PERCIVAL'S OWN WAY.
Percival had his way. He came back to the house looking stern and grim, but with a resolute determination to carry his point. In half-an-hour it was known throughout the whole household that Miss Murray was engaged to be married to young Mr. Heron, and that the marriage would probably take place before Christmas.
Kitty cast a frightened glance at Elizabeth's face when the announcement was made, but gathered little from its expression. A sort of dull apathy had come over the girl—a reaction, perhaps, from the excitement of feeling through which she had lately passed. It gave her no pain when Percival insisted upon demonstrations of affection which were very contrary to her former habits. She allowed him to hold her hand, to kiss her lips, to call her by endearing names, in a way that would ordinarily have roused her indignation. She seemed incapable of resistance to his will. And this passiveness was so unusual with her that it alarmed and irritated Percival by turns.
Anger rather than affection was the motive of his conduct. As he himself had said, he was rather a selfish man, and he would not willingly sacrifice his own happiness unless he was very sure that hers depended upon the sacrifice. He was enraged with the man who had won Elizabeth's love, and believed him to be a scheming adventurer. Neither patience nor tolerance belonged to Percival's character; and although he loved Elizabeth, he was bitterly indignant with her, and not indisposed to punish her for her faithlessness by forcing her to submit to caresses which she neither liked nor returned. If he had any magnanimity in him he deliberately put it on one side; he knew that he was taking a revenge upon her for which she might never forgive him, which was neither delicate nor generous, but he told himself that he had been too much injured to show mercy. It was Elizabeth's own fault if he assumed the airs of a sultan with a favourite slave, instead of kneeling at her feet. So he argued with himself; and yet a little grain of conscience made him feel from time to time that he was wrong, and that he might live to repent what he was doing now.
"We will be married before Christmas, Elizabeth," he said one day, when he had been at Strathleckie nearly a week. He spoke in a tone of cool insistence.
"As you think best," she answered, sadly.
"Would you prefer a later date?"
"Oh, no," said Elizabeth, smiling a little. "It is all the same to me. 'If 'twere done at all, 'twere well done quickly,' you know."
"Do you mean that?"
"Yes."