The White Virgin

She threw her arms about his neck, and clung to him till he roughly forced her to quit her hold.

“Are you mad?” he said angrily.

“Yes, very nearly,” cried the girl, with her pretty, fair, weak face lighted up with rage. “You’ve made me so. I’ll tell Mr Clive as soon as he comes back from Derbyshire – see if I don’t!”

“You’d better,” said Jessop grimly. “You dare say a word to a soul, and I’ll never put a ring on your finger, my lady – there!”

“Yes, you will – you shall!” cried the girl passionately. “You promised me, and the law shall make you!”

“Will you be quiet? You’ll have my father hear you directly.”

“And a good job too.”

“Oh, you think so, do you?”

“Yes, I do. Master’s a dear, good gentleman, and always been nice and kind. I’ll tell him – that I will!”

“Not you. There, wipe those pretty little blue eyes, and don’t make your dear little puggy nose red, nor your cheeks neither. I don’t know, though,” whispered Jessop, passing his arm round the girl and drawing her to him; “it makes you look very sweet and attractive. I say, Lyddy, dear, you are really a beautiful girl, you know.”

“Do adone, Jessop,” she whispered, softening directly, and yielding herself to his touch.

“I couldn’t help loving you, darling, and I love you more and more every day, though you will lead me such a life with your jealousy. I never find fault with you when I see you smiling at Clive.”

“But it is not as I do at you, dear. Mr Clive was always quite the gentleman to me, and it hurts me to see you trying so hard to get Miss Janet away from him.”

“There you go again, little silly. Isn’t she going to be my sister-in-law?”

“It didn’t look like it.”

“Pish! What do you know about such things? In society we are obliged to be a bit polite, and so on.”

“Oh, are we? I know; and if I told Mr Clive, he’d think as I do. I won’t have you make love to her before my very eyes – there!”

“Why, what an unreasonable little pet it is!” he cried, disarming the girl’s resentment with a few caresses.

“And the sooner master knows you are engaged to me the better,” she said, with a sob.

“And then you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that my father has quarrelled with me, and altered his will, so that everything goes to my brother. He may marry you then, for I couldn’t. I shouldn’t have a penny to help myself. Oh yes; go and tell. I believe you want to get hold of him now.”

The girl gave him a piteous look, and tried to catch his hand, but he avoided her touch, and laughed sneeringly.

“I don’t want to be hard and bitter,” he said, “but I’m not blind.”

She looked up at him reproachfully.

“You don’t mean what you are saying,” she whispered sadly, “so I shan’t fret about that.”

“You don’t believe me,” he said, in a low voice, as he fixed the girl with his eyes, glorying in the knowledge that he had thoroughly subdued her, and that she was his to mould exactly as he willed, to obey him like a slave. “Then you may believe this, that I have told you before. All that has passed between us is our secret, and if you betray it and ruin my prospects, and make me a beggar, you may go and drown yourself as you threatened, for aught I care, for you will have wilfully cut everything between us asunder. Now we understand each other, and you had better go before any one comes.” The girl stood gazing at him piteously now, with every trace of anger gone out of her eyes, and her tones, when she spoke, were those of appeal.

“But, Jessop, dear.”

“Be quiet, will you,” he said angrily.

“Don’t speak to me like that, dear,” she whispered. “Only tell me you don’t care for Miss Praed.”

“I won’t answer such a baby’s stupid questions. You know I only care for you.”

There was a sob, but at the same moment a look of hope to lighten a good deal of despair.

“You are not angry with me, Jessop, dear?”

“Yes, I am, very.”

“But you will forgive me, love?”

“Anything, if you’ll only be the dear, good, sensible little woman you used to be.”

“I will, dear – always,” she whispered.

“And fight for me, so that I may not lose.”

“Yes, dear, of course.”

“Can I trust you, Lyddy?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Then, whatever happens, you will, for my sake, hold your tongue till I tell you to speak?”

“Yes, if I die for it,” she said earnestly.

“I thought you would be sensible,” he said, nodding at her. “Come, that’s my pretty, wise little woman. Now go about your business, and wait for the bright days to come, when I shall be free to do as I like.”

“Yes, Jessop,” she whispered, and after a sharp glance at the door she bent forward and kissed him quickly. “But there isn’t anything between you and Miss Janet?”

“Of course not,” he cried. “As if there could be while you live.”

She nodded to him smiling, laid her finger on her lips to show that they were sealed, and then hurried out of the room.

“Poor little fool!” said Jessop Reed to himself, as soon as he was alone; “you are getting rather in the way.”

Chapter Five.

The Treasure House

Clive Reed stood up like a statue on a natural pedestal, high on the precipitous slope. It was a great ponderous block of millstone grit, which had become detached just at the spot where, high up, mountain limestone and the above-named formation joined. And as he looked about him, it seemed wonderful to a man fresh from London that he could find so great a solitude in central England. Look where he would, the various jumbled together eminences of the termination of the Pennine range met his eye; there was hardly a tree in sight, but everywhere hill and deeply cut dale, the down-like tops of the calcareous, and the roughly jagged crags of the grit, while, with the exception of a few white dots on a green slope far away, representing a flock of sheep, there was no sign of life, neither house, hut, nor church spire.

“Yes, there is something alive,” said the young man, “for there goes a bee wild-thyme hunting, and whir-r-r-r! Think of that now, as somebody says; who would have expected to see grouse out here in these hills?”