There was silence in the room. The eyes of all the persons present
turned more or less anxiously on Julian. Mercy was vaguely surprised and
alarmed. Horace, like Lady Janet, felt offended, without clearly knowing
why. Even Grace Roseberry herself was subdued by her own presentiment
of some coming interference for which she was completely unprepared.
Julian's words and actions, from the moment when he had written on the
card, were involved in a mystery to which not one of the persons round
him held the clew.
The motive which had animated his conduct may, nevertheless, be
described in two words: Julian still held to his faith in the inbred
nobility of Mercy's nature.
He had inferred, with little difficulty, from the language which Grace
had used toward Mercy in his presence, that the injured woman must have
taken pitiless advantage of her position at the interview which he had
interrupted. Instead of appealing to Mercy's sympathies and Mercy's
sense of right--instead of accepting the expression of her sincere
contrition, and encouraging her to make the completest and the speediest
atonement--Grace had evidently outraged and insulted her. As a necessary
result, her endurance had given way--under her own sense of intolerable
severity and intolerable wrong.
The remedy for the mischief thus done was, as Julian had first seen it,
to speak privately with Grace, to soothe her by owning that his opinion
of the justice of her claims had undergone a change in her favor, and
then to persuade her, in her own interests, to let him carry to Mercy
such expressions of apology and regret as might lead to a friendly
understanding between them.
With those motives, he had made his request to be permitted to speak
separately to the one and the other. The scene that had followed, the
new insult offered by Grace, and the answer which it had wrung
from Mercy, had convinced him that no such interference as he had
contemplated would have the slightest prospect of success.
The only remedy now left to try was the desperate remedy of letting
things take their course, and trusting implicitly to Mercy's better
nature for the result.
Let her see the police officer in plain clothes enter the room. Let her
understand clearly what the result of his interference would be. Let her
confront the alternative of consigning Grace Roseberry to a mad-house or
of confessing the truth--and what would happen? If Julian's confidence
in her was a confidence soundly placed, she would nobly pardon the
outrages that had been heaped upon her, and she would do justice to the
woman whom she had wronged.
If, on the other hand, his belief in her was nothing better than the
blind belief of an infatuated man--if she faced the alternative and
persisted in asserting her assumed identity--what then?
Julian's faith in Mercy refused to let that darker side of the question
find a place in his thoughts. It rested entirely with him to bring the
officer into the house. He had prevented Lady Janet from making any
mischievous use of his card by sending to the police station and warning
them to attend to no message which they might receive unless the card
produced bore his signature. Knowing the responsibility that he was
taking on himself--knowing that Mercy had made no confession to him
to which it was possible to appeal--he had signed his name without an
instant's hesitation: and there he stood now, looking at the woman whose
better nature he was determined to vindicate, the only calm person in
the room.