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"You don't mean that I should give way do you?" asked Fyne in a whisper of alarmed suspicion. As this was exactly what I meant, I let his fright sink into him. He fidgeted. If the word may be used of so solemn a personage, he wriggled. And when the horrid suspicion had descended into his very heels, so to speak, he became very still.
"Just before," and indulged himself with a weighty period of solemn silence. De Barral, he resumed suddenly, was not coming to Brighton for week-ends regularly, then. Must have been conscious already of the approaching disaster. Mrs. Fyne avoided being drawn into making his acquaintance, and this suited the views of the governess person, very jealous of any outside influence.
"What are you screaming for, you little fool?" she said advancing alone close to the girl who was affected exactly as if she had seen Medusa's head with serpentine locks set mysteriously on the shoulders of that familiar person, in that brown dress, under that hat she knew so well. It made her lose all her hold on reality. She told Mrs. Fyne: "I didn't know where I was.
She was frowning, I say, and I was beginning to smile faintly at her when all at once she came out with something totally unexpected. "It was horribly merry," she said. I suppose she must have been satisfied by my sudden gravity because she looked at me in a friendly manner. "Yes, Mrs. Fyne," I said, smiling no longer. "I see. It would have been horrible even on the stage."
Fyne went so far in his display of cynical pessimism as to say that it was extremely probable. He explained at length to Mrs. Fyne that de Barral certainly did not take anyone into his confidence. But the beastly relative had made up his low mind that it was so. He nursed his hopes, such as they were, in secret, and it is to be supposed kept them even from his wife. I could see it very well.
And so they are to be married before that old idiot comes out. He will be surprised," commented Fyne suddenly in a strangely malignant tone. "He shall be met at the jail door by a Mrs Anthony, a Mrs Captain Anthony. Very pleasant for Zoe. And for all I know, my brother-in-law means to turn up dutifully too. A little family event. It's extremely pleasant to think of. Delightful.
In the distance over the fields and trees smudging and blotching the vast obscurity, one lighted window of the cottage with the blind up was like a bright beacon kept alight to guide the lost wanderer. Inside, at the table bearing the lamp, we saw Mrs. Fyne sitting with folded arms and not a hair of her head out of place.
"A confounded convict," Fyne burst out. With the sound of that word offending my ears I saw the girl extend her arm, push the door open a little way and glide in. I saw plainly that movement, the hand put out in advance with the gesture of a sleep-walker. She had vanished, her black figure had melted in the darkness of the open door.
The ditch by the side of the road must have been freshly dug in front of the cottage. Once clear of the garden Fyne gathered way like a racing cutter. What was a mile to him or twenty miles? You think he might have gone shrinkingly on such an errand. But not a bit of it. The force of pedestrian genius I suppose.
"But what else could we do?" she exclaimed. That little cry of distress quite genuine in its inexpressiveness, altered my feeling towards Mrs. Fyne. It would have been so easy to have done nothing and to have thought no more about it.
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