“lord! my dear ronnie,” exclaimed daddy gwyllian, “what poor short-sighted creatures we are with all our worldly wisdom! to think that i ever advised you to do such a thing! lord! i might have ruined you!”
his astonishment and repentance were so extreme and sincere that hurstmanceaux was bewildered.
“what did you ever advise me to do,” he asked, “that would have ruined me?”
“i told you to marry her.”
“to marry whom?”
“massarene’s daughter.”
hurstmanceaux’s face changed. “i believe you did,” he said stiffly. “i am glad you see the impropriety of telling a poor man to marry a rich woman.”
“but she isn’t a rich woman!” cried the poor matchmaker in almost a shriek of remorse. “i might have led you to your ruin. she has gone and given it all away!”
hurstmanceaux turned quickly to him with animation.
“what do you say? given what away? her father’s fortune?”
“read that,” said gwyllian. “oh, lord, that fools should ever have money, and sensible folks be worn into their graves for want of it!”
what he gave ronald to read was a column in a leading journal of paris and new york; an article adorned by a woodcut which was labelled a portrait of katherine massarene, and resembled her as much as it did a burmese idol or a face on a door-knocker. the article, which was long, abounded in large capital letters and startling italics. its hyperbolic and hysterical language, being translated into the language of sober sense, stated that the daughter of the “bull-dozing boss,” so well known in the states as william massarene, having inherited the whole of his vast wealth, had come over to america incognita, had spent some months in the study of life as seen in the city of[506] kerosene, and the adjacent townships and provinces, and having made herself intimately acquainted with the people and the institutions, had divided two-thirds of her inheritance between those who had shared in any way in the making of that wealth, or whose descendants were in want.
she had devoted another large portion of it to the creation of various asylums and institutions and provision for human and animal needs in both great britain and ireland, whilst the valuable remainder had been divided amongst many poor families of county down. the journal said, in conclusion, that she had purchased an annuity for her mother, which would give that lady double the annual income allotted to her under william massarene’s will; and that for herself she had kept nothing, not a red cent. the editor added a personal note stating that miss massarene had certainly made no provision for her own maintenance, since she had forgotten to endow a lunatic asylum!
the column closed with the total in plain figures of the enormous property which had been thus broken up and distributed. hurstmanceaux read it in silence from the first line to the last; then in silence returned it to daddy gwyllian.
“isn’t it heaven’s mercy you didn’t marry her!” cried daddy. “to be sure you would have prevented this. she must be stark staring mad, you know; the paper hints as much.”
“if she had consulted the seven sages and the four evangelists, she could not have been advised by them to act more wisely or more well,” replied hurstmanceaux with emphasis. “good-bye, daddy. leave off match-making, or you may burn your fingers at it.”
he went away without more comment, and daddy stood staring after him with round, wide-open eyes. was it possible that anybody lived who could consider such a course of action praiseworthy or sane?
“but ronnie was always as mad as a hatter himself,” he thought sorrowfully as he buttonholed another friend, and displayed his parisian-american paper.
“ah, yes—frightful insanity!” said the newcomer.[507] “i’ve just seen it in truth. it was wired. enough to make old billy get up out of his grave, don’t you think? sic transit gloria mundi.”
“damned socialistic thing to do,” said a third who joined them and who also had seen truth. “horrible bad example! if property isn’t inviolate to your heirs, where are you? if there isn’t solidarity amongst the holders of property, what can keep back the nationalization of property?”
no one could say what would.
“this is what comes of young women reading herbert spencer and goldwin smith,” said a fourth.
“these men are not communists,” said the previous speaker. “this lady’s act is rank communism.”
“can’t one do what one likes with one’s own?” asked another.
“certainly not,” replied the gentleman who dreaded the nationalization of property. “we should first consider the effect of what we do on the world at large. this young woman (i never liked her) has said practically to the many millions of operatives all the world over that capital is a crime.”
“capital, acquired as billy’s was, is uncommonly near a crime,” murmured the first speaker.
“capital by its mere consolidation becomes purified,” said the other angrily, “as carbon becomes by crystallization a diamond. this young woman has practically told every beggar throughout both hemispheres that he has a right to grind the diamonds into dust.”
“i always thought her plain,” said a more frivolous listener.
“fine eyes, fine figure, but plain,” said another, “and she was always so rude to the prince.”
“rude to everybody, and always looked bored,” said a person whose hand she had rejected.
“subversive,” said the upholder of property. “very odd: her father was so sound in all his views.”
“i think billy’ll wake and walk!” said the gentleman who had before expressed this opinion; “all his pile split up into match wood!”
daddy gwyllian felt so vexed that he left them discussing[508] the matter and went home. why could not ronnie have made himself agreeable to her before this horrible socialistic idea had come into her head, and so have held all that marvellously solid fortune together? it made him quite sad to think of these millions of good money frittered away in asylums and refuges and the dirty hands of a lot of hungry people.
even harrenden house was sold, they said, just as it stood, with all its admirable works of art, and the beckoning falconer of clodion at the head of the staircase.
at the same moment the duchess of otterbourne was also reading this article in the paris-new york journal. she thought it a hoax; a yarn spun by some mischievous spinner of sensational stories. when she heard however from all sides that it was true, she felt a kind of relief.
“nobody will know her now,” she thought. “so she won’t be able to talk. it is really enough to wake that brute in his grave. i always considered her odious, but i should never have supposed she was mad.”
“what do you think of it?” she asked vanderlin, whom she met the day she had read of this amazing piece of folly. he had not heard of it: she described the salient features of the narrative.
“i know nothing of the lady or of the sources of the fortune she has broken up,” he replied, “so i cannot judge. but if she wishes to be at peace she has acted very wisely for herself.”
mouse heard with an impatience which she could not conceal.
“do you mean,” she asked point-blank, “that you would like to lose your fortune?”
“one must never say those things aloud, madame,” he replied. “for the boutade of a discontented moment may be repeated in print by these paul prys of the press as the serious conviction of a lifetime.”
“how i loathe your diplomatic answers!” she thought, much irritated at her perpetual failure to entice him out of his habitual reserve. “one can’t talk at all unless one says what one thinks,” she answered impatiently.
he smiled slightly again.
“i should rather have supposed that the chief necessity[509] in social intercourse was to successfully repress one’s sincerity: is it not so?”
“you are a very tantalizing person to talk to!” she said with a chagrin which was real.
“why insist on talking to me then?” thought vanderlin, and he let the conversation drop; it was too personal for his taste.
her verdict, more or less softened, was the verdict of the world in general on katherine massarene’s action.
the action was insane, and to english and american society offensive.
the world considered it had warmed an adder in its breast. everybody had known her only because of her money, and now she had stripped herself of her money, and would expect to know them just the same!
besides, what a shocking example! ought big brewers, instead of ascending to the celestial regions of the upper house, to strip themselves of their capital and build inebriate asylums? ought big bankers, instead of going to court and marrying dukes’ daughters, to live on bread and cheese, and give their millions in pensions and bonuses? ought big manufacturers, instead of receiving baronetcies, and having princes at their shooting parties, to go in sackcloth and ashes, and spend all their profits in making the deadly trades healthy? were all the titled railway directors to pull off their bath ribbons, and melt down the silver spades with which they had cut the sods of new lines, in order to give all they possess to maimed stokers, or dazed signalmen, or passengers who had lost their legs or their arms in accidents?
forbid it, heaven!
society shook on its very foundations. never had there been set precedent fraught with such disastrous example. it was something worse than socialism; they could not give it a name. socialism knocked you down and picked your pocket: but this act of hers was a voluntary eating of dust. she, who had supposed that she would be able to do what she choose with her inheritance unremarked, was astonished at the storm of indignation raised by the intolerable example she was considered to have set. american capitalists were as furious as english[510] aristocracy and plutocracy, and the chief organs of the american press asked her if she could seriously suppose that anybody would take the trouble to put money together if they had to give it away as soon as they got it?
the publicity and hostility roused in two nations by an act which she had endeavored to make as private as possible disconcerted her exceedingly, and the encomiums she received from anonymous correspondents were not more welcome.
what most annoyed her were the political deductions and accusations which were roused by her action and roared around it. she was claimed by the collectivists, praised by the positivists, seized by the socialists, and admired by the anarchists. she was supposed to belong to every new creed to which the latter years of the nineteenth century has given birth, and such creeds are multitudinous as ants’ eggs in an ant-hill. a ton weight of subversive literature and another ton weight of begging letters were sent to her, and she was requested to forward funds for a monument to jesus ravachol and harmodius-caserio.
the fabian philosophers wept with joy over her; but the upholders of property said that nothing more profoundly immoral than this dispersion of wealth had ever been accomplished since propriété nationale was written on the façade of the tuileries. tolstoi dedicated a work to her; cuvallotti wrote her an ode; brunetière consecrated an article to her, mr. mallock stigmatized her action as the most immoral of the age, whilst auberon herbert considered it the most admirable instance of high spirited individualism; mr. gladstone wrote a beautiful epistle on a postcard, and mr. swinburne a poem in which her charity was likened to the sea in a score of magnificent imageries and rolling hexameters.
she was overwhelmed with shame at her position and was only sustained in the pillory of such publicity by the knowledge that the world forgets and discards as rapidly as it adores and enthrones. she felt that she deserved as little the praises of those who lauded her generosity as she did the censure of others who blamed her for subversive designs and example. her strongest motive power[511] had been the desire to atone, in such measure as possible, for the evil her father had done, and to rid herself of an overwhelming burden. deep down in her soul, too, scarcely acknowledged to herself, was the desire that the duchess of otterbourne’s brother should know that, if she could not understand the finer gradations of honor as old races can do, she yet had nothing of that mercenary passion which a woman of his own race showed so unblushingly.
she longed, with more force than she had ever wished for anything, that hurstmanceaux should be justified in that higher appreciation of her which his letter had expressed.
“why should i care what that man thinks?” she had asked herself as the steamship glided over the moonlit waters of the atlantic. “i shall never speak to him again as long as our lives last.”
but she did care.
this result of her acts annoyed, harassed, and depressed her, for she was afraid that in trying to do well she had only done ill. “but our path is so steep and our light is so dim,” she thought, “we can only go where it seems right to us to go, and if we fail in our aims we must not mind failure if our intent was good.
“‘’tis not in mortals to command success.’”
but her heart was sometimes heavy, and she felt the want of sympathy and comprehension.
only one message soothed and reassured her: it was a telegram from framlingham.
“now the thing is done, i may venture to tell you that i both approve and admire what i considered it my duty theoretically to oppose.”
it was the only sympathy she received. from her mother, although she had met no active opposition, she felt that she had no forgiveness because she had no comprehension.
“you’ve done what you chose, and i hope you’ll never regret it. you’ve your poor father’s dogged will, and your poor father’s hard heart,” said margaret massarene,[512] very unkindly, on the day that her daughter landed at southampton.
if she had had an attack of diphtheria or had broken her arm no one would have been kinder and more devoted than her mother; but, for the sorrows of the soul, the maladies of the mind, the nervousness of conscience, her mother had no compassion, because she had no comprehension. to such troubles as those of katherine least of all; because to the practical views of margaret massarene it seemed that her daughter was moon-struck, nothing less; just like poor ophelia, for whom she had wept at the lyceum. to be sure katherine was not at all strange in her ways: she dressed like other people, walked, ate, spoke, and behaved like other people; but she could not be altogether in her proper mind to give away right and left all the fruits of poor william’s many years of toil and of self-denial. the pile might have been got together by questionable means, but that was not for william’s heiress to think or to judge; she had nothing to do but to be grateful. her mother watched anxiously for straws in her hair and rosemary “that’s for remembrance” in her hand.
yet she was almost reconciled to her daughter’s acts by this uproar over them.
“well!” she said with a certain dogged satisfaction—“well, kathleen, you meant to degrade your father, and to spite him, and to undo all he’d done, and to drag his memory through the mud; but it’s all turned to his honor and glory. ’tis of him they must think when they talk of you.”
but in the middle of the night, after this utterance, katherine was awakened by the entrance into her chamber of her mother, who came up to the side of her bed in silence.
“are you ill?” said katherine, starting up from her pillow.
“no, my dear,” said mrs. massarene, sitting down heavily on a low chair and putting aside the volumes which were upon its cushions. “no, my dear, but i couldn’t let the night go on without telling you, my dear, as how you’re right and i’m wrong, and i beg your pardon for my temper, and the lies i told ye.”
[513]“oh, mother, pray don’t!” said her daughter infinitely distressed. “i’m sure you never said anything which you did not think it your duty to say.”
“well, my dear, we dress up many bad passions and vanities as duty, but that’s neither here nor there,” said margaret massarene, a white, cumbrous, shapeless figure enveloped in chuddah shawls. “i’ve been wrong to be out of temper with you, and to deny to you as your father’s money was ill got. ill got it was; and all the princes and nobles in the world can’t alter that, though it did seem to me as how they did when i see ’em all a-kneeling and a-sighing round his coffin. ill got it was, and may be you’ve done well to get rid of it, though most folks will call it a pack of stuff to scatter away millions as if ye were scattering barley to chicks. no; hear me out; i shouldn’t hev done this thing myself, and i think ’twould hev been better to do it more gradual like and less high falutin, for it has set all the world gossiping and grubbing in the past; but ’tis done, and i won’t let it be a bone of contention between you and me.”
“i thank you very much,” said katherine humbly, the tears rising to her eyes.
“there aren’t anything to thank me for,” said her mother. “i’m an ignorant body and you’re a learned fine lady—a ‘blue stocking,’ as people say; and your ways of looking at things i can’t follow. i suppose you’ve found ’em in your greek books. but when i told ye i didn’t know as your poor father’s pile was ill got i told you a lie; for many and many’s the night i’ve been kep’ awake thinkin’ o’ the poor souls as he’d turned out of house and home. he was a hard man—smart, as they say over there: and he bought the lawyers right and left, and nobody ever did nought to him—till that man shot him at gloucester gate.”
“mother,” said katherine in a hushed voice, “i have learned who that man was. did ever you know robert airley?”
margaret massarene reflected a minute or two.
“yes, my dear. i mind him well: a long, thin man, soft-spoken and harmless, with a pretty young wife; they came from the north. your father bought his bit o’ land,[514] his ‘placer-claim,’ as they say out there, and found tin on it, and ’tis now in full work is that lode—’tis called the penamunic mine.”
“i know,” said katherine, and she told her mother how she had learned the request of robert airley and what she believed to have been his errand to england.
her mother listened without surprise.
“i mind him well,” she said again. “he must have been driven desperate indeed, for he was a gentle soul and wouldn’t hev hurt a fly when i knew him. i always thought, my dear, as how your father would lose his life through some of those he’d injured; but he’d never no fear himself. he was a great man in many ways, katherine.”
“as modern life measures greatness,” said katherine.
margaret massarene was crying noiselessly.
“’tis so dreadful to think as he got his death through one he wronged,” she murmured between her sobs.
“yes, mother,” said katherine gravely; “and that is why i told you all the money was blood-money and i could not keep it. perhaps you are right. perhaps you are right that i should have done this thing more gradually, more wisely, more secretly, but i acted for the best. i felt as if a curse were on me so long as i did nothing in atonement.”
“i won’t say no more against it, my dear,” said margaret massarene with a heavy sense of resignation. “but you haven’t left yourself a jointure even, and who will ever marry you now?”
katherine smiled.
“do not let that vex you. i will live with you, and you will give me twenty pounds a year for my clothes, and it will be wholesome discipline for me, and i shall be able to have a new gown once a year, which ought to be quite enough.”
“oh, katherine, how can you jest?” said her mother, with fresh tears; for, though the great world had laughed at her, worried her, tortured her, robbed her, harassed her, she had been pleased and proud to be in it, and now she was to “climb down,” and be nobody in particular, and have a penniless daughter who talked of dressing on twenty pounds a year and who would never marry!
[515]“we will be very happy together, mother,” said katherine with a caressing tenderness of tone, rare in her, as she took her mother’s hand, which was resting on the eider-down coverlet of the bed. “i may have done this thing too quickly and not wisely, but i breathe freely and am content.”
margaret massarene sighed.
“my dear, you won’t be happy. you’ll repent. ’tis a pity you weren’t made like the duchess of otterbourne. she wouldn’t have quarrelled with your father’s pile.”
“certainly she would not,” said katherine bitterly, “and i am sorry you wish me like her, mother.”
margaret massarene reflected a moment, drying her tears.
“my dear, ’twould be better for you. people only call you odd and queer. you see, kathleen,” she added with that shrewdness which early life had taught her, “in what you’ve done, you’ve as good as said to all other people that they’re knaves: it’s very bad to be thought above one’s generation, my dear. jesus cleared the temple with a scourge; but they paid him out for it, my dear—they paid him out for it on calvary.”
the excitement which had sustained her throughout her arduous and self-imposed task had subsided and left, as all spent forces do, a sense of lassitude and weariness behind them. a fatigued impression of failure and of loneliness was on her.
she had done what had seemed to her right in the best way which had been open to her. but she could not be sure of the result. she had used great volition, great energy, great resistance in her late work, and her strength had for the time spent itself. it had left a solitude round her in which her personal ego seemed to awake and cry like a lost child in the dark.
her future wore no smile and offered her no companionship. whilst her mother lived she felt that she must not leave her; and margaret massarene was strong and hale, and likely to live long. whilst her mother lived she could never herself attempt to lead any other existence than that which she led now. true, in it she could study as much as she pleased, but study in this moment of depression[516] did not seem to her the alpha and omega of life as it always had done.
all that she had heard, seen, and learned of brutal practical appetites and needs within the past twelve months haunted her; she had cast from her her father’s wealth, but she could not shake off the shadow of his sins. his memory pursued her like a ghost.
it was a morbid and exaggerated idea, she knew that; no one shunned her, no one execrated her—at the utmost people thought her an absurd quixotic young woman, absolutely uninteresting now that she had divested herself of her golden ornaments: she knew that. but she felt herself in spirit and in destiny like the hangman’s daughter, as hurstmanceaux had said, who, through no fault of her own, was shunned by all, and execrated by all, merely because she was the hangman’s daughter!
one day, soon after her return, she was walking again through that pine-wood on the little estate in which, nearly a year earlier, she had been greeted by framlingham. she had a reefer’s jacket on her arm, and held a white sunshade over her head, for the air was very mild. her gown was of that pale silvery grey which she often wore; there were a few malmaison roses and a ruffle of old lace at her throat. she walked slowly and with no energy suggested in her movements; in truth, she felt weary and spiritless. for many months both her intelligence and her volition had been stretched like a bent bow, and now that they were spent the inevitable reaction set in with both her will and her mind. she had accomplished her great task; it was done and could not be undone; she had no illusions about its success, she could only hope that it might bear good fruit.
the grey, still, windless day was without a sound. even the sea was voiceless. the weather and the landscape seemed languid and mournful, like herself. she could not regain her lost energy. she felt as if she had given it away with her father’s fortune.
as regarded her own future she had no illusions either. she expected nothing agreeable from it. she knew that her mother had said quite rightly—she would never be happy. her nature was proud and everything connected[517] with her caused her shame. her affections would have been strong, but they had no object. her talents were unusual, but they were out of harmony with her destiny and her generation. it seemed to her that she had been only created to carry on in her own soul a mute and barren revolt against all the received opinions and objects of the world in general. was the world right, and was she wrong? had she been presumptuous and vain-glorious in opposing her own single opinion to the vast serried masses of human prejudice and custom?
she made her way slowly through the pine trees and the rhododendrons to the bench where she had sat with framlingham, from which the sea was seen and the shores of tennyson’s island were visible. it was a fine calm day, with diaphanous mists in the silvery offing. she thought of the line in the “prometheus,” and of lecomte de lisle’s beautiful rendering of it: “le sourire infini des flots marins.”
some fishing cobles were half a mile off, trawling; in the offing a white-winged vessel—a yacht, no doubt—was bearing toward the island; inland, some church bells were ringing far away, but sweet as a lark’s song. she sat still and wished that she could feel as poets felt, which was perhaps being more near them than she knew. she had sat there some time, the roses faded in the light, and she was so motionless that some wrens in the pine boughs over her head picked larvæ off the branches without heeding her.
she had been there an hour or more, argus sometimes chasing imaginary rabbits, sometimes lying at her feet, when steps crushing the carpet of pine needles behind her made her turn her head.
a tall man wearing yachting clothes was coming through the shadow of the trees; he uncovered his head as he approached, evidently knowing that she was there.
“i beg your pardon,” he said vaguely, with some embarrassment; then he came behind her and stood still—it was hurstmanceaux.
she was so much surprised that she said nothing. he came round the trees and stood in front of the bench on[518] which she was sitting. the light shone on his fair hair and the color rose slightly in his face.
“i beg your pardon,” he said again. “i am an intruder on your privacy, but i have come here on purpose to say to you——” he hesitated, then continued—“to say to you how much admiration and esteem i feel for your noble action.”
she was still too surprised to reply, and almost too troubled by various conflicting and obscure emotions to comprehend him. she could not believe her own ears, and the memory of that false report of which framlingham had spoken seemed buzzing and stinging about her like a swarm of bees.
“i do not suppose you can care for my approval,” he added as she remained silent, “but such as it is worth you command it—and my most sincere respect.”
“everyone thinks me mad,” she said, with a passing smile as she strove to recover her composure.
“do swine see the stars?” he said, with impatient contempt. “of course it looks madness to the world. may i ask one thing—does your mother’s income die with her?”
“yes,” replied katherine, more and more surprised, and vaguely offended at the unceremonious interrogation.
“then if she died to-morrow you would be penniless?”
“what a very odd question!” she said, recovering her self-possession. “certainly i should be so; but i could maintain myself.”
“what would you do?”
“i really cannot say at this moment. play at concerts perhaps, or teach latin or greek to children. i do not see that it can concern anyone except myself.”
his questions, which seemed to her rude and intrusive, had restored her to her natural calmness, though her heart beat a little nervously against the malmaison roses. the sun was in her eyes and she did not look at him, or she would have understood the expression in his own. he came nearer to her; his head was still uncovered.
“i am afraid i have forgotten my greek. will you teach it to me?”
“i really cannot understand you,” she replied, vaguely[519] annoyed and much astonished; if he had been any other man, she would have thought he had taken too much wine at luncheon.
“i must speak more clearly, then,” said ronald with some embarrassment. “will you marry me?”
“how can you jest?”
“i should scarcely jest on such a subject,” said hurstmanceaux. “i mean absolutely what i say. i admire you more than i could tell you. your memory has haunted me ever since that winter walk in the snow. but i, of course, could have never told you so if your father had lived, or if, he being dead, you had kept his money.”
she was silent; she breathed with difficulty; a tremor shook her from head to foot.
she was so utterly amazed, so thunderstruck and stunned, that the light, and the sea, and the stems of trees, and the green woodland shadows, all went round her in dizzy circling mists.
“why are you so surprised? you must have heard many men before now express the same wish as mine.”
“oh! only for one reason.”
“that reason exists no longer. in putting away from you your father’s wealth, you at least acquire the certainty of being sought for yourself.”
“you speak in derision, or in compassion.”
“derision? who could dare deride you? your worst enemy, if you have one, must admire you. as for compassion, if there be any in the desire i have ventured to express to you, it is for myself.”
she was still silent. she was so violently startled and shocked that a sensation of faintness came over her; her lips lost color, her sight was troubled.
“it is utterly impossible,” she said, after long silence, in a low, hoarse voice. “you cannot mean it. you must be out of your mind.”
“i always mean what i say. and i cannot see what there is to surprise you so greatly. true, you know me very little, and the few times i have seen you i have been rude to you.”
“i cannot believe you! it is wholly impossible.”
“it may seem so to you because our only previous interviews[520] have been stormy and cold, and my expressed opinions were offensive, though you were generous enough to say that you agreed with them. but from those interviews i bore away an impression against which i contended in vain. as long as you were the heiress or holder of mr. massarene’s fortune, my lips were sealed. but now that you stand in voluntary and honorable poverty, looking forward to work for your living when your mother dies, i see nothing to prevent my saying to you what i have said.”
“i am not less my father’s daughter.”
“no, and i will not say what is untrue. i wish that you were the daughter of any other man. but in the east i have seen beautiful lilies growing out of heaps of potsherds. you are the lily which i wish to gather. your purity and stately grace are your own; your fine temper and you unsullied character are your own. william massarene is dead. let his sins be buried with him. after all, he was not worse than the great world which flattered and plundered him. you have done all you could to atone for his crimes. do not let his ghost arise to stand between you and me. that is, at least, if you could care for me. perhaps it is impossible.”
she breathed heavily; she felt faint; her sight was obscured.
“you say this to me, to me, to the daughter of william massarene?”
“i will not lie to you; i wish to heaven you were the daughter of any other man. but his vileness cannot affect your honor. you know me very slightly, and i insulted you when we did meet. but there are sympathies which overstep time and efface all injuries. as long as you held your father’s fortune i could say nothing to you; but now there is no barrier between us unless it exist in your own will.”
“but there is your sister!”
his face darkened.
“if you mean the duchess of otterbourne, i have no acquaintance with her.”
“but all your family?”
“i have long borne all the burdens of my family; i am[521] not disposed to consult them on a matter which concerns myself alone. my wife will be respected by all of them. do not fear otherwise. and,” he added, with a smile, “we will not sell our game to leadenhall or send our shetland ponies to the mines.”
the allusion to their walk through the snowy lanes made the absolute reality of what he was saying break in on her like a burst of light, light bewildering and unbearable.
“you must be out of your mind,” she said, in a broken voice, “or you are playing a cruel comedy.”
“i am not a comedian. and why should you suppose it unlikely for a man to love you and respect you?”
“but you!—i am his daughter. you said once—it was like being the hangman’s daughter. i am low-born, low-bred; i am utterly unworthy in my own sight.”
she was painfully agitated. she could not control her emotion. her heart beat tumultuously, her lips were white and trembled.
“madam,” said hurstmanceaux, very gravely and with extreme grace, “you are the woman that i love. if you accept what i offer, i swear to you that my family and the world will receive and reverence my wife. i can say no more. my future is in your hands.”
it was impossible for her to doubt his sincerity; she was silent, overcome by emotion. she did not look at him as she answered.
“i am deeply touched,” she said, in a low tone. “i am honored——”
he gave an impatient movement.
“yes—honored,” she repeated, and her lips quivered.
she paused a moment to steady her voice.
“i appreciate your generosity and your confidence,” she added. “but i cannot wrong either. i cannot do what you say.”
“why?”
“why? for innumerable reasons, for reasons as countless as those sands.”
“one will do! do you dislike me? do you resent?”
she shook her head.
“no. oh, no!”
[522]“do you think you would not be happy with me?”
“i am certain that you would be miserable, and i so too to know that i had caused your misery.”
“allow me to judge for myself. there could be no question of misery for either.”
she made the same gesture of protest and dissent.
“what fantastic folly comes between us!” he said angrily, for he was not a patient man. “you must surely allow me to know my own mind.”
“no doubt you think you know it. i am sure you are wholly sincere. i tell you—you honor me. but the future you wish for would make you wretched. you think you would forget my origin, but you could not do so. you would reproach yourself for having brought base blood into your race; you are prouder than you know—justly proud, i think. you would be too kind to show it, but you would regret every hour of your life. and i—i could not live to see that and know myself the cause.”
“you must think me a poor, weak, flickering fool!”
“not at all. but you are speaking on impulse, and in cold blood you would lament your impulse.”
“i am not speaking on impulse. i come here in deliberate choice after long reflection.”
“and can you say that when you thus reflected you did not feel that marriage with me would sully your race?”
he was silent. he could not and would not lie to her.
“you are nobility and purity yourself,” he answered, after that silence. “you are not responsible for the sins of your father.”
she smiled a little, very sadly.
“nevertheless, i am the hangman’s daughter; and a courcy of faldon must not wed with me. go! god be with you. i thank you for the trust you have shown in me, and i do not abuse it.”
“that is your last word?”
“yes, it must be so.”
he grew very white, and his eyes darkened with anger; he was annoyed and indignant; an immense offence was his first and dominant feeling. he was misunderstood, doubted, rejected, when he had in the fullness of his heart brought and laid at her feet the greatest gift he could[523] offer. he did not stoop to plead with an ingrate. he bowed low to her, and in perfect silence turned away. the sound of his steps on the fallen fir-needles made a faint crackling noise on the still air.
she stood looking seaward, but of sea and of sky seeing nothing.
her dog whined wistfully in sympathy, knowing that her motionless serenity was sorrow.
