“On my honor, Bess, no. Can you think such a thing of me?”
She smiled, half sadly, and still watched him with a species of instinctive incredulity.
“Promise me, Bess. You saved my life once. And are you nothing to me?”
The words had slipped with sudden intensity off Richard’s tongue. They seemed the very words that Bess had hoped to hear from him, and that she was hungry to take into her heart. She drooped her shoulders a little, her eyes shining, her hands hanging idly at her sides.
Richard’s face had kindled in turn, and his eyes had caught the light in the woman’s. He held his breath, and found himself trembling as he looked at her.
“On my honor, you shall be safe at Rodenham.”
She laughed, and moved nearer to him, her mouth and chin upturned to his.
“I did not dream of him on St. Agnes’s night. It was of you, Mr. Jeffray. I dreamed that I was gathering herbs in the ruins here, and that I picked a great, red flower that turned to blood in my hand. Then—I saw you standing in the doorway yonder—looking at me, and then—I awoke.”
Richard gazed at her. She was very near to him, so near that he almost felt her breath upon his mouth. He forgot Miss Jilian utterly for the moment in the near splendor of this woman’s face.
“I shall pray to St. Agnes, Bess,” he said.
She smiled at him wonderfully with her eyes.
“I almost blessed Dan, sir, for wounding you in the woods.”
“I have kept the cup out of which you drank, and put orpine in it, and it grows lustily. Listen, did you hear Dan’s gun? He’s down by the fish-ponds after wild duck.”
She had started back from Jeffray with all the soft, glamourish light gone from her face, her eyes growing hard and fierce under her black brows. With a significant gesture she turned and climbed into one of the ruined windows, and, parting the ivy that hung in masses about the jambs, looked out over the grass-land towards the abbey pools. A man was standing under a willow with his back towards the ruins. He was busy recharging his gun, and watching his spaniel that was swimming out to recover the bird that had fallen into the water. Bess watched him a moment with her eyes sullen and full of hatred. Surely some devil must have persuaded the unconscious Dan to trudge down to the abbey ponds that evening.