LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

you would not weep."

      "I weep for the death of our friendship," she answered sorrowfully.

      "You should smile at the birth of our love. Great Heaven! what is there to stand between us and consummate bliss?"

      "Your own resolve, my lord. You are determined to take no second wife; and I am determined to be no man's mistress. Be sure that in all our friendship I never thought of marriage, nor of courtship – I never angled for a noble husband. But when you profess yourself my lover, I must needs give you a plain answer."

      "Tonia, surely your soul can rise above trivial prejudices! You who have boldly avowed your scorn of Churchmen and their creeds, who have neither hope of heaven nor fear of hell, can you think the tie between a man and woman who love as we do – yes, dearest, I protest you love me – can you believe that bond more sacred for being mumbled by a priest, or stronger for being scrawled in a parish register? By Heaven, I thought you had a spirit too lofty for vulgar superstitions!"

      "There is one superstition I shall ever hold by – the belief that there are honest women in the world."

      "Pshaw, child! Be but true to the man who adores you, and you will be the honestest of your sex. Fidelity to her lover is honour in woman; and she is the more virtuous who is constant without being bound. Nance Oldfield, the honestest woman I ever knew, never wore a wedding-ring."

      "I think, sir," she began in a low and earnest voice that thrilled him, "there are two kinds of women – those who can suffer a life of shame, and those who cannot."

      "Say rather, madam, that there are women with hearts and women without. You are of the latter species. Under the exquisite lines of the bosom I worship nature has placed a block of ice instead of a heart."

      A street cry went wailing by like a dirge, "Strawberries, ripe strawberries. Who'll buy my strawberries?"

      Kilrush wiped the cold dampness from his forehead, and resumed his pacing up and down, then stopped suddenly and surveyed the room, flinging up his hands in a passionate horror.

      "Good God! that you should exist in such a hovel as this, while my great empty house waits for you, while my coach-and-six is ready to carry us on the road to an Italian paradise! There is a villa at Fiesole, on a hill above Florence. Oh, to have you there in the spring sunshine, among the spring flowers, all my own, my sweet companion, animæ dimidium meæ, the dearer half of my soul. Antonia, if you are obstinate and reject me, you will drive me mad!"

      He dropped into a chair, with his head averted from her, and hid his face in his hands. She saw his whole frame shaken by his sobs. She had never seen a man cry before, and the spectacle unnerved her. If she could have yielded – if that stubborn pride of womanhood, which was her armour against the tempter, could have given way, it would have been at the sight of his tears. For a moment her lot trembled in the balance. She longed to kneel at his feet, to promise him anything he could ask rather than to see his distress; but pride came to the rescue.

      Choking with tears, she rushed to the door.

      "Farewell, sir," she sobbed; "farewell for ever."

      She ran downstairs to the bottom of the house, and to Mrs. Potter's parlour behind the kitchen, empty at this hour, where she threw herself upon the narrow horsehair sofa, and sobbed heart-brokenly. Yet even in the midst of her weeping she listened for the familiar step upon the stairs above, and for the opening and shutting of the street door. It was at least ten minutes before she heard Kilrush leave the house, and then his footfall was so heavy that it sounded like a stranger's.

      CHAPTER VII.

      PRIDE CONQUERS LOVE

      Except the awful, the inexorable blank that Death leaves in the heart of the mourner, there is no vacancy of mind more agonizing than that which follows the defeat of a lover and the sudden cessation of an adored companionship. To Kilrush the whole world seemed of one dull grey after he had lost Antonia. The town, the company of which he had long been weary, now became actually hateful, and his only desire was to rush to some remote spot of earth where the very fact of distance might help him to forget the woman he loved. A man of a softer nature would have yielded to his charmer's objections, and sacrificed his pride to his love; but with Kilrush, pride – long-cherished pride of race and name – and a certain stubborn power of will prevailed over inclination. He suffered, but was resolute. He told himself that Antonia was cold and calculating, and unworthy of a generous passion like his. She counted, perhaps, on conquering his resolve, and making him marry her; and he took a vindictive pleasure in the thought of her vexation as the days went by without bringing him to her feet.

      "Farewell for ever," she had cried, yet had hoped, perhaps, to see him return to her to-morrow, like some small country squire, who thinks all England will be outraged if he marry beneath his rural importance, yet yields to an irresistible love for the miller's daughter or the village barmaid.

      "I have lived through too many fevers to die of this one," Kilrush thought, and braced his nerves to go on living, though all the colour seemed washed out of his life.

      While his heart was being lacerated by anger and regret, he was surprised by the appearance of his cousin, the ci-devant captain of Dragoons, of whose existence he had taken no account since his afternoon visit to Clapham. He was in his library, a large room at the back of the house, looking into a small garden shadowed by an old brick wall, and overlooked by the back windows of Pall Mall, which looked down into it as into a green well. The room was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and the favourite calf binding of those days made a monotone of sombre brown, suggestive of gloom, even on a summer day, when the scent of stocks and mignonette was blown in through the open windows.

      Kilrush received his kinsman with cold civility.

      Not even in the splendour of his court uniform had George Stobart looked handsomer than to-day in his severely cut grey cloth coat and black silk waistcoat. There was a light in his eyes, a buoyant youthfulness in his aspect, which Kilrush observed with a pang of envy. Ah, had he been as young, Fate and Antonia might have been kinder.

      George put down his hat, and took the chair his cousin indicated, chilled somewhat by so distant a greeting.

      "I saw in Lloyd's Evening Post that your lordship intended starting for the Continent," he began, "and I thought it my duty to wait upon you before you left town."

      "You are very good – and Lloyd is very impertinent – to take so much trouble about my movements. Yes, George, I am leaving England."

      "Do you go far, sir?"

      "Paris will be the first stage of my journey."

      "And afterwards?"

      "And afterwards? Kamschatka, perhaps, or – hell! I am fixed on nothing but to leave a town I loathe."

      George looked inexpressibly shocked.

      "I fear your lordship is out of health," he faltered.

      "Fear nothing, hope nothing about me, sir; I am inclined to detest my fellow-men. If you take that for a symptom of sickness, why then I am indeed out of health."

      "I am sorry I do not find you in happier spirits, sir, for I had a double motive in waiting on you."

      "So have most men – in all they do. Well, sir?"

      Kilrush threw himself back in his chair, and waited his cousin's communication with no more interest in his countenance or manner than if he were awaiting a petition from one of his footmen.

      Nothing could be more marked than the contrast between the two men, though their features followed the same lines, and the hereditary mark of an ancient race was stamped indelibly on each. A life of passionate excitement, self-will, pride, had wasted the form and features of the elder, and made him look older than his actual years. Yet in those attenuated features there was such exquisite refinement, in that almost colourless complexion such a high-bred delicacy, that for most women the elder face would have been the more attractive. There was a pathetic appeal in the countenance of the man who had lived his life, who had emptied the cup of earthly joys, and for whom nothing remained but decay.

      The young man's highest graces were his air of frankness and high

Скачать книгу