This was a question not to be decided in a hurry. He must first see clearly how to turn it most fully to his own advantage. He was not altogether a bad man; but he had had a city training. Such an avenue to prosperity and power had never been open to him before, and he must be careful how he took his first step along it.
"Be kind to the little lad," he said, giving a gulden to the woman, "and when I come back you shall have ten of them before I take him away."
Ten gulden! The thought of so magnificent a sum had never entered into the head of Chiara's sister. She thought a good deal of the hundred and fifty kreutzers paid every month by Chiara; but ten gulden all at once! These English, heathen as they were, must be made of money.
She watched the foreigner as he retraced his way along the rocky path until he was quite lost to sight. She would indeed be kind to the child of people so rich and generous.
So for a few weeks Martino had the richest draught of goat's milk and the sweetest morsels of black bread, and the warmest corner by the fire. But she grew weary of indulgence as the months passed by, and the Englishman failed to return and redeem his promise.
Sidney Martin was suffering greatly under his fresh burden of anxiety. It seemed to him that all his future happiness or misery depended absolutely upon the result of Trevor's mission. He kept away from the house on Wimbledon Common, for he dared not trust himself in conversation with Margaret. That he loved her, and loved her with the profound, mature passion of manhood--how different from his boyish fancy!--made it impossible for him to approach her with calm friendliness, as he had done before her father's private talk with him, and his avowal that Margaret herself was far from being indifferent to him.
But now he had placed his secret in the hands of another, and must be prepared to acknowledge his boyish error. He must lose Margaret, if Sophy was alive. His imagination was busy in painting to him two lives, either of which might be his in the immediate future.
If Sophy was found he must own her as his wife, and make her the mistress of his house. He pictured her to himself as his wife, with her silly, affected, low-bred manners. His inward disgust at his own conduct exaggerated her faults, and painted her in the most repulsive colors. Her relations and friends would certainly flock about her; and, though he did not know them, he could not think of them as anything but ignorant and vulgar; for they were nothing but poor shopkeepers in a little market-town. He knew himself too well to resolve upon carrying on a continual conflict with the woman he had made his wife. He would leave her to follow her own way, while he took his; but her way could not fail to intersect his at some points; and he must be brought into contact with a vulgarity and folly which he loathed. His lot must be that bitter one of being linked indissolubly to a companion always at variance with him.