The Hand of Ethelberta | Page 6

that we have
become to each other. I owe you an apology for having been betrayed
into more feeling than I had a right to show, and let us part friends.
Good night, Mrs. Petherwin, and success to you. We may meet again,
some day, I hope.'
'Good night,' she said, extending her hand. He touched it, turned about,
and in a short time nothing remained of him but quick regular
brushings against the heather in the deep broad shadow of the moor.
Ethelberta slowly moved on in the direction that he had pointed out.
This meeting had surprised her in several ways. First, there was the
conjuncture itself; but more than that was the fact that he had not parted
from her with any of the tragic resentment that she had from time to
time imagined for that scene if it ever occurred. Yet there was really
nothing wonderful in this: it is part of the generous nature of a bachelor
to be not indisposed to forgive a portionless sweetheart who, by
marrying elsewhere, has deprived him of the bliss of being obliged to
marry her himself. Ethelberta would have been disappointed quite had
there not been a comforting development of exasperation in the middle
part of his talk; but after all it formed a poor substitute for the loving
hatred she had expected.

When she reached the hotel the lamp over the door showed a face a
little flushed, but the agitation which at first had possessed her was
gone to a mere nothing. In the hall she met a slender woman wearing a
silk dress of that peculiar black which in sunlight proclaims itself to
have once seen better days as a brown, and days even better than those
as a lavender, green, or blue.
'Menlove,' said the lady, 'did you notice if any gentleman observed and
followed me when I left the hotel to go for a walk this evening?'
The lady's-maid, thus suddenly pulled up in a night forage after lovers,
put a hand to her forehead to show that there was no mistake about her
having begun to meditate on receiving orders to that effect, and said at
last, 'You once told me, ma'am, if you recollect, that when you were
dressed, I was not to go staring out of the window after you as if you
were a doll I had just manufactured and sent round for sale.'
'Yes, so I did.'
'So I didn't see if anybody followed you this evening.'
'Then did you hear any gentleman arrive here by the late train last
night?'
'O no, ma'am--how could I?' said Mrs. Menlove--an exclamation which
was more apposite than her mistress suspected, considering that the
speaker, after retiring from duty, had slipped down her dark skirt to
reveal a light, puffed, and festooned one, put on a hat and feather,
together with several pennyweights of metal in the form of rings,
brooches, and earrings--all in a time whilst one could count a
hundred--and enjoyed half-an-hour of prime courtship by an
honourable young waiter of the town, who had proved constant as the
magnet to the pole for the space of the day and a half that she had
known him.
Going at once upstairs, Ethelberta ran down the passage, and after some
hesitation softly opened the door of the sitting-room in the best suite of
apartments that the inn could boast of.

In this room sat an elderly lady writing by the light of two candles with
green shades. Well knowing, as it seemed, who the intruder was, she
continued her occupation, and her visitor advanced and stood beside the
table. The old lady wore her spectacles low down her cheek, her glance
being depressed to about the slope of her straight white nose in order to
look through them. Her mouth was pursed up to almost a youthful
shape as she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the
lip accompanied every downstroke. There were two large antique rings
on her forefinger, against which the quill rubbed in moving backwards
and forwards, thereby causing a secondary noise rivalling the primary
one of the nib upon the paper.
'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.'
A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea,
knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a full
stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone, not
rising to interrogation. After signing her name to the letter, she raised
her eyes.
'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said.
'I have been quite alarmed about you. What do you say has happened?'
The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was