“You mistake, believe me,” interrupted Randal. “You shall not finish your sentence. He is all that you do not yet suppose him; for his shyness, and his very love, his very respect for your superiority, do not allow his mind and his nature to appear to advantage. You, it is true, have a taste for letters and poetry rare among your countrywomen. He has not at present—few men have. But what Cimon would not be refined by so fair an Iphigenia? Such frivolities as he now shows belong but to youth and inexperience of life. Happy the brother who could see his sister the wife of Frank Hazeldean.”
The marchesa leaned her cheek on her hand in silence. To her, marriage was more than it usually seems to dreaming maiden or to disconsolate widow. So had the strong desire to escape from the control of her unprincipled and remorseless brother grown a part of her very soul; so had whatever was best and highest in her very mixed and complex character been galled and outraged by her friendless and exposed position, the equivocal worship rendered to her beauty, the various debasements to which pecuniary embarrassments had subjected her—not without design on the part of the count, who though grasping, was not miserly, and who by precarious and seemingly capricious gifts at one time, and refusals of all aid at another, had involved her in debt in order to retain his hold on her; so utterly painful and humiliating to a woman of her pride and her birth was the station that she held in the world,—that in marriage she saw liberty, life, honour, self-redemption; and these thoughts, while they compelled her to co-operate with the schemes by which the count, on securing to himself a bride, was to bestow on herself a dower, also disposed her now to receive with favour Randal Leslie’s pleadings on behalf of his friend.
The advocate saw that he had made an impression, and with the marvellous skill which his knowledge of those natures that engaged his study bestowed on his intelligence, he continued to improve his cause by such representations as were likely to be most effective. With what admirable tact he avoided panegyric of Frank as the mere individual, and drew him rather as the type, the ideal of what a woman in Beatrice’s position might desire, in the safety, peace, and Honour of a home, in the trust and constancy and honest confiding love of its partner! He did not paint an elysium,—he described a haven; he did not glowingly delineate a hero of romance,—he soberly portrayed that Representative of the Respectable and the Real which a woman turns to when romance begins to seem to her but delusion. Verily, if you could have looked into the heart of the person he addressed, and heard him speak, you would have cried admiringly, “Knowledge is power; and this man, if as able on a larger field of action, should play no mean part in the history of his time.”
Slowly Beatrice roused herself from the reveries which crept over her as he spoke,—slowly, and with a deep sigh, and said,
“Well, well, grant all you say! at least before I can listen to so honourable a love, I must be relieved from the base and sordid pleasure that weighs on me. I cannot say to the man who wooes me, ‘Will you pay the debts of the daughter of Franzini, and the widow of Di Negra?’”
“Nay, your debts, surely, make so slight a portion of your dowry.”
“But the dowry has to be secured;” and here, turning the tables upon her companion, as the apt proverb expresses it, Madame di Negra extended her hand to Randal, and said in the most winning accents, “You are, then, truly and sincerely my friend?”
“Can you doubt it?”
“I prove that I do not, for I ask your assistance.”
“Mine? How?”