"The thing which grips me most strongly is that this one—who is one of those who have work before them—shall not be handicapped. He shall not begin life manacled and shamed by illegitimacy. He shall begin it with the background of all his father meant to give him. The law of England will not believe in his claims unless they can be proven. She can prove nothing. I can prove nothing for her. If she had been a little female costermonger she would have demanded her 'marriage lines' and clung to them fiercely. She would have known that to be able to flaunt them in the face of argument was indispensable."
"She probably did not know that there existed such documents," the Duchess said. "Neither of the pair knew anything for the time but that they were wild with love and were to be torn apart."
"Therefore," he said with distinctness even clearer and harder, "she must possess indisputable documentary evidence of marriage before the child is born—as soon as possible."
"Marriage!" she hesitated aghast. "But who will—?"
"I," he answered with absolute rigidity. "It will be difficult. It must be secret. But if it can be done—when his time comes the child can look his new world in the face. He will be the Head of the House of Coombe when it most needs a strong fellow who has no cause to fear anything and who holds money and power in his hands."
"You propose to suggest that she shall marry you?" she put it to him.
"Yes. It will be the devil's own job," he answered. "She has not begun to think of the child yet—and she has abhorred me all her life. To her the world means nothing. She does not know what it can do to her and she would not care if she did. Donal was her world and he is gone. But you and I know what she does not."
"So this is what you have been thinking?" she said. It was indeed an unarchaic point of view. But even as she heard him she realised that it was the almost inevitable outcome—not only of what was at the moment happening to the threatened and threatening world, but of his singularly secretive past—of all the things he had hidden and also of all the things he had professed not to hide but had baffled people with.
"Since the morning Redcliff dropped his bomb I have not been able to think of much else," he said. "It was a bomb, I own. Neither you nor I had reason for a shadow of suspicion. My mind has a trick of dragging back to me a memory of a village girl who was left as—as she is. She said her lover had married her—but he went away and never came back. The village she lived in was a few miles from Coombe Keep and she gave birth to a boy. His childhood must have been a sort of hell. When other boys had rows with him they used to shout 'Bastard' after him in the street. He had a shifty, sickened look and when he died of measles at seven years old no doubt he was glad of it. He used to run crying to his wretched mother and hide his miserable head in her apron."
"It sounds unendurable," the Duchess said sharply.