Chapter 140. Please…… Forgive Me
Her whole body was cold and ached terribly.
It felt as though she were submerged deep within a pitch-black deep sea where the bottom could not be seen.
While she was drifting leisurely through that ink-like darkness, a sound reached her from somewhere.
—……It’s not true, right? Tell me it’s not true…….
A familiar voice.
The moment she realized it was the voice of the man she had heard in the study, her body, which had been slumped like a corpse, flinched and trembled.
—Everything that crazy bastard is saying is just nonsense…… You’re seeing him for the first time today…….
—Speak! Say it’s not true! Say you don’t know anything about this!
She wanted to say something—anything—to the man who was filled with rage.
The words she dared not say, could not bring herself to say, back then.
However, no matter how much she moved her lips, they only flickered repeatedly, and not a single proper word would come out.
It was no use even scratching her throat with her fingernails in frustration.
The man’s voice, which had been resonating like thunder, vanished before she knew it, and the surroundings were submerged in the same silence as before.
‘I was wrong…… I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you in advance…… I didn’t intend for it to be like that from the beginning…….’
Words that couldn’t be heard; tears falling from Deborah’s eyes as she spoke them streamed down her cheeks.
‘Because I liked you…… Because I liked you so much…… That’s why I did it. Because I was afraid I would lose you…….’
At the moment her body began to tremble more violently due to the sorrowful emotions, her fingertips finally began to move very minutely.
As her voice, which wouldn’t come out, gradually began to leak out faintly, only then did Deborah speak aloud the words she had wanted to say.
“So…… just this once, forgive me.”
In the end, it seemed those were the words she wanted to say.
Clinging to the feet of the man who was turning to leave, begging for forgiveness…….
Asking him to forgive her just this once, just like that…….
In the darkness where nothing could be heard and nothing could be seen, Deborah once again uttered the words she couldn’t say back then.
* * *
“……me ……give.”
At first, he thought it was just nonsense spoken in a delirium from the boiling fever.
But it was when he placed the towel, which had been soaked in cold water and wrung out, back onto her forehead.
“Forgive…… me. ……I was wrong.”
At those words, heard a bit more clearly, Jade’s hand came to a sudden halt.
Parched lips on a pale face without a drop of blood.
The words coming from the mouth of the woman who had been hovering between life and death for several days due to high fever were always the same.
Words seeking forgiveness from someone.
Jade, who momentarily released the tension in his grip, quietly set the towel down on her forehead.
Her body, which had flinched at the cold sensation, soon became quiet again as if nothing had happened.
“…….”
Looking at that face lying as if dead, Jade let out a long sigh.
It had already been several days; Deborah had not regained consciousness since collapsing in that rain.
In the meantime, the doctor had visited several times.
—It could be a simple fever, but sometimes people who have been in a state of tension for a long time show these symptoms. After holding out and holding out, at some point the nerves just snap, and the suppressed symptoms surface all at once.
When asked the reason for the lack of improvement, the elderly doctor said such things.
He said that perhaps mental reasons overlapped, causing her to be bedridden for this long.
With a face that immediately turned serious, the doctor he had known for a long time asked tentatively if she was someone he was going to marry.
But Jade couldn’t give any answer to those words.
Naturally, it would look that way.
Since he, an unmarried man, was looking after an unmarried woman with whom he shared no blood relation with such extreme devotion, it was natural for everyone to see it that way.
The day he brought Deborah to the mansion.
Since the young master, who had returned home much earlier than usual, had unexpectedly come in carrying a woman in his arms, strange rumors had been circulating among the servants for the past few days.
Rumors that perhaps the mansion was finally getting a mistress.
He had strictly instructed the butler to keep everyone’s mouths shut so that useless talk wouldn’t spread, but he knew it himself.
That his current actions were not the actions one takes for a mere acquaintance.
At first, it was just curiosity.
Just simple curiosity about the person Helena Lowell cherished and cared for so much.
It was also Jade who, unable to bear seeing Helena worried upon learning she was caught up in a bad situation, told her to go find the butler of Elfengreen.
Because he had a special bond since childhood with the man who had been a loyal servant to his father, Randler von Cheister.
Of course, since Raymond von Cheister became the new head of the family, their interactions had almost diminished, but they were still close enough that he could ask a favor like hiring her as a lower-class maid at the grand mansion, Elfengreen.
Fortunately, it is said that Deborah was able to be safe from the dragnet of those pursuing her thanks to the introductory letter he wrote, but Jade had to regret the events of that day several times afterward.
That he hadn’t brought her to his own mansion instead of Elfengreen, out of concern for people’s gazes.
He didn’t know his heart would drift like this.
Who would have known that the person he happened to meet and felt an attraction to at first sight was that very Deborah?
As the time they spent meeting repeated again and again, it was in a way very natural for his feelings toward her to keep growing.
However, there was a completely unexpected variable.
Truly, a variable he couldn’t even dare to guess.
That the noble Raymond von Cheister.
That arrogant man who fiercely criticized and despised his own mother, calling her an orphan and a prostitute.
He never dreamed that he would set his eyes on a lower-class maid who was an orphan with nothing……. It was something he truly never thought possible.
He thought that even if every man in the kingdom did, at least he would never do such a thing, but those thoughts of his became a painful misjudgment.
Seeing the woman who even stopped visiting the bookstore for fear of falling out of favor with the man she loved, he couldn’t help it even if his heart ached.
Even though she had been kicked out with nothing but an old bag, he couldn’t bear to see her follow the words of the man who came to find her, so he hadn’t returned to the mansion until that night was over.
After the two of them returned to the mansion together like that, Jade had to struggle for a while to sort out his feelings.
Because Deborah’s feelings for the Duke were so deep they seemed blind, there appeared to be no gap to wedge himself into.
If it had been simply Deborah’s one-sided emotion, he could have waited.
It meant he could have waited whenever until she realized that the relationship couldn’t last long and came back.
But the moment he realized the Duke felt the same way toward Deborah, such intentions turned into bubbles.
He had even come to find him, whom he had regarded as something terrible like an insect.
The sight of him entering his bookstore with a completely stiff face, asking where the woman was.
It was something he truly hadn’t imagined even in his dreams.
From the moment he knew the two felt the same way, Jade began to organize his heart.
Of course, just because one makes up one’s mind to organize things doesn’t mean they can be cut off at a single stroke, but he had lived while striving constantly not to think about it, blocking out everything that reminded him of the two.
But, a few days ago, he saw her in that rain.
The moment that sight of her walking like a person who had lost her soul, without an umbrella, entered his field of vision, he stopped the carriage immediately.
Without a moment to think, he opened the carriage door and jumped into the rain.
He had wondered if it could be, and it truly was Deborah.
Dull eyes without focus, a face as pale as a corpse.
Surprised by that unusual appearance he was seeing for the first time, he called her name, but what her eyes, moving slowly as if walking through water, saw was someone’s illusion.
—Duke…….
The warmth that momentarily returned to her extinguished eyes.
But that warmth did not last long and disappeared again without a trace.
‘……What on earth could have happened.’
The words she spoke intermittently while unconscious were the same every time.
I’m sorry, I apologize, I was wrong, please forgive me.
As if she were a person who only knew how to say those words, Deborah would repeat them for a long time, shedding sorrowful tears drop by drop onto her white cheeks, before becoming quiet again.
It was certain that something had happened between the two.
Last time, it seemed the Grand Duchess had kicked her out while the Duke was away, but this time, it felt as though the person who kicked her out was none other than the Duke himself.
Otherwise, why would she be wandering the streets, kicked out with nothing and empty-handed?
In that cold rain.
In an instant, a strong force tightened in Jade’s jaw.
He knew well that the man was cold and callous, but how could he heartlessly send out the woman he held in his heart like this?
Whatever the reason might be, it was difficult to understand.
“……Duke, for……give me.”
From her mouth, which had been quiet for a while, words seeking forgiveness flowed out again.
At that piteous sight, Jade’s blue eyes wavered greatly for a moment.
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