"No, no; I must speak! There can be more reticence now. You would not, you could not have loved him, this heartless, ungrateful profligate, as tasteless and low as he is faithless and vicious,--this scoundrel, who, holding good in his grasp, has deliberately chosen evil. Ay, I will say it, Lady Mitford! You could not have loved him, and you know it well; you have admitted it to yourself before now, when you little dreamed that anyone--that I--would ever dare to put your thought in form and shape before you. What did you love? A girl's fancy,--a shadow, a dream! It was no reality, it had no foundation, and it has vanished. Your imagination drew a picture of an injured victim of circumstances,--a weak being, to be pitied and admired, to be restored and loved! The truth was a selfish scoundrel, who has returned in wealth with fresh zest to the miserable pleasures for which he lived in poverty; a mean-hearted wretch, who could care for your beauty while it was new to him indeed, but to whose perception you, your heart and soul, your intellect and motives, were mysteries as high and as far off as heaven. Are you breaking your heart, Lady Mitford, under the kindly scrutiny of the world, because the thistle has not borne figs and the thorn has not given you purple grapes? Are you sitting down in solitary grief because the animal has done according to its kind, because effect has resulted from cause, because the wisdom of the world, wise in the ways of such men, has verified itself? Do you love this man now? Are you suffering the pangs of jealousy, of despair? No, you do not love him; you are suffering no such pangs. You are truth itself,--the truest and the bravest, as you are the most beautiful of women; and you cannot, you dare not tell me that you love this man still, knowing him as you know him now." He stopped close beside her, and looked at her with an eager, almost a fierce glance.
"Why do you ask me?" she gasped out faintly. There was a sudden avoidance of him in her expression, a shadow of fear. "Why do you speak to me thus? Oh, Sir Laurence, this--this is the worst of all." She was not conscious of the effect of the tone in which these words were spoken, of the pathos, the helplessness, the pleading tenderness it implied. But he heard them, and they were enough. They were faint as the murmur of a brook in summer, but mighty as an Alpine storm; and the barriers of conventional restriction, the scruples of conscience, the timidity of a real love, were swept away like straws before their power.
"Why?" he repeated, "because I love you!"
She uttered a faint exclamation; she half rose from her chair, but he caught her hands and stopped her.
"Hush!" he said; "I implore you not to speak till you have heard me! Do not wrong me by supposing that I have come here to urge on your unwilling ear a tale of passion, to take advantage of your husband's crime, your husband's cowardice, to extenuate crime and cowardice in myself. Before God, I have no such meaning! But I love you--I love you as I never even fancied I loved any woman before; though I am no stranger to the reality or the mockery of passion, though I have received deep and smarting wounds in my time. I wish to make myself no better in your eyes than I am. And I love you--love you so much better than myself; that I would fain see you happy with this man, even with him, if it could be. But it cannot, and you know it. You know in your true heart, that if he came back to his allegiance to you now--poor bond of custom as it is--you could not love him, any more than you could return to the toys of your childhood. I read you aright; I know you with the intuitive knowledge which love, and love only, lends to a man, when he would learn the mystery of a woman's nature. You are too noble, too true, to be bound by the petty rules, to be governed by the small scruples, which dominate nine-tenths of the women who win the suffrages of society. You have the courage of your truthfulness."
He stood before her, looking steadfastly down upon her, his arms tightly folded across his chest, his breath coming quickly in hurried gasps. She had shrunken into the recesses of her velvet chair, and she looked up at him with parted lips and wild eyes, her hands holding the cushions tightly, the fingers hidden in the purple fringes. Was it that she could not speak, or that she would not? However that may have been, she did not, and he went on.
"Yes, yes, I love you. I think you knew it before?" She made no reply. "I think I have loved you from the first,--from the moment when, callous and blasé as I had come to believe myself--as, God knows, I had good right to be, if human nature may ever claim such a right--I could not bear to see the way your fate was drifting, or to hear the chances for and against you calculated, as men calculate such odds. I think I loved you from the moment I perceived how completely you had mistaken your own heart, and how beautifully, how innocently loyal you were to the error. While your delusion lasted, Lady Mitford, you were safe with me and from me, for in that delusion there was security. While you loved Mitford, and believed that he returned your love, you would never have perceived that any other man loved you. But you are a woman who cannot be partially deceived or undeceived; therefore I tell you now, when your delusion is wholly at an end, when it can come no more to blind your eyes, and rend your heart with the removal of the bandage, that I love you,--devotedly, changelessly, eternally. You must take this fact into account when you meditate upon your future; you must number this among the component parts of your life. Hush! not yet. I am not speaking thus through reckless audacity, availing itself of your position; you know I am not, and you must hear me to the end."
She had made a movement as if about to speak, but he had again checked her; and they maintained their relative positions, he looking down at her, she looking up at him.
"We are facing facts, Lady Mitford. I love you, not as the man who left you, in your first year of marriage, for the worthless woman who forsook me for a richer lover, and would have wronged the fool who bought her without a scruple, could she have got me into her power again--not as he loved you, even when he came nearest to the truth of love. That woman, your enemy, your rival,"--he spoke the word with a stringent scorn which would have been the keenest punishment in human power to have inflicted on the woman it designated,--"she knows I love you, and she has struck at me through you; struck at me, poor fool--for she is fool as well as fiend--a blow which has recoiled upon herself. She has taught me how much, how well, how devotedly I love you, and learned the lesson herself thereby, for the intuition of hate is no less keen than that of love. But why do I speak of her? Only to make you understand that I am a portion of your fate,--only to lay the whole truth before you; only to make it clear to you that mine is no chance contact, no mere intrusion. I am not a presumptuous fool, who has dared to use a generously-granted friendship as a cover for an illicit passion. Have patience with me a little longer. Let me tell you all the truth. You cannot dismiss me from your presence as you might another who had dared to love you, and dared to tell you so; you cannot do this."
"Why?" she asked faintly, but with an angry sparkle in her eyes. For the second time she said that one word.