“He can’t leave away Torquilstone, and those thousands of profitless acres,” Lady Merrenden went on, “but unfortunately the London property is at his disposition. Oh! I must go and talk to him!”
“No!” said Robert. “It would not be the least use, and would look as if we were pleading. His face had fallen to intense sadness as Lady Merrenden spoke of his money.
“Darling,” he said, in a broken voice. “No, it is true it would not be fair to make you a beggar. I should be a cad to ask you. We must think of some way of softening my brother after all!”
Then I spoke.
“Robert,” I said, “if you were only John Smith I would say I would willingly go and live with you in a cottage, or even in a slum—but you are not, and I would not for anything in the world drag you down out of what is your position in life—that would be a poor sort of love. Oh! my dear,” and I clasped tight his hand—“if everything fails, then we must part, and you must forget me.”
He folded me in his arms, and we heard the door shut. Lady Merrenden had left us alone. Oh! it was anguish and divine bliss at the same time the next half hour.
“I will never forget you, and never in this world will I take another woman, I swear to God,” he said at the end of it. “If we must part, then life is finished for me of all joy.”
“And for me, too, Robert!”
We said the most passionate vows of love to one another, but I will not write them here, there is another locked book where I keep them—the book of my soul.
“Would it be any good if Colonel Tom Carden went and spoke to him?” I asked, presently. “He was best man at papa’s wedding, and knows all that there is to be known of poor mamma, and do you think that as mamma’s father was Lord de Brandreth, a very old barony, I believe, it is—oh! can it make any difference to the children’s actual breeding, their parents not having been through the marriage ceremony? I—I—don’t know much of those sort of things!”