“You are offended with me, and yet you ought not,” said she, sorrowfully; “you ought to feel that I am consulting your interests fully as much as ours.”
“I own, madam,” said he, coldly, “I am unable to take the view you have placed before me.”
“Must I speak out, then?—must I declare my meaning in all its matter-of-fact harshness, and say that your family and your friends would have little scruple in estimating the discretion which encouraged your intimacy with my niece,—the son of the distinguished and highly favored General Conyers with the daughter of the ruined George Barring-ton? These are hard words to say, but I have said them.”
“It is to my father you are unjust now, Miss Harrington.”
“No, Mr. Conyers; there is no injustice in believing that a father loves his son with a love so large that it cannot exclude even worldliness. There is no injustice in believing that a proud and successful man would desire to see his son successful too; and we all know what we call success. I see you are very angry with me. You think me very worldly and very small-minded; perhaps, too, you would like to say that all the perils I talk of are of my own inventing; that Fifine and you could be the best of friends, and never think of more than friendship; and that I might spare my anxieties, and not fret for sorrows that have no existence;—and to all this I would answer, I 'll not risk the chance. No, Mr. Conyers, I 'll be no party to a game where the stakes are so unequal. What might give you a month's sorrow might cost her the misery of a life long.”
“I have no choice left me. I will go,—I will go to-night, Miss Barrington.”
“Perhaps it would be better,” said she, gravely, and walked slowly away.
I will not tell the reader what harsh and cruel things Conyers said of every one and everything, nor how severely he railed at the world and its ways. Lord Byron had taught the youth of that age a very hearty and wholesome contempt for all manner of conventionalities, into which category a vast number of excellent customs were included, and Conyers could spout “Manfred” by heart, and imagine himself, on very small provocation, almost as great a man-hater; and so he set off on a long walk into the forest, determined not to appear at dinner, and equally determined to be the cause of much inquiry, and, if possible, of some uneasiness. “I wonder what that old-maid,”—alas for his gallantry, it was so he called her,—“what she would say if her harsh, ungenerous words had driven me to—” what he did not precisely define, though it was doubtless associated with snow peaks and avalanches, eternal solitudes and demoniac possessions. It might, indeed, have been some solace to him had he known how miserable and anxious old Peter became at his absence, and how incessantly he questioned every one about him.
“I hope that no mishap has befallen that boy, Dinah; he was always punctual. I never knew him stray away in this fashion before.”
“It would be rather a severe durance, brother Peter, if a young gentleman could not prolong his evening walk without permission.”