“No,” she answered, “I am not angry with you. I hope that you will never allude to this again, so I will tell you something. The difference of rank between us counts for nothing. You are young, and you have gifts which will make you, when you choose, willingly accepted among any class of people with whom you care to spend your days. But, nevertheless, I consider what you were about to say to me presumption.”
He started quickly. They were face to face now upon the edge of the lawn. Lady Malingcourt had drawn herself up, and a bright spot of color burned in her cheeks.
“That you are a mechanic,” she said, “makes you, to be candid, more interesting to me. Nothing in your circumstances would have made your feeling toward me anything but an honor. It is as a man that you fail. Your standard of life is one which I could not possibly accept. I presume that it comes from your bringing up, so I do not wish to say anything more about it. Only I beg you to consider what I have said as final, and to do me the favor of thinking no longer of what must remain forever absolutely—impossible.”
She swept past him and entered the house. He remained for a moment nerveless and tongue-tied. The lash of her bitter words stupefied him. What had he done?—wherein had he so greatly failed? After all, what did it matter? About him lay the fragments of that wonderful dream which had made life so sweet to him. Nothing could ever reëstablish it. He staggered out of the gate, and walked blindly away.
The man’s passion found kinship with the storm which broke suddenly over his head. The thunder clouds rolled up from the horizon, and the lightning shone around him with a yellow glare. Below him the tree tops and the young corn were bent by a rushing wind—even the cattle in the fields crept away to shelter. The sky above grew black, forked lightning now glittered from east to west, writing its lurid message to the trembling earth. He sat on a high rock bareheaded, and the rain, falling now in sheets, drenched him through and through.
He had lost all control of himself. The passion which had been his sole inheritance from his drink-sodden parents mastered him easily. At that moment he was almost a savage. He cursed John Martinghoe and the moment when he had been lured into the belief that his self-education and mastery of self had made him the equal of those who were divided from him only by the accident of birth. He cursed the woman whose kindness had led him into a fool’s paradise, the sudden change in his position which seemed now only a mockery to him. The fit passed with a little outburst of shame. Nevertheless, it was with bent head and gray-lined face that he crept downward to his cottage, drenched to the skin.
He heaped wood upon the embers of a fire and sat over it, shivering. Almost a stupor came over him as he sat there, weak, numbed to the bone with the clinging dampness of his clothes. If this thing had happened to him in full health, he would have met it more bravely. After all, it was the end which he had always told himself was inevitable. A sense of bitter shame was mingled with his dejection. He had built up his life so carefully, only to see it sent crashing about his ears at a woman’s light touch. So he sat brooding among the fragments, while the rain beat fiercely against his window pane and the wind howled in the wood.
He came to himself suddenly, awakened by the opening of the door. He looked around. Milly stood there, her pale cheeks glowing with the sting of the rain and the wind, her hair in disorder, her eyes alight with the joy of seeing him. She dropped a heap of parcels and fell on her knees by his side.
“Oh, thank God!” she sobbed. “Oh, I am so glad to see you, so glad!”
Her streaming eyes, the warm touch of her hands, pierced his insensibility. He even smiled faintly.