He did not see Lilia till next morning. Mrs. Mervyn was kind, even tender in her manner to him when they dined tête-à-tête, but they both tacitly ignored the position of affairs. Mrs. Mervyn recalled and recounted little anecdotes which showed Sir Roderick at his best, but nothing further was discussed. Even on the subject of Lilia they were equally on guard.
“This is the most uncomfortable position a man could possibly be placed in,” Hugh told himself, as he breakfasted alone in the dining-room next morning, stared at by the painted eyes of the pictured effigies of bygone Pyms. “Why will she not see me?” for by Mrs. Mervyn’s message of excuse, that she would breakfast upstairs with Lilia, he augured that Lilia would not face him.
“What am I to do?” he thought, pacing the room in gloomy discomfort. “Of course! I see it. I have been forced upon her. As a loving daughter, she was ready to sacrifice herself to please her dying father. If he had asked to be burnt like an Indian and she to lie down among the flames in suttee fashion, she would have carried out his whim. She shall not be made miserable for life. I must insist upon her accepting her release. Of course the Mervyns and lawyer Moffatt think it best that Sir Roderick’s ideas should be carried out. My duty plainly is, to fight for her good, and hers only.”
While he was hotly arguing against himself Lilia was hanging despairingly about Mrs. Mervyn in her darkened room.
“My dear, I assure you he loves you, and would have wished to marry you even against your father’s wish,” Mrs. Mervyn was assuring the unhappy girl for the hundredth time. “If you only see him, you will be convinced that I am right. You will, indeed!”
Then Lilia said, brokenly, that she could not. If he would only go away, she would write to him.
“Let him take everything, and go,” she said for about the hundred-and-first time. “Life is over for me.”
Then once more Mrs. Mervyn said, this time somewhat indignantly, for she was losing patience, that such a suggestion to Mr. Paull savoured of insult.
“You are cowardly in your grief, Lilia,” she said, sharply. “At least tell the young man your ideas yourself, instead of saying them over and over again to poor me, who can do nothing.”
Perhaps it was this speech which brought about the following:—