I think she meant to be silent, but desperation drove her to speak, and she spoke.
I had a headache the last day out but one, and I stopped in my cabin all the afternoon. It seems that Mrs. Brandreth asked Jim if she might visit me for a little while, and he consented.
I was half dozing when she came, with a green silk curtain drawn across the window. I suggested that she should push this curtain back.
“Please, no!” she said. “I don't want light. I don't want to be seen. Dear Lady Courtenaye—may I really call you 'Elizabeth,' as you asked me to do?—I need so much to talk to you, and the darker it is, the better.”
“Very well, Rosemary!” I answered. “I've guessed that you are worried, or not quite happy. There's nothing I should like so much as to help you, if I could. I believe you know that.”
“Yes, I know; I feel it,” she said. “I want your advice. I think you're the only person whose advice I would take whether I liked it or not. I don't understand why that is so. But it is! You're probably younger than I am.”
“I'm getting on for twenty-three,” I informed the girl, when I had made her sit down beside my bed.
“And I'm nearly twenty-six!”
“You look twenty-one.”
“I'm afraid I look lots of things that I'm not,” she sighed, in a voice gloomy for the half-joking words. “Oh, now that I'm trying to speak, I don't know how to begin, or how far to go! I must confess one thing frankly, and that is, I can't tell you everything.”
“Tell me what you want to tell, not a word more.”
“Thank you! I thought you'd say that. Well, suppose you loved a man who was ill, so ill he couldn't possibly get well, and he begged you to marry him so that you might be in the same house till the end, and he could die happily because you were near: what would you do?”
“If I loved him enough, I would marry him the very first minute I could,” was my prompt answer.
“I do love him enough!” she exclaimed.
“But you hesitate?”
“Yes, because—oh, Elizabeth, there's a terrible obstacle.”
“An obstacle!” I echoed, forgetting my headache. “I can't understand that, if—forgive me!—if you're free.”
“I am free,” the girl said. “Free in the way you mean. There's no man in the way. The obstacle is a woman.”
“Pooh!” I cried, my heart lightened. “I wouldn't let a woman stand between me and the man I loved, especially if he asked me as much as—as”
“You needn't mind saying it. Of course you know as well as I do that we're talking about Ralston Murray. And I believe he does need me. I could make him happy, if I were always near him, for the few months he has to live.”
“He would have a new lease of life given him, with you,” I ventured.
The girl shook her head.
“He says that the specialists gave him three months at the most. And twelve days out of those three months have gone already, since he left California.”
For an instant a doubt of her shot through me. Ralston Murray had been a get-rich-quick oil speculator, so I had heard; anyhow he was supposed to be immensely rich. Besides, there was that lovely old place in Devonshire of which his widow would be mistress. I knew nothing of Rosemary Brandreth's circumstances, and little of her character or heart except as I might judge from face, and voice, and charming ways. Was I wrong in the judgment I'd impulsively formed? Could it be that she didn't truly care for Murray, that if she married him in spite of the mysterious obstacle, it would be for what she could get?
Actually I shivered as this question asked itself in my mind! And I was ashamed of it. But her tone and look had been strange. When I tried to cheer her by hinting that Murray's lease of life might be longer because of her love, she had looked frightened, almost horrified.
For the first time I deliberately tried to read her soul, whose sincerity I had more or less taken for granted. I stared into her eyes through the green dusk which made us both look like mermaids under water. Surely that wonderful face couldn't mask sordidness? I pushed the doubt away.
“All the more reason for you to make radiant the days that are left, if you're strong enough to bear the strain,” I said. And Rosemary answered that she was strong enough for anything that would help him. She would tell Ralston, she added, that she had asked my advice.
“He wanted me to do it,” she said. “He thought I oughtn't to decide too hastily. When you are better, will you come on deck and talk to Ralston?”