Every word stung the marquis like the knot of a lash.
“Stop!” he cried, passionately. “What are you thinking of? You cannot go like this.”
“And do you think,” said Belle, turning on him with flashing eyes, “that now I know the truth I will stop another moment beneath the roof of a father who considers me a disgrace to him? I will go, if I should have to walk the whole way home barefoot!”
“No, stay; you don’t understand! My God, that you should take it like this! Your father is not ashamed of you, but of himself. It is he who disgraces you, not you him. He went away because he had not the courage to meet you, and to tell you with his own lips the injury he had done you.”
“Is that the truth?” She gazed at him in doubt, a half-formed suspicion beginning to struggle faintly for entrance to her mind. “Then why has he never come near me since I was born? Why has he let me grow up in ignorance that I had a father? Why has he never cast one glance of pity towards his nameless child?”
The marquis stood silent, eager to answer, and yet afraid. She went on with increasing vehemence:
“No, I am not his child; the Lady Victoria is his child. She has sat upon his knee; I never have. She bears his name, and is protected by his rank; I bear a name to which I have no right, and have no one to protect me. She has been reared in her father’s house, among riches and splendor; I have grown up in obscurity, and have had to go out to battle with the world. She meets in her father’s drawing-room the men whom I meet in the street. No; you are wrong in telling me that Lord Severn is my father. I have no father. Lady Victoria is his daughter, but I am only his orphan.”
The marquis broke down.
“Belle, don’t make it too hard for me,” he said, humbly. “Your father has not been quite so bad as that. He has watched over you, but, like a coward, in disguise.”
For a minute she stood with heaving breast gazing at him, while his own eyes were cast down before her.