"Miss Kilmansegg, with the golden leg," I interrupted, derisively. "Truly you surprise me."
"O Miriam! how can you treat me with such heartless levity?" and he wrung his hands bitterly. "I am pushed to desperation already. I never knew, until I lost you, what you were to me; how superior to all other women, how pure, how unworldly, how strong, how rich in all mental and womanly endowments! Hear me, Miriam," and he attempted to take my hand, an error of which he was soon made conscious.
"Claude Bainrothe," I said, sternly, "I can tolerate you on one condition alone—that you respect me. You cease to do this, you, the betrothed husband of another woman! the moment you sully my ear with your addresses, your effusions of sentiment. They are no more, I know; but even these I will not endure from you, nor yet from—" I hesitated; a hated name had risen to my lips, but I repressed it. He, the son, surely was not the father's keeper.
"You do me injustice; before Heaven, you do!" he exclaimed, flinging back his long curling locks impetuously, by a toss of his superb head, and bending his blazing eyes upon me. "Hear me, Miriam, I hold the clew to a secret by means of which I can compel wealth to flow back to your feet, in the old channels, if you will be mine. You would not have thought this condition hard a year ago. What has occurred to change you? You loved me then—by Heaven you love me still! Oh, say so, Miriam, and make me doubly blessed! Am I deceived in the expression of that beaming eye? You will pardon, bless me;" and he knelt humbly at my feet, and clasped my hand.
"Rise, Claude," I said, "and forgive me if a momentary feeling of triumph, that may have lit my eye, was mingled with the feeling of entire emancipation from all past weakness, which this hour so surely proves, and so satisfactorily, to my own spirit. You are to me like any other stranger."
He was standing sullenly before me now, his head dropping on his breast, his hands loosely clasped before him.
"You are deceived," I pursued, calmly, "if you imagine from any expression of mine that one ray of love survives the ruin of other days. I told you the truth when I said all was over between us forever. Did you suppose me a woman to sit down in the ashes because one man—one woman of all God's manifold creation—had proved false, or treacherous, or ungrateful? I should have wronged my youth, my soul, my descent, my God, had I so yielded. Go and fulfill your contract faithfully this time; a second rupture might not go so well with you as the first. There are persons who are singularly tenacious of their possessions, and who number their bondsmen as a principal portion of their property. Beware how you anger such! Your father too. He would be conciliated now, by what would once have incensed him. Evelyn Erie is rich, Miriam Monfort is poor; why need I add another word? The suggestion is perfect."
Coldly, silently, angrily, he left the room. I heard him stamp impatiently at the hall-door, at some delay apparently in undoing its fastenings—his childish habit when provoked—such was his haste to be gone.
Yet I could scarcely judge, from what had just occurred, taking this, too, in connection with what had passed long before, when I alone was the injured and forgiving one, that I had drawn down upon my head his eternal enmity.
But thus it proved.