charming history of his relations with'
'No, I don't want you to tell me anything of the sort,' Laura interrupted. 'Especially as you were just now so pained by the license of my own allusions.'
'You listen to him thenbut it suits your purpose not to listen to me!'
'Oh, Selina, Selina!' the girl almost shrieked, turning away.
'Where have your eyes been, or your senses, or your powers of observation? You can be clever enough when it suits you!' Mrs. Berrington continued, throwing off another ripple of derision. 'And now perhaps, as the carriage is waiting, you will let me go about my duties.'
Laura turned again and stopped her, holding her arm as she passed toward the door. 'Will you swearwill you swear by everything that is most sacred?'
'Will I swear what?' And now she thought Selina visibly blanched.
'That you didn't lay eyes on Captain Crispin in Paris.'
Mrs. Berrington hesitated, but only for an instant. 'You are really too odious, but as you are pinching me to death I will swear, to get away from you. I never laid eyes on him.'
The organs of vision which Mrs. Berrington was ready solemnly to declare that she had not misapplied were, as her sister looked into them, an abyss of indefinite prettiness. The girl had sounded them before without discovering a conscience at the bottom of them, and they had never helped any one to find out anything about their possessor except that she was one of the beauties of London. Even while Selina spoke Laura had a cold, horrible sense of not believing her, and at the same time a desire, colder still, to extract a reiteration of the pledge. Was it the asseveration of her innocence that she wished her to repeat, or only the attestation of her falsity? One way or the other it seemed to her that this would settle something, and she went on inexorably'By our dear mother's memoryby our poor father's?'
'By my mother's, by my father's,' said Mrs. Berrington, 'and by that of any other member of the family you like!' Laura let her go; she had not been pinching her, as Selina described the pressure, but had clung to her with insistent hands. As she opened the door Selina said, in a changed voice: 'I suppose it's no use to ask you if you care to drive to Plash.'
'No, thank you, I don't careI shall take a walk.'
'I suppose, from that, that your friend Lady Davenant has gone.'
'No, I think she is still there.'
'That's a bore!' Selina exclaimed, as she went off.
VI
Laura Wing hastened to her room to prepare herself for her walk; but when she reached it she simply fell on her knees, shuddering, beside her bed. She buried her face in the soft counterpane of wadded silk; she remained there a long time, with a kind of aversion to lifting it again to the day. It burned with horror and there was coolness in the smooth glaze of the silk. It seemed to her that she had been concerned in a hideous transaction, and her uppermost feeling was, strangely enough, that she was ashamednot of her sister but of herself. She did not believe herthat was at the bottom of everything, and she had made her lie, she had brought out her perjury, she had associated it with the sacred images of the dead. She took no walk, she remained in her room, and quite late, towards six o'clock, she heard on the gravel, outside of her windows, the wheels of the carriage bringing back Mrs. Berrington. She had evidently been elsewhere as well as to Plash; no doubt she had been to the vicarageshe was capable even of that. She could pay 'duty-visits,' like that (she called at the vicarage about three times a year), and she could go and be nice to her mother-in-law with her fresh lips still fresher for the lie she had just told. For it was as definite as an aching nerve to Laura that she did not believe her, and if she did not believe her the words she had spoken were a lie. It was the lie, the lie to her and which she had dragged out of her that seemed to the girl the ugliest thing. If she had admitted her folly, if she had explained, attenuated, sophisticated, there would have been a difference in her favour; but now she was bad because she was hard. She had a surface of polished metal. And she could make plans and calculate, she could act and do things for a particular effect. She could go straight to old Mrs. Berrington and to the parson's wife and his many daughters (just as she had kept the children after luncheon, on purpose, so long) because that looked innocent and domestic and denoted a mind without a feather's weight upon it.