Sir Bernard Vanbrugh recognized Lord Alistair’s voice, and bowed his head in despair. “My daughter is lost to me,” he told himself. “I have lost my daughter.”
Aloud he said:
“And your father? I have tried to be a good father to you, my dear.”
Hero was smitten to the heart. She went over to where her father sat, and put an arm round his neck.
“I love you just the same,” was all she found it in her heart to say. “I love you just the same.”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE LAST WORD OF SCIENCE
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh knew that he had failed to shake his daughter’s resolution.
He did not believe that Hero would marry Lord Alistair Stuart while he forbade her to. But what he feared was that she would refuse to give him up. He was getting on in years, he had not spared himself, and sooner or later Hero must be free. In the meanwhile he saw before him the prospect of her celibacy, a state abhorrent to his feelings whether as father or as physician.
In his own mind he had a husband chosen for Hero—an engineer; one of that class to whom the future seems to be assigned; sane, strong, and self-reliant; a water-drinker, like himself; a man of orderly life and wholesome instincts; an ideal father, for whom what science calls the mechanism of life was really mechanism, and nothing more; a man in whose eyes poetry-books and prayer-books were alike contemptible; one who found no weakness in himself, and tolerated none in others.
Vanbrugh compared the husband whom he had chosen for his daughter with the husband she had chosen for herself, and was bewildered and impatient.