Having read Mrs. Linley's answer, Mr. Sarrazin looked out of the breakfast-room window, and saw that the fog had reached the cottage. Before Mrs. Presty could make any remark on the change in the weather, he surprised her by an extraordinary question.
"Is there an upper room here, ma'am, which has a view of the road before your front gate?"
"Certainly!"
"And can I go into it without disturbing anybody?"
Mrs. Presty said, "Of course!" with an uplifting of her eye brows which expressed astonishment not unmixed with suspicion. "Do you want to go up now?" she added, "or will you wait till you have had your breakfast?"
"I want to go up, if you please, before the fog thickens. Oh, Mrs. Presty, I am ashamed to trouble you! Let the servant show me the room."
No. For the first time in her life Mrs. Presty insisted on doing servant's duty. If she had been crippled in both legs her curiosity would have helped her to get up the stairs on her hands. "There!" she said, opening the door of the upper room, and placing herself exactly in the middle of it, so that she could see all round her: "Will that do for you?"
Mr. Sarrazin went to the window; hid himself behind the curtain; and cautiously peeped out. In half a minute he turned his back on the misty view of the road, and said to himself: "Just what I expected."
Other women might have asked what this mysterious proceeding meant. Mrs. Presty's sense of her own dignity adopted a system of independent discovery. To Mr. Sarrazin's amusement, she imitated him to his face. Advancing to the window, she, too, hid herself behind the curtain, and she, too, peeped out. Still following her model, she next turned her back on the view--and then she became herself again. "Now we have both looked out of window," she said to the lawyer, in her own inimitably impudent way, "suppose we compare our impressions."
This was easily done. They had both seen the same two men walking backward and forward, opposite the front gate of the cottage.
Before the advancing fog made it impossible to identify him, Mr. Sarrazin had recognized in one of the men his agreeable fellow-traveler on the journey from London. The other man--a stranger--was in all probability an assistant spy obtained in the neighborhood. This discovery suggested serious embarrassment in the future. Mrs. Presty asked what was to be done next. Mr. Sarrazin answered: "Let us have our breakfast."
In another quarter of an hour they were both in Mrs. Linley's room.
Her agitated manner, her reddened eyes, showed that she was still suffering under the emotions of the past night. The moment the lawyer approached her, she crossed the room with hurried steps, and took both his hands in her trembling grasp. "You are a good man, you are a kind man," she said to him wildly; "you have my truest respect and regard. Tell me, are you--really--really--really sure that the one way in which I can keep my child with me is the way you mentioned last night?"
Mr. Sarrazin led her gently back to her chair.
The sad change in her startled and distressed him. Sincerely, solemnly even, he declared that the one alternative before her was the alternative that he had mentioned. He entreated her to control herself. It was useless, she still held him as if she was holding to her last hope.
"Listen to me!" she cried. "There's something more; there's another chance for me. I must, and will, know what you think of it."
"Wait a little. Pray wait a little!"
"No! not a moment. Is there any hope in appealing to the lawyer whom Mr. Linley has employed? Let me go back with you to London.
I will persuade him to exert his influence--I will go down on my knees to him--I will never leave him till I have won him over to my side--I will take Kitty with me; he shall see us both, and pity us, and help us!"
"Hopeless. Quite hopeless, Mrs. Linley."
"Oh, don't say that!"
"My dear lady, my poor dear lady, I must say it. The man you are talking of is the last man in the world to be influenced as you suppose. He is notoriously a lawyer, and nothing but a lawyer. If you tried to move him to pity you, he would say, 'Madam, I am doing my duty to my client'; and he would ring his bell and have you shown out. Yes! even if he saw you crushed and crying at his feet."
Mrs. Presty interfered for the first time.
"In your place, Catherine," she said, "I would put my foot down on that man and crush _him_. Consent to the Divorce, and you may do it."
Mrs. Linley lay prostrate in her chair. The excitement which had sustained her thus far seemed to have sunk with the sinking of her last hope. Pale, exhausted, yielding to hard necessity, she looked up when her mother said, "Consent to the Divorce," and answered, "I have consented."
"And trust me," Mr. Sarrazin said fervently, "to see that Justice is done, and to protect you in the meanwhile."
Mrs. Presty added her tribute of consolation.
"After all," she asked, "what is there to terrify you in the prospect of a Divorce? You won't hear what people say about it--for we see no society now. And, as for the newspapers, keep them out of the house."
Mrs. Linley answered with a momentary revival of energy "It is not the fear of exposure that has tortured me," she said.
