Having by no means any wish to renew the conversation, Raeburn availed himself of the opportunity presented by the woman's retiring into the house, to sneak off, which he did, and joined his friend Cressingham, who was waiting for him at a little distance.
"She's dead, Cressingham!--she's dead!" he said, in great agitation, as he approached the latter.
"Dead!" exclaimed Cressingham--"is it possible? Why, then, Harry, your £5000 are gone, and you have been a villain for nothing."
"A villain, did you say, Cressingham?" repeated Raeburn, his lips pale and quivering as he spoke.
"Yes; surely a villain--a double-dyed villain!" reiterated the former. "Did you ever imagine you were anything else? My share in the transaction is bad enough--I allow it; but it's nothing to yours, Raeburn--nothing; for I would assuredly have married the girl, if she would have had me. My conduct in the business was perhaps that of a profligate: but yours--yours, Raeburn--was unquestionably that," repeated Cressingham, coolly and considerately--"that of a double-dyed villain." Saying this, he turned on his heel and left him.
The instances just mentioned were the first and the only ones in which Raeburn had yet suffered the martyrdom of hearing the opinion of others of his conduct with regard to Miss Rutherford; but this was a species of torture to which he was now to be frequently exposed. On this very occasion, he had not proceeded twenty yards from the place where Cressingham had left him, when he encountered the medical gentleman who had been attending his victim. This person, conjecturing, from the direction whence Raeburn was coming, that he had been inquiring for his patient, accosted him, and asked him how she was.
Raeburn, it will readily be believed, would have gone fifty miles about--ay, even on his bare knees--rather than have exposed himself to this meeting; but it had taken place, and he now, therefore, endeavoured to suppress his agitation, and tried to look as composed as possible; and it was with this forced and affected calmness that he replied to the physician's inquiry, that his patient was dead.
"Dead!" said the kind-hearted man; "ah, poor girl! I knew it was at hand, but I thought she might have lived for at least twenty-four hours yet. Well, then," he went on, and now looking Raeburn sternly in the face, "since it is so, I will tell you, Mr Raeburn, my opinion of what your conduct has been in this most heartrending affair; for you are deeply implicated in it. My opinion, then, is, sir, that it has been most infamous, most atrocious; and, regarding yourself, sir, I certainly think you one of the most heartless ruffians that ever lived."