CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WORLD.

It was no surprise to Sylvester Riddell, when, as he sat alone on that same morning, in the room appropriated to himself and his home belongings, Lucian Leigh burst in upon him, white-faced and fierce, and broke out with no previous greeting.

"Sylvester! You were with my mother yesterday. What does it all mean? What is this extraordinary delusion?"

All through the long hours of the sleepless night, Sylvester had turned over and over in his mind what answer he should give to this inevitable question. He knew what no one else knew, enough to make him certain that there was some coil around the girl, who, three months before, had seemed the embodiment of fresh, frank youth, enough to make him doubtful how far the coil was of her own twisting. He was Lucian's friend, he feared for his future, and yet, if Mrs Leigh's eyes had not seen as well as his, he felt that he would have forsworn the witness of his own eyes and ears, sooner than betray his suspicions.

"What--what has taken place?" he said, lamely.

Lucian was in great agony of mind. Every moment that had passed since he left Amethyst had added to the tumult within him; but he stood up straight, and spoke clearly and to the point.

"You were with my mother; I need not repeat her story. Amethyst denies it utterly. She was never there with him. But she says she took a walk with him in the shrubbery, and that you met them.--Well, I saw you with them!"

"Well!" said Sylvester, in a tone of noncommittal.

"She gave him a packet. There was some mystery between them?"

Sylvester was silent, and Lucian hurried on--"Lady Haredale brought up one of the little girls to say that it was some childish present. She-- Amethyst--did not confirm it, but--Oh, I cannot discuss it, or her--" stamping his foot impatiently. "But she won't speak out. It is maddening, Sylvester?"

Poor Lucian appealed for he knew not what--contradiction, advice, sympathy; and yet all the time he was fully conscious how unfit it was that he should make any appeal at all on such a matter.

"Lucian," cried Sylvester, starting up, and driving his hands into his pockets as he walked about the room, "she has got involved in some ugly coil. Take her, and ask her if it should come between you. Abide by her answer. She loves you--I know she loves you; no one could see her with you, and doubt it. Take her out of the snares. Before Heaven, I would!"

"Yes," said Lucian, after a moment's silence, "I know she loves me. But, sometimes, even then.--And oh, my God, if she did not tell me the truth! They were all lying."

He sat down on the window-seat, and stared out at the trees in the rectory garden,--delicate acacias, with their fine green leaves dancing against the blue sky. He watched them, and noticed their soft fluttering motion, without really heeding them at all. Sylvester looked at his young fair face with its set lips and contracted brows, and saw how the hand on his knee trembled.

"My mother didn't make a mistake?" he said, presently.

"No," said Sylvester.

"Lady Haredale tried to make me think it was one of the children!"

"Look here, Lucy," said Sylvester suddenly, and using Lucian's old school nickname, "the truth is your due; and, if you know the truth, you can give Miss Haredale a better chance of explaining herself. Two or three days ago I saw her post a letter to Major Fowler. It was in her writing--she dropped it, and I picked it up; she blushed, and was embarrassed. When I came upon them at Loseby in the shrubbery they were talking earnestly, and she did give him a packet. He went away and left her there, and she turned and saw me. Una came up to us in a minute, she did not tell her that she had been with Fowler."

"That disposes of the `children's present'," interpolated Lucian bitterly.

"After that," continued Sylvester, "as I sat with your mother in the conservatory, Miss Haredale came through it. She was alone, and looked hurried. Mrs Leigh got up to join her; we looked through into the ante-room, and saw--a parting embrace. Afterwards we met her walking with Fowler and Miss Verrequers. She was not the least embarrassed then. There's something not explained--some secret. And even if some childish indiscretion, some folly permitted by her mother, customary perhaps among them, has--has hampered her, Lucian, I believe on my soul she is a pure and noble creature, and she loves you--as--as no man on earth can deserve to be loved."

Sylvester splice with passionate earnestness, heedless of the chance of self-betrayal; but Lucian never thought of him at all.

"It is either true, or false--and so is she," he said, with white lips.

"Suppose we go and talk it over with your mother," said Sylvester, after a pause, in a lame and commonplace fashion.

"I must go back, and settle it," said Lucian, taking up his hat.

They walked away through the sunny fields together, each as miserable as he well could be, Sylvester, tormented with pity and indignant pain, feeling that the innate, inherent beauty of Amethyst's soul was written in her face. She was worth trusting. And then there swept over him the thought of her mother and her elder sister, and the sad conviction that _all_ the possibilities of her most lovely face were not noble ones. "Yet I would trust her, I would risk it all," Sylvester thought, with a pang that was like an inward sob, as he knew not whether he were weaker or wiser than the poor young fellow beside him, on whom the problem turned another face, and who could only feel that love however passionate, beauty however exquisite, must not be weighed in the balance with honour and truth.

As they came up the garden at Ashfield, Mrs Leigh was standing on the terrace with a note in her hand, while two broad hats and striped frocks were disappearing down the footpath in the direction of Cleverley Hall. As Mrs Leigh saw the two young men coming, she retreated into the drawing-room, beckoning to them to follow her. She looked very pale and grave as she spoke to Sylvester.

"You have come to our help in this miserable business," she said. "I don't know what light, if any, is thrown on it by this extraordinary note."

The note was written in an ill-formed, girlish hand, with spelling not above suspicion.

"Dear Mrs Leigh," it ran, "There's no reason for Amethyst to be in a scrape. Dear old Tony has made pets of us always, and he kissed _me_ in the anti-room just for a spree. He'd _never_ kiss HER, I'm certain, so don't trouble yourself about it.

"Sincerely yours,--

"Una Haredale."

"Una!" cried Sylvester, as by Mrs Leigh's desire he read this extraordinary production, over Lucian's shoulder. "Is that possible? can we have been mistaken?"

"I am certain of my own eyesight," said Mrs Leigh. "This is a pretence. Lady Haredale is capable of anything; I have no dependence on a word they say."

And Lucian thought of the story of the purse, of the "Make up some story to tell him," that he had overheard--of what seemed to him the impossibility of mistaking Una for Amethyst--and was silent.

"Don't you see?" said Sylvester hurriedly, "if this is so, all the rest goes for nothing--is easily explained by some one else's secret."

"You must know whether it was Una that you saw," said Lucian, sullenly.

"Certainly it was not," said Mrs Leigh. "Sylvester, you cannot think so."

"You might ask her face to face," he said.

"I cannot believe any of them!" said Mrs Leigh, with agitation. "If they confuse the evidence, till proof is impossible, I shall never feel confidence again. Lucian, my dear, dear boy, it is a heartbreaking business, but oh, don't you see that it is better to be warned in time?"

"Hush, mother!" said Lucian, "not till we know. But--but I know that in justice to myself--to all of us, the truth must be made clear. But," he added again, "I was violent, and frightened her. Give me that note; I can have no one doubt that she will tell me the truth about it I shall go to her again."

He looked very resolute and very wretched, and Sylvester felt that Amethyst's chance was small.

"I shall go alone," said Lucian, "it is my own affair, and, mother, you must trust me to judge rightly."

In the meantime Amethyst had not long remained crying in Una's arms. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within her. She would not go down in the whirlpool without a struggle. She got up and went resolutely to her mother, whom she found in her dressing-room, reading a note just received by the second post from Lord Haredale.

The mother was not very sensitive, but she could hardly fail to feel the change from the loving deference, the admiring tenderness of her daughters manner, to the cold, sad, and half-contemptuous look with which Amethyst now faced her.

"Mother," she said, "will you let me tell Lucian that I had to communicate a family secret to Major Fowler? There is no use in pretending that there is no mystery; but I do not wish the children to tell falsehoods on my account."

"Ah, my dear child," said Lady Haredale, "innocent things like you are very hard. What is a little fib, compared to all the misery that would follow on telling the truth? I am sure I had rather tell a thousand fibs than make my darling child unhappy."

"Unfortunately, people who are accustomed to telling the truth, don't believe them," said Amethyst bitterly. "I _cannot_ tell Lucian a falsehood," she added with more emotion, "nor try to make him believe what is not true, but I can keep your secret from him if I must."

Lady Haredale hesitated for a moment, and looked at the letter in her hand. Judging by herself, she did not believe for one moment, that the girl would or could be true to her in the face of Lucian's anger, and she was, in fact, in a very great difficulty.

"Amethyst," she said, suddenly rising from her seat, and putting on a grand manner, which was new to her daughter, "Lucian has behaved very ill; you are too ignorant of the world to know how much he has insulted you by refusing to believe your first denial. If he does not give in at once and entirely, without demanding any explanations at all, I shall insist on the engagement being broken off. I won't have you sacrificed to a man with a suspicious, jealous temper. And, remember, if you did tell him that you had messages from me, if he is of that nature, and once thinks you have been too intimate with poor Tony, it would make no difference, because, you know, it is no proof against it. If he and his mother think you were indiscreet, they will think so, and never forget it."

"Then, mother," said Amethyst, with flashing eyes, "you have been very cruel to me, in setting me to do such a compromising thing."

"My darling, it is impossible to calculate on the fads of countrified and _bornes_ people, like the Leighs. How could I think such ideas would occur to them?"

"I am countrified too," said Amethyst, "and I think they are quite right."

"Ah, my dear," said Lady Haredale, "you think so now. But depend upon it, you will feel differently when you are a little older. I know what it is, and Lucian and his people would make you miserable. He'll never understand you, and you would break your heart in trying to content him. I never ought to have let him have you."

"Mother, do you want us to be parted?" cried Amethyst, in despair.

Lady Haredale paused for a moment. She had often had to sacrifice a great deal to meet the exigencies caused by her own difficulties and her husband's, and now, besides the dread of exposure, there was upon her that most irresistible pressure of all, the need of ready money. The letter in her hand told her what she already partly knew, that Lord Haredale could only raise the three thousand pounds, which he was bound to produce on Amethyst's wedding-day, with the consent of his son, at great sacrifices; while, having raised a part of it, if it could only be applied to other purposes, sundry small debts of his own, and, as Lady Haredale felt, her own liabilities, could be settled off-hand, and a respite from intolerable pressure be obtained. It was, really, to this humiliating need, rather than to any misapprehension or dread of discovery, that Amethyst's fate was owing. Under the circumstances Lucian could hardly be asked to give time for the payment of the small marriage portion. After all, he was no millionaire, Amethyst might easily marry better. No, Lady Haredale would not make that prettily-worded confession of her little plans, that half playful, half regretful acknowledgment of Una's childish folly that might have set all right. A broken engagement was nothing for a girl of eighteen, and with the quick resolution born of hundreds of emergencies, she took her line at once.

"That must depend on how far Lucian is reasonable," she said; "but, my darling, you must trust me to know what you may rightly demand of him."

"I don't think I can trust any one," said Amethyst, but, as she spoke, Tory opened the door.

"Amethyst, Lucian wants you," she said.

"I am coming too," said Lady Haredale. "It is to me that he must answer for his unworthy suspicions."

"Speak out, Amethyst," whispered Tory, as she passed her. "Don't be bullied into giving him up. What does it matter what any one knows about my lady?"

Lucian was in the library, and when he saw Lady Haredale, he stopped short in his eager movement towards Amethyst, drew himself up, and said sternly and shortly--

"My business is with Amethyst alone."

"I do not think it is, Mr Leigh," said Lady Haredale. "You have refused to accept her word as to the nature of her interview with Major Fowler. I will not say anything about Mrs Leigh's _extraordinary_ misapprehension, or what motive she may have had in bringing it forward; but, unless you at once withdraw all your suspicions, and apologise to my daughter for your words this morning, neither Lord Haredale nor myself will allow her to continue her engagement."

Lucian could not fail to see that this speech was intended to offend him, and, taken in conjunction with Lady Haredale's previous excuses, that it was intended to conceal the truth. He turned away from her, and caught Amethyst roughly by both hands.

"What have you to say?" he said. "You must tell me the truth. If you don't, I shall go mad. I do believe you, I will believe you, but you must speak out. You owe it to me to make everything clear."

"It can never be clear," said Amethyst. "I don't think you could trust me, and so--if that's so--we had better part."

She spoke calmly, and looked him full in the face; he showed much more emotion, turning white and red, and losing the thread of what he meant to say. He dropped her hands, and walked over to the window, leaning against the shutter for a moment or two, and trying to collect himself enough to speak. At last he turned round and said--

"I see it in this way. I couldn't stand any mystery about my wife. I should not forget it. Amethyst, tell me."

The misery of the doubt showed itself in stern displeasure. He looked so hard a judge with his clear eyes and frowning brows, that Amethyst, angered and embittered already by the dreadful experience she had undergone, felt that, having once doubted, he would never have faith again.

"Then you had better not marry me," she said. "I think you have every right to distrust me; but since you do, I will never marry you. I dare say I am bad--or shall be; I will not injure you."

She turned and went out of the room, with a sudden movement, and in the instant's pause that followed, they heard her girlish rush up the long staircase before Lady Haredale said--

"It is your own fault, Mr Leigh; my daughter is above suspicion."

"No, Lady Haredale," said Lucian, fiercely, "that cannot be under the circumstances. There is no more to be said."

He went out by the open window, walking with long strides across the bright sunny lawn, away from the place that had been as a Paradise to him, leaving all the trustful joy of his young life behind him.