“I don’t think it could be him,” said Mrs. Woodburn, with something like the instinct of despair; “I don’t remember any very old friends he has; it is so long a time ago—” and then the poor lady stopped short, as if she had something choking her in her throat. “I don’t think it could be he.”
“Not such a very long time,” said Lucilla, in her easy way. “It is dreadful to give him a character for being old. Do write him, please, and tell him about those people. He is sure to be interested if you say it is a lady, and a pretty woman, and a widow,” continued Miss Marjoribanks. “She says he was once very kind to her when her poor husband was alive.”
Mrs. Woodburn recovered herself a little as Lucilla spoke. “It must have been some other Mr. Cavendish,” she said. “Harry was—so much abroad—so long away from home—” At that moment there was a sound in the house of a heavy step, and Mr. Woodburn’s whistle became audible in the distance. Then the poor woman, who had a secret, fixed haggard eyes upon Miss Marjoribanks. She dared not say, “Don’t speak of this before my husband.” She dared not utter a word to awaken suspicion on one side or the other. She knew very well that if Mr. Woodburn heard of the existence of any old friends of his brother-in-law, he would insist upon having them produced, and “paying them some attention”; and at the same time Mrs. Woodburn could not so far confide in Lucilla as to beg her to keep silent. This was what her brother’s poltroonery brought upon the unfortunate woman. And when the emergency came she was not as equal to it as she expected to be. Her talents were not of a nature to do her any good in such a strait. She collapsed entirely, and looked round her in a flutter of fright and despair, as if to find some means of escape.
But this terror all arose from the fact that she did not know Miss Marjoribanks, who was generous as she was strong, and had no intention of going to extremities. Lucilla got up from her chair when she heard Mr. Woodburn’s whistle coming nearer. “I hear somebody coming,” she said, “and I must not stay, for I have quantities of things to do. Only mind you tell Mr. Cavendish I have something quite serious to say to him from his old friend; and from me, please to tell him, that it is impossible to get on without him,” continued Lucilla, as Mr. Woodburn entered the room. “There is not a soul that can flirt or do anything. I should write to him myself if I knew his address.”
And then, as was natural, Woodburn, with his usual absurdity, as his wife explained afterwards, struck in with some boisterous badinage. As for Mrs. Woodburn, in her mingled terror and relief, she was too much excited to know what he said. But when Lucilla, serenely smiling, was gone, the mimic, with her nerves strung to desperation, burst into the wildest comic travesty of Miss Marjoribanks’s looks and manners, and her inquiries about Harry, and sent her unsuspicious husband into convulsions of laughter. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks—the unconscious simpleton; and all the time his wife could have liked to throw him down and trample on him, or put pins into him, or scratch his beaming, jovial countenance. Perhaps she would have gone into hysterics instead if she had not possessed that other safety-valve, for Mrs. Woodburn had not that supreme composure and self-command which belonged to Lucilla’s higher organisation. She wrote a long letter that afternoon, and had a dreadful headache all the evening after it, which, considering all things, was to be expected under the circumstances, and was a weak-minded woman’s last resource.
No headache, however, disturbed Miss Marjoribanks’s beneficent progress. She went home conscious that, if she had not acquired any distinct information, she had at least gained a moral certainty. And besides, she had measured the forces of Mr. Cavendish’s bodyguard, and had found them utterly unequal to any prolonged resistance. All that was wanted was prudence and care, and that good luck which was as much an endowment in its way as the other qualities by which Lucilla might be said to have secured it. She went home meditating her next step, and with a certain enjoyment in the sense of difficulty and the consciousness of how much skill and power would be required to carry on three different threads of innocent intrigue with the three different persons in the drama, without ever letting the general web get confused, or confounding one strand with another. She had to frighten the Archdeacon with the idea that Mrs. Mortimer might marry the impostor, and she had to keep the widow in the profoundest ignorance of this suggestion, and she had to manage and guide the impostor himself, to save his position, and deliver him from his enemies, and make his would-be persecutor forever harmless. If by chance she should forget herself for a moment, and say to Mr. Beverley what she meant for Mr. Cavendish, or betray her mode of dealing with either to the third person interested, then farewell to all her hopes. But when all that was required was skill and self-possession and courage, Miss Marjoribanks knew herself too well to be afraid.
She came in with that sense of having done her duty which is so sweet to a well-regulated mind. But it was not to that internal satisfaction alone that Providence limited Lucilla’s reward. There are exceptional cases to be found here and there even in this world, in which virtue finds its just acknowledgment, and disinterested well-doing is recompensed as
