“Sir Percival!” I interposed sharply, “have you nothing to say when
my sister has said so much? More, in my opinion,” I added, my unlucky
temper getting the better of me, “than any man alive, in your position,
has a right to hear from her.”
That last rash sentence opened a way for him by which to escape me if
he chose, and he instantly took advantage of it.
“Pardon me, Miss Halcombe,” he said, still keeping his hand over his
face, “pardon me if I remind you that I have claimed no such right.”
The few plain words which would have brought him back to the point from
which he had wandered were just on my lips, when Laura checked me by
speaking again.
“I hope I have not made my painful acknowledgment in vain,” she
continued. “I hope it has secured me your entire confidence in what I
have still to say?”
“Pray be assured of it.” He made that brief reply warmly, dropping
his hand on the table while he spoke, and turning towards us again.
Whatever outward change had passed over him was gone now. His face was
eager and expectant—it expressed nothing but the most intense anxiety
to hear her next words.
“I wish you to understand that I have not spoken from any selfish
motive,” she said. “If you leave me, Sir Percival, after what you
have just heard, you do not leave me to marry another man, you only
allow me to remain a single woman for the rest of my life. My fault
towards you has begun and ended in my own thoughts. It can never go
any farther. No word has passed—” She hesitated, in doubt about the
expression she should use next, hesitated in a momentary confusion
which it was very sad and very painful to see. “No word has passed,”
she patiently and resolutely resumed, “between myself and the person to
whom I am now referring for the first and last time in your presence
of my feelings towards him, or of his feelings towards me—no word ever
can pass—neither he nor I are likely, in this world, to meet again.
I earnestly beg you to spare me from saying any more, and to believe
me, on my word, in what I have just told you. It is the truth, Sir
Percival—the truth which I think my promised husband has a claim to
hear, at any sacrifice of my own feelings. I trust to his generosity to
pardon me, and to his honour to keep my secret.”
“Both those trusts are sacred to me,” he said, “and both shall be
sacredly kept.”
After answering in those terms he paused, and looked at her as if he
was waiting to hear more.
“I have said all I wish to say,” she added quietly—“I have said more
than enough to justify you in withdrawing from your engagement.”
“You have said more than enough,” he answered, “to make it the dearest
object of my life to KEEP the engagement.” With those words he rose
from his chair, and advanced a few steps towards the place where she
was sitting.
She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her. Every
word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a
man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true
woman. Her own noble conduct had been the hidden enemy, throughout, of
all the hopes she had trusted to it. I had dreaded this from the first.
I would have prevented it, if she had allowed me the smallest chance of
doing so. I even waited and watched now, when the harm was done, for a
word from Sir Percival that would give me the opportunity of putting
him in the wrong.
“You have left it to ME, Miss Fairlie, to resign you,” he continued. “I
am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has just shown herself to
be the noblest of her sex.”
He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate enthusiasm,
and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised her head, flushed
up a little, and looked at him with sudden animation and spirit.
“No!” she said firmly. “The most wretched of her sex, if she must give
herself in marriage when she cannot give her love.”
“May she not give it in the future,” he asked, “if the one object of
her husband’s life is to deserve it?”
“Never!” she answered. “If you still persist in maintaining our
engagement, I may be your true and faithful wife, Sir Percival—your
loving wife, if I know my own heart, never!”
She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that
no man alive could have steeled his heart against her. I tried hard to
feel that Sir Percival was to blame, and to say so, but my womanhood
would pity him, in spite of myself.
“I gratefully accept your faith and truth,” he said. “The least that
you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope for from
any other woman in the world.”
Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly
at her side. He raised it gently to his lips—touched it with them,
rather than kissed it—bowed to me—and then, with perfect delicacy and
discretion, silently quitted the room.
She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone—she sat by me, cold
and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground. I saw it was hopeless and
useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her, and held her to me
in silence. We remained together so for what seemed a long and weary
time—so long and so weary, that I grew uneasy and spoke to her softly,
in the hope of producing a change.
The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness. She
suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet.
“I must submit, Marian, as well as I can,” she said. “My new life has
its hard duties, and one of them begins to-day.”
As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which her
sketching materials were placed, gathered them together carefully, and
put them in a drawer of her cabinet. She locked the drawer and brought
the key to me.
“I must part from everything that reminds me of him,” she said. “Keep
the key wherever you please—I shall never want it again.”
Before I could say a word she had turned away to her book-case, and had
taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright’s drawings.
She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume fondly in her
hands—then lifted it to her lips and kissed it.
“Oh, Laura! Laura!” I said, not angrily, not reprovingly—with nothing
but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my heart.
“It is the last time, Marian,” she pleaded. “I am bidding it good-bye
for ever.”
She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened her
hair. It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and shoulders,
and dropped round her, far below her waist. She separated one long,
thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and pinned it carefully, in the
form of a circle, on the first blank page of the album. The moment it
was fastened she closed the volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands.
“You write to him and he writes to you,” she said. “While I am alive,
if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never say I am
unhappy. Don’t distress him, Marian, for my sake, don’t distress him.
If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his
drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no harm, when I am gone, in
telling him that I put it there with my own hands. And say—oh, Marian,
say for me, then, what I can never say for myself—say I loved him!”
She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in my
ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost broke my
heart to hear. All the long restraint she had imposed on herself gave
way in that first last outburst of tenderness. She broke from me with
hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm of
sobs and tears that shook her from head to foot.
I tried vainly to soothe her and reason with her—she was past being
soothed, and past being reasoned with. It was the sad, sudden end for
us two of this memorable day. When the fit had worn itself out she
was too exhausted to speak. She slumbered towards the afternoon, and
I put away the book of drawings so that she might not see it when she
woke. My face was calm, whatever my heart might be, when she opened
her eyes again and looked at me. We said no more to each other about
the distressing interview of the morning. Sir Percival’s name was not
mentioned. Walter Hartright was not alluded to again by either of us
for the remainder of the day.
10th.—Finding that she was composed and like herself this morning, I
returned to the painful subject of yesterday, for the sole purpose of
imploring her to let me speak to Sir Percival and Mr. Fairlie, more
plainly and strongly than she could speak to either of them herself,
about this lamentable marriage. She interposed, gently but firmly, in
the middle of my remonstrances.
“I left yesterday to decide,” she said; “and yesterday HAS decided. It
is too late to go back.”
Sir Percival spoke to me this afternoon about what had passed in
Laura’s room. He assured me that the unparalleled trust she had placed
in him had awakened such an answering conviction of her innocence
and integrity in his mind, that he was guiltless of having felt even
a moment’s unworthy jealousy, either at the time when he was in her
presence, or afterwards when he had withdrawn from it. Deeply as he
lamented the unfortunate attachment which had hindered the progress
he might otherwise have made in her esteem and regard, he firmly
believed that it had remained unacknowledged in the past, and that
it would remain, under all changes of circumstance which it was
possible to contemplate, unacknowledged in the future. This was his
absolute conviction; and the strongest proof he could give of it was
the assurance, which he now offered, that he felt no curiosity to
know whether the attachment was of recent date or not, or who had
been the object of it. His implicit confidence in Miss Fairlie made
him satisfied with what she had thought fit to say to him, and he was
honestly innocent of the slightest feeling of anxiety to hear more.
He waited after saying those words and looked at me. I was so conscious
of my unreasonable prejudice against him—so conscious of an unworthy
suspicion that he might be speculating on my impulsively answering the
very questions which he had just described himself as resolved not
to ask—that I evaded all reference to this part of the subject with
something like a feeling of confusion on my own part. At the same time
I was resolved not to lose even the smallest opportunity of trying
to plead Laura’s cause, and I told him boldly that I regretted his
generosity had not carried him one step farther, and induced him to
withdraw from the engagement altogether.
Here, again, he disarmed me by not attempting to defend himself. He
would merely beg me to remember the difference there was between his
allowing Miss Fairlie to give him up, which was a matter of submission
only, and his forcing himself to give up Miss Fairlie, which was,
in other words, asking him to be the suicide of his own hopes. Her
conduct of the day before had so strengthened the unchangeable love
and admiration of two long years, that all active contention against
those feelings, on his part, was henceforth entirely out of his power.
I must think him weak, selfish, unfeeling towards the very woman
whom he idolised, and he must bow to my opinion as resignedly as he
could—only putting it to me, at the same time, whether her future as
a single woman, pining under an unhappily placed attachment which she
could never acknowledge, could be said to promise her a much brighter
prospect than her future as the wife of a man who worshipped the very
ground she walked on? In the last case there was hope from time,
however slight it might be—in the first case, on her own showing, there
was no hope at all.
I answered him—more because my tongue is a woman’s, and must answer,
than because I had anything convincing to say. It was only too plain
that the course Laura had adopted the day before had offered him the
advantage if he chose to take it—and that he HAD chosen to take it.
I felt this at the time, and I feel it just as strongly now, while
I write these lines, in my own room. The one hope left is that his
motives really spring, as he says they do, from the irresistible
strength of his attachment to Laura.
Before I close my diary for to-night I must record that I wrote to-day,
in poor Hartright’s interest, to two of my mother’s old friends in
London—both men of influence and position. If they can do anything for
him, I am quite sure they will. Except Laura, I never was more anxious
about any one than I am now about Walter. All that has happened since
he left us has only increased my strong regard and sympathy for him.
I hope I am doing right in trying to help him to employment abroad—I
hope, most earnestly and anxiously, that it will end well.
11th.—Sir Percival had an interview with Mr. Fairlie, and I was sent
for to join them.
I found Mr. Fairlie greatly relieved at the prospect of the “family
worry” (as he was pleased to describe his niece’s marriage) being
settled at last. So far, I did not feel called on to say anything
to him about my own opinion, but when he proceeded, in his most
aggravatingly languid manner, to suggest that the time for the marriage
had better be settled next, in accordance with Sir Percival’s wishes,
I enjoyed the satisfaction of assailing Mr. Fairlie’s nerves with as
strong a protest against hurrying Laura’s decision as I could put into
words. Sir Percival immediately assured me that he felt the force of
my objection, and begged me to believe that the proposal had not been
made in consequence of any interference on his part. Mr. Fairlie leaned
back in his chair, closed his eyes, said we both of us did honour to
human nature, and then repeated his suggestion as coolly as if neither
Sir Percival nor I had said a word in opposition to it. It ended
in my flatly declining to mention the subject to Laura, unless she
first approached it of her own accord. I left the room at once after
making that declaration. Sir Percival looked seriously embarrassed
and distressed, Mr. Fairlie stretched out his lazy legs on his velvet
footstool, and said, “Dear Marian! how I envy you your robust nervous
system! Don’t bang the door!”
On going to Laura’s room I found that she had asked for me, and that
Mrs. Vesey had informed her that I was with Mr. Fairlie. She inquired
at once what I had been wanted for, and I told her all that had passed,
without attempting to conceal the vexation and annoyance that I really
felt. Her answer surprised and distressed me inexpressibly—it was the
very last reply that I should have expected her to make.
“My uncle is right,” she said. “I have caused trouble and anxiety
enough to you, and to all about me. Let me cause no more, Marian—let
Sir Percival decide.”