"I am afraid you must think it very rude of us, leaving you alone on
the last evening of your visit," says Miss Blessington next day to
Esther, as the two girls stand together in the conservatory, picking
bits of heliotrope and maidenhair, and regardless of the ten and twenty
little pots that their long gowns have knocked down; "but, you see, it
is such a long-standing engagement, and we can so seldom induce Sir
Thomas to go to a ball, that we really could hardly get out of it."
She speaks politely, with that friendly suavity that one feels on the
ultimate and penultimate days of their stay to a guest that one is glad
to be rid of.
"Oh, never mind me," says Essie, lightly; "I can always amuse myself:
and, besides, it will be very nearly bedtime by the time you go."
"They intend me to go with them," St. John had said to her overnight,
_à propos_ of this ball, "and of course I intend it too; only
some prophetic instinct tells me that my head will begin to ache
prodigiously towards dressing-time. I am half divided between that and
toothache, only I suppose that the latter necessitates the simulating
of acute bodily torture, and subjects one to unlimited offers of boiled
figs, hopbags, laudanum, and the Lord knows what."
Gerard had found his betrothed stubborner than he had expected as
to her expressed resolution of departure. Looking at the childish
roundness of her soft face, at the dewy meekness of her heavenly eyes,
he had fancied her malleable by his hand, as clay by the potter's;
and so, in most things, she would have been. In most things, it was
to her easier to yield than to resist--less trouble--and, besides, it
pleased people; but in the one prime passion of her life, her love for
her brother, you might as well try to move the Tower of London with
your finger and thumb as to stir her. After half an hour of arguments,
persuasions, caresses, St. John is constrained vexedly to own to
himself that in that young faithful heart _lover_-love holds as yet
only the second place. The sole concession he could win from her was
that of one day, the day of the ball.
"We may imagine the clock put on thirty years, and ourselves already in
possession," he says, laughing--"only minus the gout and wrinkles and
spectacles we shall also have come into possession of by then."
* * * * *
"What the devil do people mean," says Sir Thomas, entering the
morning-room that evening after dinner, with his hair brushed up into
a stiff cockatoo, and tugging away at a huge pair of white kid gloves,
off which he has already succeeded in bursting both buttons, "dragging
a man away from his own fireside to see a lot of fools cutting capers,
and flourishing their heels in each other's faces?"
From Sir Thomas's description one would imagine that the Cancan was
habitually danced at the balls he frequents.
The door opens, and Miss Blessington makes her appearance; looking, not
vain or conscious, but calmly defiant of any one to make a better--a
triumph of lace and tulle and flowers, and milk-white flesh, and grand,
cold curves and contours.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cries Essie, clasping her little hands, with the
unaffected admiration of one handsome woman for another. "I know it is
rude to make personal remarks; but is not she, Lady Gerard?"
"It is a pretty dress," replies miladi, whose unwieldy bulk not even
the cunningest of Parisian _couturières_ has been able to fashion into
anything nearer than an approximation to any shape at all; "but I never
think that Elise's taste is as good as Jane Clarke's used to be."
Constance has walked to a pier-glass, and is examining with anxiety
a bite that a gnat has been savage enough to inflict on her face, a
little under the lower lip, and which has been disturbing her wonted
composed serenity ever since 3 p.m., when the catastrophe took place.
"Does it show much?" she asks, turning with a concerned, serious look
to Esther.
"Oh no! hardly at all."
"I think I will put a little bit of sticking-plaster on it," she
continues, gravely. "It will only look like a patch; and patches are
always so becoming."
"Let me go and get you a bit!" cries Essie, good-naturedly, running off.
When she returns Sir Thomas is saying, fussily: "Now, why is not that
boy dressed? Always the same! Always late! Never in time for anything!"
"He is not coming, Sir Thomas; he has got a headache, and is gone to
lie down--at least he said so," replies Constance, coldly, but casting
a scrutinising glance at Esther (who is deftly, with a small pair of
scissors, cutting out a little circle of sticking-plaster) as she
speaks.
"Stuff and nonsense!" cries "that boy's" papa, angrily--"a pack of
lies! A fine Miss Molly you have made of your son, miladi! He'll be
afraid of going out shooting next year for fear of getting his feet
wet!"
"Is that about the right size?" inquires Esther, timidly, raising a
pair of guilty pink cheeks, and exhibiting the result of her labours on
the point of the scissors.
"Good God! miladi, do take that plaguy long tail of yours up! How the
devil can I help treading on it?"
These are the last sweet words of Sir Thomas, as he follows wife and
ward into the carriage. They are gone, and Essie sits down in the large
empty room to await the resurrection of her lover. The sort of shy
half-fear which always assails her at his expected approach comes over
her more strongly than ever. A distant door bangs faintly somewhere
about the house; then another nearer. "He is coming!" she says to
herself, and the quick blood rushes tingling to her fingers' ends.
It is a hot night, and the tall French windows stand unshuttered and
open. Some impulse of timid coquetry urges her to flee from before him:
she is ashamed that he should see the plain letters of joy written on
her face at his coming: she would fain have yet a few moments of the
happiness of expectancy, to whose delights those of reality are but
seldom comparable. From the terrace a flight of stone steps leads down,
with many a twist, to the mere. In a minute Essie has run lightly down,
and is standing by the water's edge.
The dahlias are nodding their round drowsy heads, and the sentinel
hollyhocks stand up stiff and pompous with their clustered
flower-spikes--rulers and law-givers among the flower-people; the
little ripples are biting with playful tooth the low sedge-banks, and
the tall bulrush forest, whence the coot and the waterhen families
sailed out into life in the warm spring weather. To and fro rock the
heavy, lazy, water-lily leaves, whose bloom-time is past two months
ago. Through her garden, the sky, the high moon walks stately, holding
her silver lamp, in whose light all things shine deliciously.
Essie stands entranced. It seems to her like the intermediate residence
of some happy soul, freed from the world's toil and moil, shrived from
sin, emancipated from life, where it should dwell in tempered bliss
till that last day when heaven's brighter glories, stronger raptures,
should burst upon and clothe it for aye. She strolls along the narrow
gravel path, bathing her hands with childish delight in the moonbeams,
and then stoops and picks up two or three little stones that the
night's sweet alchemy has gifted with a bright short glory not their
own. So stooping, she hears a man's quick firm foot running down
the garden steps. She raises herself, and goes to meet him with "a
moonlight-coloured smile" on her face. "Aren't they lovely?" she asks,
holding up her pebbly treasures for him to look at.
Not speaking, he takes the little pink palm, stones and all, into
his hand, and looks into her face; and then, as if yielding to a
temptation that he hates, that he would fain resist, and to which,
being over-strong, he must yet succumb, he snatches her to his breast,
and kisses her fiercely--eyelids, lips, and neck--with a violence he is
himself hardly conscious of.
"Stop!" she cries, surprised, half-shocked, pushing him away from her.
"What do you mean? You frighten me!"
He recollects himself instantly, and releases her. "It _is_ alarming
being kissed, especially when you are not used to it," he answers, with
a sneer.
She looks up at him in blank astonishment. Has he gone mad? Is it the
moonlight that has given him that white wrathy look?
"Something has happened!" she says, quickly. "What is it? tell me!"
"Oh! nothing--a mere bagatelle!" he replies, with a little bitter
laugh. "It is only that I have been hearing a pleasant piece of news."
"What is it?"
"Only that an acquaintance of mine is going to be married!"
"Is it an acquaintance of mine too?"
"About the most intimate you have, I should say: yourself, in fact!"
"Is that news?" she asks, trying to smile. "I _am_ going to be married,
am not I, to you?"
"I am not aware that my name is--Brandon," he answers, coldly, while
his sorrowful, fierce eyes go through her heart like poisoned arrows.
She turns her head aside and groans. A great vague darkness blots out
the broad moon, and the stars' thick cohorts; the bright water beside
her grows black as hell's sluggish rivers.
He had not known how much he had been buoyed up by hope till that mute
gesture of hers bid him despair.
"It's true, then?" he asks in a voice of sharp rage and anguish,
catching hold of the white wonder of her arm, on which his fingers,
unwittingly cruel, leave crimson prints.
"Is _what_ true?" she asks, faintly, trying for yet a little longer to
stave off Fate, to push away Nemesis, with her weak woman-fingers.
"That you are--God! am I choking?--engaged to Brandon?"
"I was once," she falters under her breath.
"How long ago?"
"When first I came here."
"And since then you have written to break it off?" he asks, while a
tone of joyful hope vibrates in his deep voice.
"No, I have not," she answers, in a frightened whisper.
St. John's face gathers blackness. "I am to understand, then," he
resumes, in a constrained voice, out of which the man's strong will
keeps the pent passion from bursting forth, "that you belonged to
him at the time when I kept you out of bed one night to listen to an
interesting chapter in my own autobiography?"
"Yes."
"And when, in reply to my inquiries, you denied having any connection
beyond common acquaintance with--with him?"
"Yes."
"And when you were good enough to overlook all trifling obstacles, and
to consent to marry me?"
"Yes."
The little catechism ended, the last cobweb of doubt torn away, they
stand dumb. Esther's guilty head sinks down on her breast as a flower's
head sinks overladen with rain. Suddenly she looks up and stretches out
her arms. "Speak to me!" she says, huskily. "Curse me! strike me! call
me some bad name--only speak!"
"I wish to God you were a man!" he answers, in a hard, low voice; while
his straight brows draw together into one dark line across his face,
and his lips look white and thin under his moustache.
"That you might _kill_ me!" she says, incoherent with excitement.
"Well, kill me now! If revenge is so pleasant to you, I give you leave!"
"Let us have no heroics, please," says he, contemptuously; "you don't
appear to be aware that it is not the fashion for English gentlemen to
murder women who make fools of them. It may be a sensible practice, but
it is at present confined to the _tiers état_."
Having spoken, he makes a slight movement to depart.
"Are you going to give me up?" she cries, smiting her hands together,
and forgetting in her great dismay to reflect whether the remonstrance
accorded well with her dignity or not.
"I have no claim upon you," he answers, icily.
"What do you mean?" she cries, passionately. "You are unjust. There
could be nothing too bad for _him_ to say of me, but what injury have
I done you? You ought to thank me and praise me for having been wicked
and dishonourable and double-dealing for your sake."
"For my sake!" he repeats, with a sardonic smile. "I am hardly so
conceited as to take it personally."
"What do you mean?" she asks, quickly. "If I did not do it for your
sake, for whose did I?"
He is silent.
"Do you mean," she inquires, slowly, her cheeks paling to the whiteness
of snowdrops blowing, "that you think I gave him up because I wanted
to be a grand lady--because I wanted to have all these fine things"
(looking round at the flowering gardens, at the broad lake, at the
stately house shimmering in the moonshine) "belonging to me?"
Still he holds his peace.
"Is that what you meant?" she repeats, urgently.
"I meant," he says, looking up, his eyes flashing with a hard, metallic
gleam, "that you thought a rich man a better investment than a poor
one, and, being equally and conveniently indifferent to both, you
thought it wisest to select the former."
"If such is your opinion of me," she says, turning away indignantly, "I
don't wonder at your being in such a hurry to be rid of me!"
He looks askance at her out of the corners of his eyes. She has hidden
her face in her hands, but by the panting breast and heaved white
shoulder he sees that she is weeping--that a storm of sobs is shaking
her childish frame.
"I am in a hurry to be rid of you!" he says, harshly, steeling himself
against her. "From a woman who could throw a man over with the
deliberate, cold-blooded artlessness you have done, one may well sing
'Te Deum' for being rescued in time."
She flings up her little head proudly, and the dusk splendour of her
eyes blazes through great tears. "Listen to me!" she says, laying hold
of his arm with one small burning hand. "I am a bad girl, I know, but
I am not the calculating, mercenary wretch you take me for. I tell you
honestly that the first day I came here--I had never been staying at
a great house before--I thought it must be pleasant to live in large
rooms, and have gilt and ormolu and fine pictures about one, and to
have carriages and horses and servants, and not to be obliged to think
twice before one spent sixpence; and I thought, too" (her long neck
droops, and she blushes painfully as she makes the confession), "what
a pity it was that I was already engaged, for that otherwise, as I was
pretty, you might have taken a fancy to me----" She stops, choked with
maiden shame. Upon his averted face an enduring flush, like a hectic
autumn leaf's, burns red and angry.
"But as soon as I saw you, almost," she continues, commanding her
tears with great difficulty--"as soon as you spoke to me, all such
thoughts went out of my head. I don't know why they did," she says,
simply. "You were not particularly pleasant or civil; I did not think
you good-looking, and you gave me the idea of being ill-tempered; but"
(with a sigh) "one cannot reason about those sort of things. I began to
think so much about what you _were_, that I forgot to remember what you
had."
He makes no comment upon her confession.
"Do you believe me?" she asks, eagerly, her little fingers tightening
their clasp upon his coat-sleeve.
Still he is dumb.
"Do you?" she repeats, excitedly, the quick breath passing to and fro
pantingly across the threshold of her crimson lips.
"Why do you insist on making me uncivil?" he says, with a sarcastic
smile. "I do _not_ believe you. I dare say you fancy you are telling
truth; but if another man were to come on the scene with a few
thousands a-year more, and a higher position in the social scale, you
would enact the same part over again. Women must be true to their
instincts. Those who are bent on rising must kick down the ladder by
which they have climbed: it is an irreversible law."
"You are mistaken," she says, eagerly. "I have no desire to climb; if I
came here with any silly, childish idea that rich people were happier
than poor ones, I have been quite disillusioned. Bob" (how oddly the
little unromantic name comes in among her heroics!)--"Bob is a happier
man than you are, though he is only a lieutenant in a foot regiment,
and has next to nothing to live upon."
"I have no doubt that _Bob_" (with a little sneering emphasis on the
monosyllable) "is in all respects a very superior person to me," says
St. John, with a bitter pale smile, like a gleam of wrathful sunlight
on a day of east wind and clouds and driving sleet.
"I quite agree with you," she answers eagerly, her great eyes flashing
angry, like unwonted meteors that blaze fitful in the winter sky, "and
I wish to Heaven I had never left him!"
Over Gerard's features a spasm, contracting and puckering them, passes
ugly and painful; his hands clench themselves in the mightiness of
his effort to govern his smitten soul. "That is easily remedied," he
answers, after a little pause, in a clear cold voice. "Why should not
you go back to him as you came? There is no reason why he should ever
hear of this--this _episode_, this _interlude_, this _farce_."
"And you think that I am to be bandied about like a bale of goods!" she
cries, scornfully, voice trembling and lip quivering with passion. "You
are like the woman in the Judgment of Solomon, who said, 'Let it be
neither mine nor thine, but divide it!' _You_ love me! You never did!"
"Perhaps not," he answers, with slow difficulty; "perhaps what I loved
was my ideal that I fancied I had found in you, and when I found I was
mistaken, perhaps the love went too! My God, I wish it had!"
Through the proud calmness of his voice penetrates a tone of bitter,
unwilling tenderness. Hearing it, her whole soul is melted into fresh,
quick tears.
"It is not my ideal, or any one else's, that I love in you!" she cries,
stretching out eager white arms towards him; "it is yourself--your very
self! Oh, if I could but tear out my heart, and show it you! Oh! why
won't you believe me?"
He looks at her--looks at the innocently-wooing arms, at the
tear-stained, dimpled, tremulous face--and feels his resolution wasting
away like wax before the fire, as Samson's wasted away in Delilah's
lap. He turns his eyes away across the cool silvered flood, and hardens
his heart against her.
"Why cannot you?" she repeats, in her sweet, vibrating voice.
"Because I have not the faith that removes mountains," he answers,
harshly; "because a thing must be probable, or at least possible,
before I can give credit to it; because I am unable to understand how,
for a man whom you confess to having thought ill-looking, ill-tempered,
and ill-mannered, you could, out of pure disinterested love, throw
over one to whom you must, at least, have pretended to be sincerely
attached."
"I never pretended anything of the kind," she answers, vehemently. "If
you don't believe me, ask him. I was engaged to him because he seemed
unhappy, and because I did not see any particular reason why I should
not, and because he asked me."
Through all his bitter, surging wrath, St. John can hardly forbear a
smile. "And you became engaged to me because I asked you?" he says,
drily. "At that rate, there is no reason why the number of your
aspirants should not be increased _ad infinitum_.
"And were you going to play the play out to the end, may I ask, and
_marry_ us both?" he inquires, in the same cutting key.
No woman can stand being sneered at; she much prefers having the tables
and chairs flung at her head.
"Do you think it manly or witty to jeer at me," cries Essie, stung
almost to madness by his taunts, "because I have been fool enough to
desert for you a man worth a hundred of you?"
Gerard stands motionless in the moonlight, with folded arms, and a
chill, painful smile on his stern mouth. "I have already announced my
conviction of his superiority, and have advised you to return to him,"
he says.
"Do you mean _really?_" asks Essie, her wild, wide eyes flaming in
half-incredulous fear on his face.
"I do," he answers, with icy steadiness.
"And you have done with me altogether?" she says, brokenly, her tears
forcing their way through her slight shielding fingers, and falling one
after another, slow and heavy, on the stones at her feet. "Serve me
right!--Serve me right!"
Once again, intoxicated by her great fairness, he goes nigh to
pardoning her; once again his obstinate will comes to his aid. "If I
were to marry you now," he says, resolutely, "my life would be one long
suspicion: I should love you madly, and should disbelieve in you."
With that, and his saying he should love her madly, a little creeping
hope steals warmly about her heart. "Why should you disbelieve in me?"
she asks, putting out a timid peace-making hand.
"Because a faith once broken can never be mended," he answers,
sternly--"it may be patched up, but a patched faith will not do to go
through life with; because a woman who has deceived a man once for one
object may deceive him a second time for another. I should never," he
says (words coming quicker and emotion deepening as he proceeds), "look
in your sweet eyes without thinking I read some treachery in them; I
should never press your heart against mine without fearing that it was
beating for some one else."
She withdraws her rejected hand, and falls to weeping sorelier than
ever, but very mutely.
"What madness induced you to tell me so many lies?" he cries,
passionately, with mournful severity. "Were you bent on putting a gulf,
that could never be bridged through all eternity, between us? Did not
you know that that is the one sin I could never forget or forgive?"
She looks down humbled and crestfallen, and says, sobbingly, "I was
afraid of you. I thought that, if I told you, I should lose you as I
have done now, without telling you. I was on the point of speaking two
or three times, but you looked so angry that my courage failed, and I
_dared_ not."
"Afraid of me!" he says, reproachfully. "By your own showing, then, you
could not have loved me perfectly, for 'perfect love casteth out fear,'
If you are afraid of me, it is indeed time for us to part."
"I see you are bent on misconstruing every word I say," she says,
hopelessly, and yet with a little petulant movement of shoulder and
head, "and so I'll hold my tongue."
He looks at her, not relentingly, but with infinite sadness. "I almost
wish that Constance had left me in my Fool's Paradise!" he says.
"Constance!" exclaims Esther, quickly. "Was it she that told you?"
"It was," he answers, quietly: "she heard it this morning; she was
annoyed with me for not going to the ball, and chose this ingenious
and, I must say, complete mode of revenge."
"What _had_ I done to her?" says Essie, bringing her two hands together
sharply, and looking upwards to Heaven's great black, blue floor above
her,
"Thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
"What _had_ I done to her," she says, in a sort of wonder, "that she
should do me such a mischief?"
Looking at her as she stands with upturned eyes, like some sweet
prayerful saint or penitent Magdalen, drawn by a cunning hand that
has been resolved three centuries back into elemental dust--dust that
has stopped a bunghole perhaps, like Alexander's--Gerard's resolution
breaks a little; not his resolution of parting from her--_that_ remains
firm as ever--but his power of so parting with nonchalant coldness.
"Child!" he cries, a little roughly, and yet with a half-groan, placing
a hand heavily on each of her shoulders--"Child! why are you so pretty?
If it was your nature to be deceitful and underhand, why could not you
be ugly too? Your beauty is the one thing about you that I believe in,
and it drives me distracted!"
"And yet," she answers, with a melancholy smile, "you told me just now,
very calmly, to go back to--to _him:_ you seemed to contemplate with
great equanimity the prospect of seeing me and my _distracting beauty_"
(with a bitter emphasis) "in another man's possession."
"You are mistaken," he answers, with quick violence. "By God's help,
I'll never see you again after to-night."
Hearing that heavy sentence, her knees tremble beneath her a little; a
momentary dimness comes over her eyes; voice, breath, and heart seem
to suspend their functions. No word of protest, of lamentation, of
entreaty, crosses her whitened lips.
"What right have I to be with you?" he asks, indignantly--"I, who
cannot see you without coveting you? What right have I to steal another
man's wife, any more than his horse or his money?"
"Let me go, then," she answers, with a low, moaning sigh--"since it
must be so. You know what is right better than I do. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!" he answers, very shortly, and turns away his head sharply,
that only the lake and the stars may see the distortion that the
passion of that parting is working on his face.
"Say you forgive me before I go!" says the tender, tremulous voice,
that might unman a hero--might unsaint an anchorite--as she lingers yet
a little minute beside him.
"Why should I say what is not true?" he asks, turning round roughly
upon her. "I don't forgive you, and never shall, either in this world
or the next."
"You must!" she says, sobbingly, the words coming a little wildly
through a tempest of tears. "I cannot go unless you do; if I went now,
I should remember you all my life as you are to-day; to-day would blot
out all the happy hours we have been together!"
For all answer he turns away from her, and buries his face in his hands.
"Look at me kindly once again!" she says, calmness growing out of her
strong emotion, putting up her two small hands and trying to draw his
away from before his hidden face. "I may be very wicked; I suppose I
am--as you say so--mean, underhand, deceitful; but yet, for the sake of
what is gone, look at me kindly once again: that won't hurt you, as it
is for the very last time!"
Still Gerard remains speechless--not from obstinacy, but because he
cannot command his voice: and his pride revolts from speaking shakily,
quaveringly, like an hysterical woman or paralytic old man.
"If I were a thief, or a murderer!" she says, indignantly, withdrawing
her hands, "you could not turn from me with greater loathing!"
"You are a murderer!" he answers, with fierce vehemence, looking at
her once again as she had asked him--looking at her with wrathful,
reluctant passion, but not kindly. "You have murdered my whole
future--my hope, my belief in women, in truth--my everything of life
but what is merely animal. If you had murdered my body I could have
forgiven you much more easily. Time or disease must have done that
sooner or later, but now--" He stops abruptly.
"If I am a murderer, I am a suicide too," she replies, with a smile
more tearful than her tears. "St. John," she says, earnestly, "don't
you know that people always attend to dying requests, however foolish
and unreasonable they may be? This of mine is a dying request, for
after to-night I shall be dead to you. Say, 'Essie, I forgive you.'"
"What is it to you whether I forgive you or not?" he inquires,
sullenly, with a certain savage pulling and biting of his moustache.
"Are you mistaking me for Brandon again? Why should two indifferent
acquaintances like us go through the farce of begging each other's
pardons? What are we to one another?"
"Nothing," she answers, calmly; "you need not be so eager to remind
me of that; my memory needs no refreshing; but we _have been_
something--do what you will you cannot take that away from me--so for
the sake of that 'have been,' say you forgive me!"
"Falsehoods don't pass my lips so glibly as they do yours," he answers,
doggedly. "If I were to say, 'I forgive you' a thousand times, I should
be no nearer the doing it. Good-bye!" he says again, abruptly, putting
out his hand; feeling that the strain is too great for him, and that
if it last much longer he, being but human, will break under it. Her
answering farewell is to fling herself upon his breast.
"I can no more say 'good-bye,'" she says, desperately, in a passionate
whisper, "than you can say 'I forgive you.' St. John, take me back, try
me once again! I know I ought not to say it--that it is undignified,
unwomanly, perhaps--but I cannot see my everything going away from me
without reaching out a hand to stop it. Oh, my darling! give me one
more trial!"
Her arms cling about his brown throat close as the bindweed clings
about the hedges in sultry August; her white warm breast heaves and
pants against his, as the sea heaves and pants against the shore's
tawny sides; her eyes, impassioned as only dark eyes can be--alluring,
despairing--flame into his eyes, and down through his eyes into his
heart. Prisoned in those sweet, frail fetters, he feels strength and
name and fame ebbing from him, as Merlin's ebbed under Vivien's wily
charm.
"Is not it better to be tricked by such a woman," Passion whispers,
"than to spend long æons of unswerving fidelity with one less
maddeningly fair? Were not such moments of ecstasy very cheaply
purchased, even by years of suspicion and deceit?" But Will and Honour
push her back with their strong right hands. "She has deceived you
once, and therefore she will deceive you twice. She is enacting _this_
melodrama on _your_ breast: she may enact the next on another man's.
Put her away!--put her away!"
Hearkening to them, he, with a groan as of one that teareth out his
right eye, with relentless fingers unfastens her arms from about his
neck. "_Your_ darling!" he says, contemptuously; "you are forgetting
whom you are addressing!"
"I am, indeed," she answers, with a sudden revulsion of feeling; "but
it is a mistake that one does not make twice in a lifetime."
"I hope not," he answers, taking, refuge in surly rudeness from the
almost overpowering temptation to fall at her feet and say, "Essie,
come to me! deceive me! outwit me! overreach me; do what you please,
I cannot help it! If there were a thousand Brandons and ten thousand
treacheries between us, I _must_ be yours, and you _must_ be mine!"
"I have degraded myself once to the dust before you," rejoins Essie, in
a voice that tries to be angry, but is only trembling; "but there is no
fear of my doing it again. And yet," she continues, after a pause, her
soft nature making it more difficult for her to part from him in anger
than to incur his contempt by again descending to supplication--"and
yet, since I have confessed to having been wicked, you might as well
forgive me. How much the better will you be for going through life
with the consciousness that you have made one wretched woman even more
unhappy than she would otherwise have been? You forgave that other girl
who deceived you because she did not love you. Forgive me, who deceived
you, because I loved you too well!"
"I forgave her," he answers, sternly, "because I had ceased to care
about her--because what she stole from me had lost its value. Perhaps
at some future period I may be in the same frame of mind towards you;
at present I am some way off it. I neither can forgive you, nor have I
the slightest wish to do so!"
Seeing that she is abasing herself in vain, she refrains. "Well, then,
since you wish it, so it must be," she answers, with meek despair;
and catching suddenly his hand before he has time to prevent her, she
kisses it very humbly and sorrowfully. Then, unforgiven, unrecalled,
she passes away. And Gerard, the battle over, the victory won, sits
down on a garden-seat, and cries like a child for his pretty lost
plaything.