“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 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. “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 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 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 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 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, 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.”
“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, 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!
“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 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 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 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 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 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 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!”
“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
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.