Starvecrow Farm. Weyman Stanley John

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СКАЧАТЬ for your future. But they would not take you back."

      "And now-what on your own account?" she asked, almost flippantly. "Something, I suppose?"

      "Yes," he said, answering her slowly, and with a steady look of condemnation. For in all honesty the girl's attitude shocked and astonished him. "I have something to say on my own account. Something. But it is difficult to say it."

      She turned to him and raised her eyebrows.

      "Really!" she said. "You seem to speak so easily."

      He did not remark how white, even against the pale shimmer of the lake, was the face that mocked him; and her heartlessness seemed dreadful to him.

      "I wish," he said, "to say only one thing on my own account."

      "There is only one thing you must not say," she retorted, turning on him without warning and speaking with concentrated passion. "I have been, it may be, as foolish as you say. I am only nineteen. I may have been, I don't know about that, very wicked-as wicked as you say. And what I have done in my folly and in my-you call it wickedness-may be a disgrace to my family. But I have done nothing, nothing, sir," – she raised her head proudly-"to disgrace myself personally. Do you believe that?"

      And then he did notice how white she was.

      "If you tell me that, I do believe it," he said gravely.

      "You must believe it," she rejoined with sudden vehemence. "Or you wrong me more cruelly than I have wronged you!"

      "I do believe it," he said, conquered for the time by a new emotion.

      "Then now I will hear you," she answered, her tone sinking again. "I will hear what you wish to say. Not that it will bend me. I have injured you. I own it, and am sorry for it on your account. On my own I am unhappy, but I had been more unhappy had I married you. You have been frank, let me be frank," she continued, her eyes alight, her tone almost imperious. "You sought not a wife, but a mother for your child! A woman, a little better bred than a nurse, to whom you could entrust the one being, the only being, you love, with less chance of its contamination," she laughed icily, "by the lower orders! If you had any other motive in choosing me it was that I was your second cousin, of your own respectable family, and you did not derogate. But you forgot that I was young and a woman, as you were a man. You said no word of love to me, you begged for no favour; when you entered a room, you sought my eye no more than another's, you had no more softness for me than for another! If you courted me at all it was before others, and if you talked to me at all it was from the height of wise dullness, and about things I did not understand and things I hated! Until," she continued viciously, "at last I hated you! What could be more natural? What did you expect?"

      A little colour had stolen into his face under the lash of her reproaches. He tried to seem indifferent, but he could not. His tone was forced and constrained when he answered.

      "You have strange ideas," he said.

      "And you have but two!" she riposted. "Politics and your boy! I cared," with concentrated bitterness, "for neither!"

      That stung him to anger and retort.

      "I can imagine it," he said. "Your likings appear to be on a different plane."

      "They are at least not confined to fifty families!" she rejoined. "I do not think myself divine," she continued with feverish irony, "and all below me clay! I do not think because I and all about me are dull and stupid that all the world is dull and stupid, talking eternally about" – and she deliberately mocked his tone-"'the licence of the press!' and 'the imminence of anarchy!' To talk," with supreme scorn, "of the licence of the press and the imminence of anarchy to a girl of nineteen! It was at least to make the way very smooth for another!"

      He looked at her in silence, frowning. Her frankness was an outrage on his dignity-and he, of all men, loved his dignity. But it surprised him at least as much as it shocked him. He remembered the girl sometimes silly, sometimes demure, to whom he had cast the handkerchief; and he had not been more astonished if a sheep had stood up and barked at him. He was here, prepared to meet a frightened, weeping, shamefaced child, imploring pardon, imploring mediation; and he found this! He was here to upbraid, and she scolded him. She marked with unerring eye the joints in his armour, and with her venomous woman's tongue she planted darts that he knew would rankle-rankle long after she was gone and he was alone. And a faint glimpse of the truth broke on him. Was it possible that he had misread the girl; whom he had deemed characterless, when she was not shy? Was it possible that he had under-valued her and slighted her? Was it possible that, while he had been judging her and talking down to her, she had been judging him and laughing in her sleeve?

      The thought was not pleasant to a proud nature. And there was another thing he had to weigh. If she were so different in fact from the conception he had formed of her, the course which had occurred to him as the best, and which he was going to propose for her, might not be the best.

      But he put that from him. A name for firmness at times compels a man to obstinacy. It was so now. He set his jaw more stiffly, and-

      "Will you hear me now?" he asked.

      "If there is anything more to be said," she replied. She spoke wearily over her shoulder.

      "I think there is," he rejoined stubbornly, "one thing. It will not keep you long. It refers to your future. There is a course which I think may be taken and may be advantageous to you."

      "If," she cried impetuously, "it is to take me back to those-"

      "On the contrary," he replied. He was not unwilling to wound one who had shown herself so unexpectedly capable of offence. "That is quite past," he continued. "There is no longer any question of that. And even the course I suggest is not without its disadvantages. It may not, at first sight, be more acceptable to you than returning to your home. But I trust you have learnt a lesson, and will now be guided." After saying which he coughed and hesitated, and at length, after twice pulling up his cravat, "I think," he said-"the matter is somewhat delicate-that I had better write what I have in my mind."

      Under the dead weight of depression which had succeeded to passion, curiosity stirred faintly in her. But-

      "As you please," she said.

      "The more," he continued stiffly, "as in the immediate present there is nothing to be done. And therefore there is no haste. Until this" – he made a wry face, the thing was so hateful to him-"this inquiry is at an end, and you are free to leave, nothing but preliminaries can be dealt with; those settled, however, I think there should be no delay. But you shall hear from me within the week."

      "Very well." And after a slight pause, "That is all?"

      "That is all, I think."

      Yet he did not go. And she continued to stand with her shoulder turned towards him. He was a man of strong prejudices, and the habit of command had rendered him in some degree callous. But he was neither unkind by nature, nor, in spite of the story Walterson had told of him, inhuman in practice. To leave a young girl thus, to leave her without a word of leave-taking or regret, seemed even to him, now it came to the point, barbarous. The road stretched lonely on either side of them, the woods were brown and sad and almost leafless, the lake below them mirrored the unchanging grey above, or lost itself in dreary mist. And he remembered her in surroundings so different! He remembered how she had been reared, by whom encircled, amid what plenitude! And though he did not guess that the slender figure standing thus mute and forlorn would haunt him by night and by day for weeks to come, and harry and torment him with dumb reproaches-he still had not the heart to go without one gentler word.

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