“I saw, at last, that there was a secret, and then I pressed him no more.”
“And you did well. Had you importuned, and had he yielded, it had been worse for him.”
“Just as little did I suspect,” continued she, rapidly, “that any reproach could attach to my living in his society; he was your friend; it was at your desire he accepted this brief guardianship; he never, by a word, a look, transgressed the bounds of respectful courtesy; and I felt all the unconstrained freedom of old friendship in our intercourse.”
“All his reserve and all your delicacy won't silence evil tongues, girl. I intended you to have stayed a day or two, at most, at Aix. You passed weeks there. Whose fault that, you say? Mine,—of course, mine, and no one else's. But what but my fault every step in your whole life? Why was n't I satisfied to bring you up in my own station, with rogues and swindlers for daily associates? Then I might have had a daughter who would not be ashamed to own me.”
“Oh, that I am not; that I will never be,” cried she, throwing her arm around his neck. “What has your whole life been but a sacrifice to me? It may be that you rate too highly these great prizes of life; that you attach to the station you covet for me a value I cannot concur in. Still, I feel that it was your love for me prompted this hope, and that while you trod the world darkly and painfully, you purchased a path of light and pleasantness for me.”
“You have paid me for it all by these words,” said he, drawing his hand across his eyes. “I 'd work as a daily laborer on the road, I'd be a sailor before the mast, I'd take my turn with the chain-gang and eat Norfolk Island biscuit, if it could help to place you where I seek to see you.”
“And what is this rank to which you aspire so eagerly?”
“I want you to be a peeress, girl. I want you to be one of the proudest guild the world ever yet saw or heard of; to have a station so accredited that every word you speak, every act you do, goes forth with its own authority.”
“But stay!” broke she in, “men's memories will surely carry them back to who I was.”
“Let them, girl. Are you the stuff to be chilled by that? Have I made you what you are, that you cannot play their equal? There are not many of them better looking; are there any cleverer or better informed? Even those Oxford boys said you looked like an empress. If insult will crush you, girl, you 've got little of my blood in you.”