D’Almayne glanced at her as, with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, she owned her vain appeal to her husband’s liberality—never had he seen her look so lovely; he had always admitted her statuesque grace, but now the statue had become animated, and her beauty appeared to his fascinated vision enthralling, entrancing; while the absence of the reserve she usually maintained towards him misled him and threw him off his guard. Thus, utterly sceptical as to the existence of female virtue, urged by the impulses of his warm southern blood, and deceived by his experiences of foreign society, he conceived the moment for which he had so long waited and schemed had arrived; gamester-like, he resolved to stake all on the hazard of a die; and, turning towards her, while his voice trembled with an emotion which for once was not feigned, he exclaimed passionately—
“I have witnessed long and silently, though that silence has proceeded from an effort of the strongest self-control, the mean-spirited and selfish conduct of the cold-hearted, witless imbécille to whom it is your misfortune to be allied; I have seen also, with sentiments of the warmest and most vivid admiration, the heroic endurance with which you have borne his insults—the gentle tenderness with which you have striven to conceal his faults—the noble generosity with which you have impoverished yourself to atone for his selfish parsimony. I have seen all this with feelings of the deepest indignation towards him—of the warmest, the most devoted admiration towards you. I have perceived the low, sordid spirit of the one—the beautiful angelic nature of the other; and I have afflicted myself with a vain remorse when the reflection that I was a weak, blind instrument in bringing about this incongruous, this most abhorred union, forced itself upon me—night after night have I lain sleepless, indulging in these sombre reflections. At length a thought, an idea, an inspiration, as it were, flashed across my brain, like lightning through the darkness that overwhelmed me. The laws of man change, it said; they are weak, vain, frivolous; a breath can make, a breath can alter them; but the laws of Heaven are immutable—written on human hearts, whence death alone can efface them. In the stillness of night a voice said, ‘Look within; read your own heart; what do you find written there? Is it not that a strange, sweet, yet mysterious sympathy attracts you towards her—links you to her? Does not an intuition teach you her every thought and wish? When she smiles, does not an ecstatic joy pervade your frame? When she suffers, do you not suffer also?’ I recognised the truth, delightful yet exquisitely painful; but I put it away from me. I said, ‘Our paths in life diverge—the joy of such soul-communion is not for me—I am alone in life!’ But I watched you; I saw your unhappiness increase; you required a friend—again the voice addressed me; it said, ‘Be that friend;’ and I came, and did the little I was able to aid you. I was of use to you, and for the time I was happy. Once more, this day, when your brother confided in me, the voice spoke, ‘Go, Horace,’ it exclaimed, ‘she requires you.’ It had not deceived me; I found you pale, dejected, traces of tears on your silken lashes, sorrow marked in every line of your speaking countenance—in every pose of your graceful figure; and with flashing eyes and burning cheeks you tell me of your wrongs. Again, at this moment, the voice addresses me: ‘It is in vain to strive.’ it cries, ‘you cannot silence the utterances of the heart; they may be repressed for a time, but they will make themselves heard. Listen to their dictates now. She who is part of your soul is unhappy: she seeks affection, and is repelled with insensate coldness; she requires a mind capable of appreciating and reciprocating her own, and is met by feeble incapacity; she asks for common justice—common courtesy, and encounters sordid illiberality, fretful churlishness. Oppressed by her dismal fate, she sits alone and weeps. And shall this continue?—no! break through the trammels of dull conventionality, and let heart speak to heart; tell her of your ardent sympathy—of your tender devotion; ask her to permit your boundless love to compensate for the effete indifference of her despicable partner.’”
Up to this point Kate had been so entirely taken by surprise, and so carried away by the vehemence of D’Almayne’s address, that she could scarcely collect her ideas sufficiently either to comprehend his meaning or to attempt to check him; when, however, encouraged by her silence, he exchanged his German sentimentalism for the plain speaking contained in his last sentence, Kate’s indignation could no longer be restrained, and she cut him short by exclaiming—
“Do not further degrade yourself or insult me, Mr. D’Almayne, by continuing to address to me language which I should have thought you had known me sufficiently to feel sure could excite in me no other feelings than those of contempt and disgust. Leave me, sir! I am disappointed in you; I believed you were too much of a gentleman to have presumed upon Mr. Crane’s mistaken confidence in you, and dared thus to insult me! I shall now, however, feel it my duty to enlighten him as to the true character of the man he has so injudiciously trusted.”
As Kate thus reproached him, a look of fiend-like malignity, compounded of disappointed passion, baffled rage, and an eager thirsting for revenge, passed across D’Almayne’s usually unmoved countenance; it came and went in an instant, but not so quickly as to escape Kate’s keen glance; and, from that time forth, she know that he was a man to be feared, as well as to be disliked.
CHAPTER XLVIII.—MAGNANIMITY.
The malevolent glance with which D’Almayne favoured Kate passed away in a moment, and was succeeded by his usual expression of quiet, contemptuous sarcasm.
“If you choose thus to resent the warmth of expression into which my sympathy for your trials has betrayed me,” he said, “at the same time that you inform Mr. Crane of my delinquencies, pray tell him of the attentions which you have accepted from me, as well as of the one you reject. Tell him of the scroll wrapped round the rose-stalk, asking a private interview, which you instantly granted; tell him of the ostensible visits to the portrait-painter, undertaken to conceal the secret expedition to Mrs. Leonard; tell him that this expedition was made in a carriage hired by me to convey you to meet me by appointment at a house in an obscure quarter of London; and ask him, as a man of the world, whether he imagines you went there simply out of pure benevolence, and whether that benevolence to the wife of a man whom he supposes to have defrauded him, meets with his approval; or rather, I will ask him all this when he applies to me for an explanation of my conduct.” He paused, then perceiving from Kate’s look of embarrassment and annoyance that she recognized and was disconcerted by the force of his remarks, he continued: “You now see the absurdity, as well as the danger, of threatening me. Were Mr. Crane to break with me to-morrow, it would only be the loss of a dull acquaintance—”