fatuous smile, “don't force me to rob your stables!”
“If you did, my dear sir, it should avail you nothing,” Mr. Crawford broke in, “for Sidmouth so prizes his horseflesh, he has undertaken to mark them in a singular manner. You should not get far without discovery.”
“Do you brand them, then?” Mrs. Barnewall enquired, her nose wrinkling with repugnance.
“Never,” Sidmouth replied.
“He has his initials cut into their shoes!” Mr. Crawford declared, with a delighted slap upon his mahogany table. “No thief could fail to leave a telling trail behind him.”
“Shoes?” my mother enquired, only now, it seemed, emerging from the fog of suspense into which Miss Crawford's words regarding my sister's fate had thrown her. “But cannot one merely exchange one shoe for another?”
I knew her immediately to have mistaken the master's shoe for his horse's, and to have stumbled upon a point all unawares; for Mr. Crawford seized at her apparent perspicacity with the greatest delight. Assuredly, madam, and a clever ruse it would be—but even did the thief know beforehand of the shoes’ mark, he could do nothing without a blacksmith; and horse and thief should undoubtedly be apprehended while still bent upon the forge. I consider it a capital idea.”
This response so confounded my mother's understanding, as to silence her for the moment; and the conversation turned to other things.
MY MASTERY OF CURIOSITY WAS REWARDED AS SUCH MASTERY ONLY rarely is—with Mr. Sidmouth's broaching the subject of his cousin in a very little while. The ladies had retired to the drawing-room, and at the gentlemen's following soon thereafter, bearing the scents of tobacco and excellent port about their persons, Mr. Sidmouth joined me before Captain Fielding should have the chance. Miss Armstrong had seated herself at the pianoforte, and Mademoiselle LeFevre stood at her side, her voice swelling with Italian airs; so captivatingly beautiful, and so clearly freed of all the evening's anxiety, as to make the heart sing with her.
“Your cousin is very lovely, Mr. Sidmouth,” I ventured, with a glance at his brooding face.
He was engaged in studying Seraphine intently, and seemed almost not to have heard me. After an instant, his dark eyes turned back to mine, and he said abrupdy, “I would ask of you a favour, Miss Austen. My cousin is too much alone. You will have guessed that she labours under the effect of some sad business; discretion, and a care for her delicacy, forbid me from saying more. I would ask only that you consider her gende nature, her evident goodness—the fragility of her understanding—” At this he halted, for the first time in our acquaintance, completely tongue-tied.
“I do not pretend to comprehend your cousin's place in your household,” I began slowly, “nor her entire relationship to yourself. But if I take your meaning correctly, you wish me to visit Mademoiselle LeFevre—to undertake a certain … intimacy.”
Sidmouth had flushed at my initial words, and appeared in an agony of indecision as to his response; but now he bowed his head and touched a hand to his brow. “I cannot convince you of what you have no reason to believe,” he said quietly. “Rumour and calumny are accepted of themselves, and a simpler goodness hardly to be credited. I know to whom I owe your hesitancy. But for Seraphine's sake I will say nothing of this here; I will merely trust in your goodness. You cannot turn away from a soul in suffering—your every aspect declares you to be a woman of sympathy and such warmth as is rarely met with.”
Seraphine's liquid voice rose in the final tremulous notes of an aria—the cry, no doubt, of a woman betrayed and dying, as with all such songs—and fell away into silence. There was a moment's indrawn breath, a hesitation, and then a sudden patter of applauding hands.
“I shall call upon your cousin as soon as ever I may, Mr. Sidmouth,” I said; and received a fervent look of gratitude in return.
I HAD OCCASION TO CONSIDER ALL THAT PASSED SATURDAY E'EN, while sitting this morning with my mother in the little breakfast parlour of Wings cottage—which I must confess is decidedly shabby, when exposed to the strong sunlight of morning.
“I still cannot comprehend, my dear, why Mr. Sidmouth should take his shoes to the blacksmith,” my mother was saying to the Reverend Austen, whose head would droop over his volume of Fordyce's Sermons—when Jenny, our housemaid, threw open the door. Her fresh young face bore a look of alarm, and she twisted her apron