CAPTAIN TORQUIL LEAVES THE DRAWING-ROOM.
CAPTAIN TORQUIL smiled. The smile was not at all like the smile of theatrical villainy. It was intended to be genial and re-assuring. He was handsome, and doing his best; yet the smile inexplicably alarmed Mrs. Jenner.
Certain shadows that had crossed his face immediately before it, had, no doubt, something to do with the sudden eclipse of the celestial Captain Torquil, and the vague revelation of a counterpart more or less infernal.
The captain, I think, saw the unpleasant change in Mrs. Jenner’s mind, and he tried to restore her happier impressions.
“I see, Mrs. Jenner, we are entirely agreed as to the cruelty of punishing people, and the fact is that I should be immensely relieved if you and Mr. Jenner would join in advising me not to put the law in motion against her. Hileria Pullen is one of the most entirely unscrupulous persons on earth. She fancied she had got poor Mrs. Mildmay entirely in her hands. She hated me because she saw that her mistress consulted me. She fancied that I had an influence. Perhaps she was right. But if I had, the will, leaving but a miserable fifty pounds a year to my wife, shows how I used it. The woman was bitterly disappointed at the amount of her own legacy — handsome as it was. Furious with her late mistress, furious with me, furious with my poor wife, enraged at seeing her prey slip through her fingers, she framed a plan to abscond with the child. She’s a woman of profound dissimulation — intensely artful and vindictive, beyond your power to conceive. I don’t care a farthing, of course, what she says of me. It can’t be worse than she has already said, again and again, when it suited her purpose, of her dead mistress and benefactress. I have detected her in so many and such awful untruths, that one word she utters I don’t believe. In consequence of these — which justice to the memory of poor Alice Mildmay compelled me to notice — I told her she should leave our service next morning, and she ran away over night with the infant, which she had with her own ears heard poor Alice Mildmay consign, in the most solemn and passionate terms, to my care. This-and I suppose the usual cloud of slanders — she proposes for her revenge, and a mode of accounting for her abrupt departure, and perhaps ultimately of extorting money from more persons than one.”
As he spoke, the lady, over whom was stealing again a mist of perplexity, raised her eyes quite suddenly, and detected those of Captain Torquil fixed upon her with an expectant look that was cunning and intense; it was triumphant, and shocked her. She returned it unconsciously with a fixed stare of fear.
The fascination of this stare continued for little more than a second. It was dispelled; but an ineffaceable lesson remained.
The lady stood up, and very coldly but pointedly asked —
“With respect to poor Alice Mildmay’s child, be good enough, Captain Torquil, to say exactly what you wish?”
“I want you kindly to direct your servant to bring down the child, so as to enable me to satisfy myself by actual inspection that the child is really here. Will you do so?”
“I will not, sir.”
The captain, beginning to forget his politeness, laughed a short, dangerous laugh.
“And may I ask,” said the captain, his eyes beginning to gleam, and his features to grow sharper and whiter, “your reason for that particularly unsustainable resolution?”
The captain leaned a little forward as he put his question, his fingers clenched on each side upon the brim of his hat, which he held firmly to his waistcoat, while the crown was presented for the inspection of Mrs. Jenner.
He peered in her face with a look of the intensest fury, which trembled under strong momentary restraint, at the very point of explosion.
With the crisis Mrs. Jenner’s courage had come. She was terrified; she was excited; she was resolute.
“I won’t have the child brought down, because you might seize it and take it away. Nothing on earth will induce me to part with it until the law has determined who shall keep it. You shan’t see the child, sir; and be good enough to let your visit end.”
“Have you quite decided, Mrs. Jenner?”
“Quite, sir.”
He bowed with a kind of shrug and a fixed smile, and backed towards the door, at which he made her another bow.
This simple lady made him one of her curtseys, fancying that he was taking his departure, and had her hand upon the bell, when it was arrested by a sound which called her instantly to the lobby.
Captain Torquil was not descending, but mounting the stairs, with long and rapid steps, and as she came out on the lobby he was striding up the second staircase.
As luck would have it, the baby was crying, and the sound too surely conducted him to the nursery door. With a loud scream the affrighted lady followed.