LITMIR.BIZ

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      "Attached to her? Attached to my darling daughter? Are you mad, Osbert?"

      "I don't think so. I am still a bachelor, you know, and the proposal which I put before you is this: If your daughter will undertake the position which her mother declined, we will cry quits, you and I."

      She had almost screamed in the extremity of her surprise and mortification. Had he struck her with a horsewhip she could not have felt more outraged. Fury, resentment, a wild, combative resistance which she could not recognise as jealousy, deprived her for a while of speech. She was choking, inarticulate with the force of blind feeling which shook her as a tempest shakes a tree.

      "You are atrocious!" she ejaculated at last. "Simply atrocious! What can you mean? Virgie won't have you."

      "In that case there will be no need of further discussion," was his answer. "In your place, I think I should at least place the offer before her. Should she accept it, I will make you an allowance of three hundred pounds a year for life, besides undertaking the cost of your son's education. Are there other children?"

      She was staring at him as one may gaze, fascinated, upon a cobra about to strike. "One other," she hurriedly replied. "A little girl—she is lame."

      "Ha!" A dull flush rose to his face. "Cripples seem to haunt your footsteps. Well—in the event of the acceptance of my offer, it shall be my care to see that she has the proper treatment and the best advice."

      "Good gracious me!" slowly said the bewildered woman. "Am I dreaming? Osbert, you must be mad!"

      "Madam, I think you will find that I am considered remarkably sane by most people. Anyway, you have my offer—make what you can of it. I will put it in writing, if you like. Your daughter won't find many husbands who would be willing to marry and provide for the entire family. Yet, you see, such is my devotion, that I am ready to do even this for her charming sake."

      "Devotion? You have no devotion!" she cried wildly. "You are taking advantage of my helplessness to torture me! You would torture Virgie! How can you feel any devotion for a girl you have only set eyes upon once?"

      "Well, we will say it is not devotion that inspires me, but a desire to get a bit of my own back," said he, with a most unpleasant smile. "She will be the Andromeda, sacrificed for the rest of you—offered to the Beast—myself. You flinched from such a fate. If she now undertakes to brave it, will not that be poetic justice?"

      Mrs. Mynors swallowed once or twice, blinked, tried to visualise the impression this speech gave. Since his entrance, nothing that Gaunt said had sounded real. There had been a sarcasm, a jeering cadence; he had been playing with her all the time. But these words had a different ring. He was in earnest. It seemed as if the last sentence revealed to her something of his inner state of mind. It was like coming, in the dusk, upon the sudden mouth of a black pit. She had said, "You would torture Virginia!" and something in his reply suggested that her random words were true.

      She sat staring, confronting the set mask of his face. The old fear of him came back, after twenty years, racing up across the vistas of memory as the Brittany tide races over the St. Malo sands. In this man there was something perverted, something evil, something with which she must hold no traffic, make no bargain. She knew that she ought to end this preposterous interview; to speak a few dignified reproachful words and leave the tempter and his monstrous proposal.

      "Virginia," she managed at last to say, "shall never even know of your horrible suggestion."

      He took his watch from his pocket, glanced at it, replaced it, and spoke.

      "Then you reject this offer unconditionally?"

      "As you foresaw that I should!" she cried, with a burst of tears hastily choked back.

      "Oh, pardon me, I foresaw nothing of the kind. You forget that in old times I knew you rather well; and I never thought you a fool."

      "But you are impossible—outrageous!" she expostulated. "Why should you want to marry Virginia?"

      "I am old enough to know my own mind, I suppose. My reasons—pardon me—are not your concern. My terms are before you, and I am somewhat pressed for time. If you refuse tout court, there is nothing further to be said. I will take my leave. But it seems to me that you might submit the case to the judgment of Miss Mynors. Tell her that I have an estate in Derbyshire, and can settle five thousand pounds upon her, in addition to what I propose doing for her family. If she has anything like her mother's eye to the main chance, she will think twice before turning me down."

      Part of the rage which surged in the woman's heart as she glared at him was sheer jealousy—jealousy of her young, fresh daughter. They had met, those two. He had seen Virginia in a picture-gallery. He, a man of past forty, wanted to marry this girl of twenty! Oh, what a fool! What a fool! When she, the suitable age, the suitable partner, the old, lost love in almost all her old charm, sat there before him!

      "Osbert," she murmured faintly, "don't jeer at me! For pity's sake be yourself, your old self, for five minutes! Tell me the meaning of this unkind jest."

      "Once more, madam, let me assure you that I am in earnest. I mean what I say. I am aware that my proposal does sound quixotic; but I will have it all legally embodied and made certain. If Miss Mynors will marry me, I will do for you what I have said. If she will not, then I regret to be unable to offer you any assistance."

      He took up his hat and rose. "May I know whether you will undertake to convey my offer to your daughter?" he asked. "If you decline, I leave London to-day. I farm my own land, and we are busy at Omberleigh just now. If you decide to tell her, I will await the first post here in London the day after to-morrow; and, in the event of her being favourably inclined, I shall come down to Wayhurst that afternoon."

      Mrs. Mynors clenched her small, ineffectual fists. There he stood, pitiless. Her presence meant nothing to him. It left him utterly unmoved. How he had changed from the days of his emotional youth!

      He was master of the situation. If she arose in her offended majesty, marched off and left him—to what must she return? To absolute pauperism. She had no relatives of her own, and her husband's few distant cousins had been far more frequently appealed to than her daughter knew, and were tired of helping. By promising to let Virginia know his terms, she committed herself to nothing. If there had been an alternative.... But there really was not!

      She, too, rose. "I—I suppose I must tell Virginia," she said sullenly; "but I shall forbid her to accept your preposterous suggestion."

      "Oh, no, you won't," he replied, again with that odious smile. "Too much hangs upon it for you. We part, then, with at least a sporting chance of meeting again. I hope I shall prove a dutiful son-in-law. Good morning."

      He bowed, seeming not to notice her appealing hands, outstretched in one last attempt to pierce his armour.

      He was gone. Thus ended her mission—the last throw of the dice, upon which she had staked so much!

      Nothing now between her and beggary but the remains of the cheque for twenty pounds, sent to her by Mr. Rosenberg.

CHAPTER VI

       Table of Contents

      GAUNT'S TERMS

      "Her hand was close to her daughter's heart And it felt the life-blood's sudden start; A quick deep breath did the damsel draw Like the struck fawn in the oakenshaw."—Rossetti.

      Virginia, lily-pale in the heat, sat at the window of the tiny parlour dignified by the name of dining-room, adding up accounts. She had given Pansy her lunch, eaten some bread and cheese herself, and left the child to her daily afternoon rest while she applied herself to the discussion of ways and means.

      It was Tony's half-holiday, and he would be home, he promised, at five o'clock, to help her carry

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