“Mr. Cavendish!” Minnie came up breathless, putting her hand to her side. “Oh, Chatty, you are shameless! Do you know what you are doing? It was his duty—to satisfy us first. Mr. Cavendish, if she is lost to—all sense of shame—”
Panting, she had got up to them, and was pulling Chatty away from him by her arm.
“There is no shame in the matter,” he said. “But, Chatty, your sister is right, and I must explain everything to your relatives at once. There is no time to lose, for the train leaves at six, and I want to take you away with me. If you can be ready.”
“Yes, Dick, I can be ready. I am ready, whenever you please.”
He pressed her arm, which she had placed within his, with a look that said everything there was to say. But Minnie replied with a scream. “Take her away! What right have you to take her away? Eustace will never consent, and my mother—oh, even my mother will not hear of that. If you were a hundred times divorced—which it is a shame to think of—you can’t take her away like that; you will have to be married again.”
“I am sorry to push past you, Mrs. Thynne. It is your husband’s fault, who stopped my entrance in the natural way. But we have no time to lose.” He looked back, waving his hand to Minnie, whose wrath took away the little breath she had left. “I am not a divorced man,” he said. Mrs. Eustace looked after them with feelings indescribable. They went hurrying along, the two figures melting into one, swift, straight, carried as by a wind of triumph. What did he mean? It was horrible to Minnie that she could not go so fast, that she had to wait and take breath. With a pang of angry disappointment she felt at once that they were on the winning side, and that they must inevitably reach the Warren before she could, and that thus she would not hear what Dick had to say. It may here be added that Minnie had, like Chatty, the most perfect confidence that all was right. She no more believed that Dick would have been there had the end of his mission been unsatisfactory than she believed that night was day. She would not have owned this for the world, and she was vexed and mortified by the conviction, but yet at the bottom of her heart, being not at all so bad as she wished to believe she was, felt a sense of consolation and relief, which made it at once easier and more tantalising to have to wait.
Foolish Chatty held Dick’s arm fast, and kept up a murmur of happiness. “Oh, Dick, are you sure it is you? Have you come at last? Are you well now? And I that could not go to you, that did not know, that had no one to ask! Oh, Dick, didn’t you want me when you were ill? Oh, Dick! oh, Dick!” After all, his mere name was the most satisfactory thing to say. And as he hurried her along, almost flying over the woodland path, Chatty too was soon out of breath, and ended in a blissful incapacity to say or do anything except to be carried along with him in his eager progress towards the tribunal which he had to face.
Eustace Thynne opposed his entrance, but quite ineffectually, at the drawing-room door. Dick with his left hand was more than a match for the Reverend Eustace. Warrender stood in the middle of the room, with his head towards the sofa, over which his mother was bending, though his eyes turned to the newcomers as they entered. He made a step towards them as if to stop them, but a movement on the sofa drew him back again as by some fascination. It was Geoff, who struggled up with a little pale gray face and a cut on his forehead, like a little ghost. His sharp voice piped forth all at once in the silence: “I told her, Mr. Cavendish. I gave her your message. Oh, I’m all right, I’m all right. But I told Chatty. I—I did what you said.”
“Mr. Cavendish!” cried Mrs. Warrender, turning from the child. She was trembling with the excitement of these hurrying events, though the sick terror she had been seized with in respect to Geoff was passing away. “Mr. Cavendish, my son is right in this—that before you saw Chatty we should have had an account of you, he and I.”
“I should have said so too, in other circumstances,” said Dick holding Chatty’s arm closely within his own. “If my presence or my touch could harm her, even with the most formal fool,”—he flashed a look at Eustace, angrily, which glowed over the pale parson like a passing lamp, but left him quite unconscious. “As it is, you have a right to the fullest explanation, but not to keep my wife from me for a moment.”
“She is not your wife,” cried Warrender. “Leave him, Chatty. Even in the best of circumstances she cannot be your wife.”
“Chatty, do not move. I have as full a right to hold her here as you have, or any married man. Mrs. Warrender, I don’t want to get angry. I will tell you my story at once. On our wedding-day, when that terrible interruption occurred, the poor creature whom I then thought, whom I then believed, to have been—”
“You mean Mrs. Cavendish, your lawful wife.”
“Poor girl, do not call her by that name; she never bore it. She did not mean to do any harm. There was no sanctity to her in that or any other tie.”
Chatty pressed his arm more closely in sympathy. “Oh, Dick, I know, I know.”
“She meant no harm, from her point of view. She scarcely meant to deceive me. Mrs. Warrender, it was a fiction all through. There
