He had made as though he were about to throw himself on the grass beside her, and, in order to avoid his doing so, Jenny rose and moved a few paces forward. Henry Hindes had, therefore, no alternative but to walk slowly by her side, and as she had turned her face from the town, each step took them further from it.
‘If you have anything unpleasant to tell me,’ she said, with a slight laugh, ‘for goodness’ sake don’t make it public property. Let us go further up the cliffs, where our voices will not reach any loiterers on the beach below.’
‘You can hardly expect my message to be a very pleasant one, Jenny,’ commenced Henry Hindes, as composedly as he knew how, ‘but it is soon told. Mr Crampton refuses either to write to or see you, unless you agree to his conditions. When he received your terrible news this morning, I was afraid he would have a fit, it affected him so dreadfully. As for your poor mother and aunt, they are, I hear, in utter despair. You have changed a happy home, Jenny, into a house of mourning.’
‘Well, they should have been more considerate of my feelings,’ said the girl, in a low voice, but Mr Hindes could detect signs of softening in it.
‘They were considerate of them, they intended to be considerate of them,’ exclaimed Henry Hindes, ‘they only told you the truth when they said that Walcheren was not a fit man for you to marry, that he was a gambler and an evil liver—that—’
‘Mr Hindes, you forget yourself,’ cried the girl with newly acquired dignity, ‘when you said those things the other day, you were speaking of an acquaintance, to-day you are maligning my husband!’
‘I cannot help it! Were he twenty times your husband, I must say what is in my mind concerning him. You have had your own way too long, Jenny, and now you have taken it to your ruin. But your father is willing to receive you back as his daughter, on one condition, and that is, that you leave this man who has led you into so grievous an error, and return to the protection of your parents.’
Jenny gazed at him as if he had been a lunatic.
‘Do I hear you rightly,’ she said, ‘or are you mad? Leave my husband, whom I have just married, leave the man whom I love above all the world, father and mother included, leave him all alone and go back to Hampstead to live a widowed life with my people! Why, papa must have been tipsy to propose such a thing. What had you been giving the old gentleman to make him talk such nonsense? Surely you are dreaming and have fancied it all.’
‘Dreaming!’ echoed Hindes, indignantly; ‘is it dreaming to see your father’s agony, to hear of your mother’s tears? No, these things may be play to you, Jenny, but they are death to them. I have repeated your father’s words just as he told them to me. “I will never see her, nor speak, nor write to her so long as life lasts,” he said, “and I will never, under any circumstances, receive that man into my house; but, if Jenny will give him up and come back to our protection, I will try and forgive the past.” Jenny! think of what you are resigning before you finally decide. Mr Crampton is much richer than you imagine. You will inherit nothing short of fifteen to twenty thousand a year at his death. And you were married illegally. Mr Walcheren took a false oath about your age, and this may be set aside if you will only give your consent to it. Why, Jenny, you have not been half clever enough! With your beauty and prospective wealth, you should have married into the aristocracy. Think twice about it. Give up this man who is not worthy of you, and you will make twice as brilliant a marriage by-and-by.’