The Will and the Way by Bernard Capes — Read

It might have been difficult to estimate, on the face of things, the mutual benefit to Miss Vanborough and Mrs. Redding, derived from the visit of the latter to Queen Charlotte's Mansions. A silent antagonism, a stealthy distrust of each other, a constant suspicion lurking under the veneer of social observances, an instinctive sense on the part of both that they were being exploited to some impenetrable purpose by a master schemer, were hardly to be regarded as testimonies to the success of the situation proposed and brought about by the lawyer. Whether the alleged advantage were designed, in the first instance, for wife or client, the incompatibility of the two natures would alone, one might have thought, have been a sufficient argument against any possible development of sympathy between them. But, indeed, neither dreamed of pretending to such an understanding. They had been brought blindly together for some reason, which might or might not explain itself in the sequel, and in the meanwhile they abode in antipathetic association, and waited for the fearful oracle to speak. Miss Vanborough, in truth, was at no trouble to effect a hospitality which she had been the remotest from desiring to offer, or to conceal, at least, by implication, her contempt of the mean little creature, her guest, whom she fully believed to have been introduced into her house as a spy. A manner of social condescension, intentionally offensive, as extended by a patroness towards the wife of an employee, was her means for keeping the undesired visitor at her distance. She would deign no more than an injured queen to ingratiate herself with her treacherous subjects, and this one, she believed in her heart, had been deputed to watch and report upon any secret communication she might hold with her friends. She did not guess indeed, how utterly the stranger and his paltry claim were disregarded by Luke Redding.

All this time the conscious tumult in her soul subjected her to a hundred moods of miserable suspicion and perplexity, of utter despair and the rare sweet reactions from despair. She seemed to herself to live and move in a spectral world of informers--to see eyes watching and traps set for her in a multitude of glimmering places. They need not have taken such elaborate precautions, she thought. In that one direction where escape seemed to offer there was hope for her least of all. A bar crossed it stronger than any bolt they could forge. Had he not said that he would not have her until she came to him of her own will, and was not that tantamount to abandoning her to the outer darkness for evermore? For how could she pretend to love and impose her own wicked ruin on the chosen of her heart? Fine term for such an out rage! She must save him from herself and hug what consolation she could gather from that heroism.