"It is scarcely fair of you to judge everything by the
money-standard,"--I said,--then, after a little pause I added what in my
own heart I knew to be a lie,--"She,--Sibyl,--loves me for myself
alone."
His glance flashed over me like lightning.
"Oh!--sets the wind in that quarter! Why then, my dear Geoffrey, I
congratulate you more heartily than ever. To conquer the affections of
one of the proudest girls in England, and win her love so completely as
to be sure she would marry you even if you had not a sou to bless
yourself with--this is a victory indeed!--and one of which you may well
be proud. Again and yet again I congratulate you!"
Tossing the horrible thing he called his 'sprite' off to fly on one of
its slow humming circuits round the room, he shook my hand fervently,
still smiling,--and I,--feeling instinctively that he was as fully aware
of the truth as I was, namely, that had I been a poor author with
nothing but what I could earn by my brains, the Lady Sibyl Elton would
never have looked at me, much less agreed to marry me,--kept silence
lest I should openly betray the reality of my position.
"You see"--he went on, with a cheerful relentlessness--"I was not aware
that any old-world romance graced the disposition of one so apparently
impassive as your beautiful fiancée. To love for love's sake only, is
becoming really an obsolete virtue. I thought Lady Sibyl was an
essentially modern woman, conscious of her position, and the necessity
there was for holding that position proudly before the world at all
costs,--and that the pretty pastoral sentiments of poetical Phyllises
and Amandas had no place in her nature. I was wrong, it seems; and for
once I have been mistaken in the fair sex!" Here he stretched out his
hand to the 'sprite,' that now came winging its way back, and settled at
once on its usual resting-place; "My friend, I assure you, if you have
won a true woman's true love, you have a far greater fortune than your
millions,--a treasure that none can afford to despise."
His voice softened,--his eyes grew dreamy and less scornful,--and I
looked at him in some astonishment.
"Why Lucio, I thought you hated women?"
"So I do!" he replied quickly--"But do not forget why I hate them! It is
because they have all the world's possibilities of good in their hands,
and the majority of them deliberately turn these possibilities to evil.
Men are influenced entirely by women, though few of them will own
it,--through women they are lifted to heaven or driven to hell. The
latter is the favourite course, and the one almost universally
adopted."
His brow darkened, and the lines round his proud mouth grew hard and
stern. I watched him for a moment,--then with sudden irrelevance I
said--
"Put that abominable 'sprite' of yours away, will you? I hate to see you
with it!"
"What, my poor Egyptian princess!" he exclaimed with a laugh--"Why so
cruel to her Geoffrey? If you had lived in her day, you might have been
one of her lovers! She was no doubt a charming person,--I find her
charming still! However, to oblige you--" and here, placing the insect
in its crystal receptacle he carried it away to the other end of the
room. Then, returning towards me slowly, he said--"Who knows what the
'sprite' suffered as a woman, Geoffrey! Perhaps she made a rich
marriage, and repented it! At anyrate I am sure she is much happier in
her present condition!"
"I have no sympathy with such a ghastly fancy,"--I said abruptly--"I
only know that _she_ or _it_ is a perfectly loathsome object to me."
"Well,--some 'transmigrated' souls _are_ loathsome objects to look
at;"--he declared imperturbably--"When they are deprived of their
respectable two-legged fleshly covering, it is extraordinary what a
change the inexorable law of Nature makes in them!"
"What nonsense you talk, Lucio!" I said impatiently--"How can you know
anything about it!"
A sudden shadow passed over his face, giving it a strange pallor and
impenetrability.
"Have you forgotten"--he said in deliberately measured accents--"that
your friend John Carrington, when he wrote that letter of introduction I
brought from him to you, told you in it, that in all matters scientific
I was an 'absolute master?' In these 'matters scientific' you have not
tested my skill,--yet you ask--'how can I know?' I answer that I do
know--many things of which you are ignorant. Do not presume too much on
your own intellectual capability my friend,--lest I prove it
naught!--lest I demonstrate to you, beyond all possibility of consoling
doubt, that the shreds and strippings of that change you call death, are
only so many embryos of new life which you _must_ live, whether you will
or no!"