“I have no power to invite guests to Penarvon,” she answered gently. “My father has never given me leave to do so; but I think he will be glad to think you will come again: he has so few belonging in any way to him now.”
“Would you be glad, Bride?” he asked, in the same tense and almost impassioned way; “that is what I wish to know. Would you be glad to think that I should come again soon?”
Something in his tone aroused in Bride a vague sense of shrinking and distaste. She could not understand exactly what produced this feeling; but at that moment her impulse was to leave her cousin hastily and fly to the shelter of her own room. That being impossible, she could only retire into the shell of her own impenetrable reserve, and Eustace was at once aware that some of the light had gone out of her eyes, and that she very slightly drew away from him.
“I do not know,” she said very quietly; “that depends upon so many things. You have been very kind, Eustace, and yet you have done things which have brought great trouble to us. If you could learn to be a comfort to my father, I would welcome you gladly again; but you can hardly expect it when you trouble and distress him.”
“Bride, Bride, do not speak so! do not drive me to despair!” cried Eustace suddenly, losing his long-preserved self-control. “Do you not know that I love you, that I have loved you almost ever since I saw you first three months ago? Oh, my love, my life, only love me in return, and do what you will with me! I am yours, body and soul, and together we will walk through life, and yours shall be the guiding and directing will, for you are the guiding star of my life! Bride, Bride! hear me! Be my wife, and I will be in the future what you will. You shall rule my life for me. Only let me know that your love is mine, and I care for nothing else!”
She understood then, and the surprise of it all held her mute and spellbound. Perhaps no maiden in the length and breadth of the land had grown up more oblivious of the thought of love and marriage than Lady Bride Marchmont. No young companions had she ever known to suggest such ideas. Her mother had preserved the guarded silence on the subject that mothers are wont to do whilst their daughters are yet young, and her father had followed his wife’s example. She had seen the best and happiest side of married life in the tender love and dependence of her parents; but as a thing applied to herself she had never given it a thought, and now she recoiled from this passionate appeal with a sense of shrinking and distaste which she found it difficult to refrain from expressing in words that would inflict pain on the man before her. She did not wish to pain him. She was woman enough to know that he meant to do her honour by this proffer of love and service; but he had utterly failed to awaken any answering chord in her heart, and she felt that he ought not to have spoken as he had done, or to use such arguments to her.
“No, Eustace,” she said, not ungently, as he tried to take her hand. “You must not speak to me so. It is not right. It is not even manly. I think you can know very little of me when you speak of offering yourself to me body and soul, or tell me that you care for nothing else if you can have my love. Do you think I can love any one, save with the love of a deep pity, who can place a mere earthly love before everything else, and talk as though his soul were his own to give into the keeping of another? Do you think I like to hear you say that you would even abandon a cause which seemed to you holy and just and right, simply because you think I may not approve it? Do you wish to make of me your conscience-keeper? O Eustace! think what such words mean!—think what treachery they imply, not only to God but to man, and I am sure you yourself will be ashamed of them.”
“I can think of nothing but that I love you, Bride,” broke in Eustace, hotly and passionately, his heart moved by the wonderful beauty of the woman before him; her utter unconsciousness of the wild passions of love and tenderness stirring within him only rousing him to a sense of wilder resolve to win her at all cost. “I love you! I love you! I love you! All my religion, all my faith, all my happiness here or hereafter are comprised within the limits of those three little words. I love you! Surely you will not tell me in return that you hate me, and would spurn me from your presence. O Bride, my life, my love! do not say that you have no love to give me in return.”
There was something so appealing in his voice that her heart was touched with compassion, though with no answering response. She let him possess himself of her hand, but it lay cool and passive in his hot clasp.
“I do not hate you, Eustace—why should I? I do not hate any living thing. I do not spurn you. I do not spurn your love.”