“Not without some more consideration, dear.”
“I hate consideration. Do let me tell Walter; it will be such a pleasure to see the sunshine come over his face.”
“Poor dear boy, yes, but a minute’s sunshine may be bought too dear. We may be wrong. Are you not unconsciously adopting the story I suggested as possible—the idea of some religious motive having actuated Laura?”
“There would be a much simpler way of accounting for it all, if Laura were another kind of woman.”
“Some quarrel? Out of the question. Such a thing would be almost as possible between you and me.”
“No, don’t say that. Your temper is a better one—naturally, I mean, sir, than Arthur’s. He could be roused by a woman’s tongue.”
“So could Hawkesley, mind that, much as he has endured. But there has been no quarrel. It is impossible. If, indeed, Arthur had been another kind of man, and Laura could have imagined, or discovered anything to make her unhappy”
“Do you mean, if he had got into difficulties?”
“No, in that case would she have left his side?”
“I mean difficulties he had concealed from her.”
“When a man conceals such things from his wife it is her fault. She has not convinced him that she can bear his troubles with him. Arthur has not to learn what Laura would be in the hour of trouble. No, I meant—what it is almost wrong to suggest—even when we are trying all conjectures. I mean if she had reason to suppose that his heart had gone astray.”
“Charles, dearest, if that were so, those children would not be here. She would have fled away with them all.”
“Would you have done so?”
“Don’t raise such a thought, darling,” said Beatrice, clutching at her husband’s hand, and the next moment dropping it, and adding, saucily,
"Yes, of course, but not until I had given you laudanum, and set fire to your house, and paid a hundred men to go and hiss your next play, and written to the ‘Times’ to say that you were a wretch. Then, we are not to tell the boys.”
“Let us wait a day or two longer. Arthur may be returning, and then we shall know all. Meantime we have done our duty by the children.”
“Poor dears. Charles, by the way, I have something to say to you. I have been setting your study to rights.” “Humph.”
“Don’t be absurd—it was in a shocking condition, and I have put everything where I found it. But I want to know where you got a play, which is not your own, and which you have been pencilling and marking.”
“Why, what of that?”
“Where did you get it? tell me.”
“From Aventayle. He wanted me to see whether it would do for him.”
“Do you know whose writing it is?”
“I forget the name, but I have the letter that came with it.”
“The writing is that of our writing-master at Lipthwaite.”
“What!” said Hawkesley. “Are you sure?”
“Certain. If there is one handwriting in all the world that one would know, it is one’s writing master’s. Not that he was mine so much; he came when Mr. Frost went away, and I had been his pupil, but he taught the other girls.”
“His name?”
“I told you the other day—Adair, Ernest Adair.”
“Yes, that’s it,” said Hawkesley. “I recollect quite well. That is the name in the letter.”
“How odd that you should have to sit in judgment on him! But that is nothing. Have you read the play?”
“Yes, it will not do.”
“I should think it would not do,” said Mrs. Hawkesley indignantly. “Why, he has founded it upon Lipthwaite scandals, and I am perfectly certain that the character of Manacle is meant for himself.”
“Lipthwaite scandals! Do you know, Beatrice, that you are putting some very extraordinary notions into my head,” said the author, thoughtfully, and “trying back” upon the fable of the piece in question. “Have you left it on my table?”
“No, it is here,” said his wife, taking the MS. out of a work-table.
“That is called leaving things as we found them,” said Hawkesley, “but give it me.”
And he turned over leaf after leaf with rapidity, reading passages as he went on, and finally becoming so absorbed in the play that Beatrice addressed him in vain.
“Yes,” he said, gazing hard at her, as he concluded.
“Yes, what?” she replied. “I have asked you half a dozen times what you had discovered.”
“I beg your pardon, my dear. So this is founded, you think, on Lipthwaite scandals?”
“I suppose not altogether, but he has taken such things as his groundwork. The part of the plain, ambitious, scheming, sly girl who loves Manacle, and whom he pretends to like for the sake of obtaining the situation, I know very well who that was meant for.”
“There are worse things than that, in fact that is rather good comedy. But what do you say to the device by which Ellinor loses her character, although perfectly virtuous?”
“I overlooked that. But there is another part, that of Miriam, the daughter of the clergyman, who is deceived by the tutor, and becomes so vindictive. That he is a bad man for using, because the poor old man’s heart was broken by the disgrace—it really occurred, and very nearly in the way Adair must have been told it, in confidence, for no one would have willingly talked about it.”
“But her vindictiveness is nothing to that of the plain woman, what’s her name? Sophia, who is so in love with Manacle.”
“That was Marion Wagstaffe, I am certain. They said that she was desperately in love with Mr. Adair, but that after he had amused himself