“My thoughts like my affections are my own, I refuse to share them.”
He smiled again, derisively.
“It is this wild dream that makes you so haughty. Dream on—I can wait!—when you awake, my homage may not seem so paltry.”
He left me abruptly, and for many minutes I stood watching his dusky form as it wound slowly in and out among the chestnuts. There was something serpentlike about his progress that made me thoughtful.
Why had this man sought me? Not from love, of that I was assured. Was there anything in my last scene with Lady Catherine, with which he had become acquainted, to arouse feelings of ambition or interest in a nature like his? If not, where was I to seek an explanation of his strange love-making? Now, for the first time, for hitherto my pride had kept on the outskirts of the question, I asked myself plainly why the picture of that haunting face—the face, which, without proof, I knew to be that of my mother—why it should have been found in Lord Clare’s desk?
With this question came others that made my heart quail and my cheek burn. Memories thronged upon me—Lady Catherine’s words as she urged Turner’s marriage—the half uttered sentences of George Irving—the bitter dislike which his mother evidently felt for me; all these thing crowded upon my brain so close that conviction came like lightning flashes. I was Lord Clare’s illegitimate child. My mother—great heavens, how the thought of that face in all its heavenly beauty burned in my brain! Amid sobs and tears, and a bitter, bitter sense of degradation, my soul drew a black veil over it, and turned away from a remembrance of its loveliness.
I could not follow up the subject. Indeed, Mr. Upham was overwhelmed in the feelings that rushed upon me. I forgot to question his motives—forgot him—everything in the desolation of my shame.
I went home, but asked no questions either of Turner or his wife. They could have explained nothing that I did not fully comprehend, and my soul shrunk from the idea of speaking out its shame in words.
Now all rest forsook me. I had a craving wish to know everything—to penetrate into the centre of my parents’ secret, but felt all the time that it was useless, as painful to inquire. The whole history was locked up in my own soul. I felt its weight there, but the struggle to drag it forth strained my whole being to no avail.
Then my conjectures began, as at first, to wander over that which was probable. Could George Irving continue to love a creature so disgraced—a wretched offshoot from his own proud ancestral tree? And if he did, where was the end, marriage? No, no, my own pride rose up in defence of his! Where, then? Oh, how dead my heart lay as I asked the question.