[CHAPTER IV]
For some moments after Emmeline found herself in the chaise, astonishment and terror deprived her of speech and even of recollection. While Delamere, no longer able to command his transports at having at length as he hoped secured her, gave way to the wildest joy, and congratulated himself that he had thus forced her to break a promise which only injustice he said could have extorted, and only timidity and ill-grounded prejudice have induced her to keep.
'Do you then hope, Sir,' said Emmeline, 'that I shall patiently become the victim of your rashness? Is this the respect you have sworn ever to observe towards me? Is this the protection you have so often told me I should find from you? And is it thus you intend to atone for all the insults of your family which you have so repeatedly protested you would never forgive? by inflicting a far greater insult; by ruining my character; by degrading me in my own eyes; and forcing me either to violate my word solemnly given to your father, or be looked upon as a lost and abandoned creature, undone by your inhuman art. I must now, indeed, seem to deserve your mother's anger, and the scorn of your sister; and must be supposed every way wretched and contemptible.'
A shower of tears fell from her eyes, and her heart seemed bursting with the pain these cruel reflections gave her.
Delamere, by all the soothing tenderness of persuasion, by all the rhetoric of ardent passion, tried to subdue her anger, and silence her scruples; but the more her mind dwelt on the circumstances of her situation, the more it recoiled from the necessity of entering under such compulsion into an indissoluble engagement. The rash violence of the measure which had put her in Delamere's power, while it convinced her of his passion, yet told her, that a man who would hazard every thing for his own gratification now, would hardly hereafter submit to any restraint; and that the bonds in which he was so eager to engage, would with equal violence be broken, when any new face should make a new impression, or when time had diminished the influence of those attractions that now enchanted him.
Formed of the softer elements, and with a mind calculated for select friendship and domestic felicity, rather than for the tumult of fashionable life and the parade of titled magnificence, Emmeline coveted not his rank, nor valued his riches. No woman perhaps can help having some regard for a man, who she knows ardently and sincerely loves her; and Emmeline had felt all that sort of weakness for Delamere; who in the bloom of life, with fortune, title, person and talents that might have commanded the loveliest and most affluent daughter of prosperity, had forsaken every thing for her, and even secluded himself from the companions of his former pleasures, and the indulgences his fortune and rank afforded him, to pass his youth in unsuccessful endeavours to obtain her.
The partiality this consideration gave her towards him, and the favourable comparison she was perpetually making between him and the men she had seen since her residence near London, had created in her bosom a sentiment warmer perhaps than friendship; yet it was not that violent love, which carrying every thing before it, leaves the mind no longer at liberty to see any fault in the beloved object, or any impropriety in whatever can secure it's success, and which, scorning future consequences, risks every thing for it's present indulgence.
Still artless and ingenuous as when she first left the remote castle where she had been brought up, Emmeline had not been able to conceal this affection from Delamere. Her eyes, her manner, the circumstance of the picture, and a thousand nameless inadvertences, had told it him repeatedly; but now, when he seemed to have taken an ungenerous advantage of that regard, it lost much of it's force, and resentment and disdain succeeded.
Delamere tried to appease her by protestations of inviolable respect, of eternal esteem, and unalterable love. But there was something of triumph even in his humblest entreaties, that served but to encrease the anger Emmeline felt; and she told him that the only way to convince her he had for her those sentiments he pretended, was to carry her back immediately to Mrs. Ashwood's, or rather to Lord Montreville, there to acknowledge the attempt he had made, and that it's failure had been solely owing to her determined adherence to her word.