The Perpetual Curate · Chapter 21 (2/2)

“If it was love that brought you,” said poor Miss Wodehouse; “but oh, Tom, you know I can’t believe that. He is very, very ill; and it is you that have done it,” cried the mild woman, in a little gush of passion⁠—“you whom he has forgiven and forgiven till his heart is sick. Go away, I tell you, go away from the house that you have shamed. Oh, Mr. Wentworth, take him away,” she cried, turning to the Curate with clasped hands⁠—“tell him to hide⁠—to fly⁠—or he’ll be taken: he will not be forgiven this time; and if my father⁠—if my dear father dies⁠—” But when she got so far her agitation interrupted her. She kept her eyes upon the door with a wild look of terror, and waved her helpless hands to warn the intruder away.

“If he dies, matters will be altered,” said the stranger: “you and I might change places then, for that matter. I’m going away from Carlingford. I can’t stay in such a wretched hole any longer. It’s gout or something?” said the man, with a tone of nature breaking through his bravado⁠—“it’s not anything that has happened? Say so, and I’ll never trouble you more.”

“Oh, if Lucy were to see him!” said poor Miss Wodehouse. The words came unawares out of her heart without any thought; but the next thing of which she was conscious was that the Perpetual Curate had laid his hand on the stranger’s arm, and was leading him reluctantly away. “I will tell you all you want to know,” said Mr. Wentworth, “but not here;” and with his hand upon the other’s arm, moved him somehow with an irresistible command, half physical, half mental, to the door. Before Miss Wodehouse could say anything they were gone; before she could venture to draw that long sighing breath of relief, she heard the door below close, and the retreating footsteps in the garden. But the sound, thankful though she was, moved her to another burst of bitter tears. “To think I should have to tell a stranger to take him away,” she sobbed, out of the anguish of her heart; and sat weeping over him with a relenting that wrung her tender spirit, without power to move till the servant came up with alarmed looks to ask if anyone had come in in his absence. “Oh, no; it was only Mr. Wentworth⁠—and a⁠—gentleman who came to fetch him,” said Miss Wodehouse. And she got up, trembling as she was, and told John he had better shut up the house and go to bed. “For I hope papa will have a better night, and we must not waste our strength,” she said, with a kind of woeful smile, which was a wonder to John. He said Miss Wodehouse was a tenderhearted one, to be sure, when he went downstairs; but that was no very novel piece of information to anybody there.

Meantime the Curate went down Grange Lane with that strange lodger of Mrs. Hadwin’s, who had broken thus into Miss Wodehouse’s solitude. They did not say much to each other as they went sullenly side by side down the silent road; for the stranger, whose feelings were not complicated by any very lively sense of gratitude, looked upon his companion as a kind of jailer, and had an unspeakable grudge against the man who exercised so calm an ascendancy over him; though to be sure it might have been difficult to resist the moral force of the Curate of St. Roque’s, who was three inches taller than himself, and had the unbroken vigour of youth and health to back him. As for Mr. Wentworth, he went on without speaking, with a bitterness in his heart not to be expressed. His own personal stronghold of happiness and consolation had shattered in pieces in that evening’s interview; and as he went to his own house he asked himself what he should find in it? This wretched man, with whose sins he had been hitherto but partially acquainted; and Jack, with whom the other had heaven knew what horrible connection. Should he find a den of thieves where he had left only high thoughts and lofty intentions? It was thus, after his three days’ absence, that he returned home.