“Una! How can you. How can any one like that repent? Why, I don’t believe that he has left himself all his senses!”
“I am so sorry for him,” said Una.
“I cannot be, when I think of his wanting a good girl to marry him!”
“But, Amethyst, he might be changed. You believe that?”
“Well, yes—in a way, of course, I believe it. But people after all are what they have made themselves. He can’t repent, so as to be much good, in this world, at any rate.”
Amethyst spoke harshly and recklessly. There was something in Charles’s half-ruffianly, half-foolish manner, that revolted her past any sense of pity for him, and she was in no mood for toleration. She had no great inward impulse to set against the force of circumstances, and to be driven by necessity is a very different thing from being urged forward by a force within.
There was nothing for it but to marry Sir Richard Grattan, she had scarcely a choice left. She believed that she should always be mistress enough of herself to play her part with success; and interests, such as her friendship with Mr Carisbrooke, who happily did not want to marry her, might keep her spirit alive. Yes, she was acting rightly, and yet she felt it utterly impossible to ask for the help of which Una had spoken.
Still in this humour on the next morning, while she had so far managed to avoid the actual, final “Yes” to Sir Richard’s suit, she heard Sylvester’s announcement and request, which she answered with a certain sense of defiance both of herself and of him.
But, when he was gone, she knew that she was shaken almost to pieces by her interview with him, and she could hardly string herself up to go, as arranged, with her aunt and Carrie, to a fashionably patronised matinée in which a débutante, in whose performance Mr Carisbrooke was interested, was to play Juliet.
Amethyst was too high-strung a creature not to be susceptible to dramatic excitement; she was no critic of acting, and was not perhaps so familiar with the play, that it did not come upon her with some freshness. Its influence seized her like a sort of madness, possessing and changing her. Whether the spirit breathed airs from heaven or blasts from hell, it was absolute. Given a Romeo, Juliet’s was the only course—the charnel-house rather than the County. This was a force to which her own nature answered, which Mr Carisbrooke had already done something to awaken. Here was a great and mighty impulse, which would make life worth living, or death worth dying. She did not cry, or melt with pity over the woes of Juliet, she felt the force of such passion in herself, she saw the power of such self-devotion. Her real self seemed to flash into life, as she recalled her own brief love-story, her own young love. And to-night she was to see her old lover again. Not only prudence, expediency, worldly wisdom, would go down before the flood, but right and wrong, if there was any right but allowing such a force of nature to have its way.