"I hope so," I replied quietly, for what had I but that?
"Yes," he resumed, "but I don't mean conventionally, because your godfathers and godmothers at your baptism said you were--I mean really. I don't believe there is a particle of humbug about you. Can you forgive your enemies?"
"I have already told you so," I answered; "don't you remember that night in the trenches? besides, Ropsley, I shall never consider you my enemy."
"That is exactly what cuts me to the heart," he replied, flushing up over his wan, wasted face. "I have injured you more deeply than any one on earth, and I have received nothing but kindness in return. Often and often I have longed to tell you all--how I had wronged you, and how I had repented, but my pride forbade me till to-day. It is dreadful to think that I might have died, and never confessed to you how hard and how unfeeling I have been. Listen to me, and then forgive me if you can. Oh, Vere, Vere! had it not been for me and my selfishness, you might have married Constance Beverley!"
I felt I was trembling all over; I covered my face with my hands and turned away, but I bade him go on.
"Her father was never averse to you from the first. He liked you, Vere, personally, and still more for the sake of your father, his old friend. There was but one objection. I need not dwell upon it; and even that he could have got over, for he was most anxious to see his daughter married, and to one with whom he could have made his own terms. He was an unscrupulous man, Sir Harry, and dreadfully pressed for money. When in that predicament people will do things that at other times they would be ashamed of, as I know too well. And the girl too, Vere, she loved you--I am sure of it--she loved you, poor girl, with all her heart and soul."
I looked him straight in the face--"Not a word of her, Ropsley, as you are a gentleman!" I said. Oh, the agony of that moment! and yet it was not all pain.
"Well," he proceeded, "Sir Harry consulted me about the match. You know how intimate we were, you know what confidence he had in my judgment. If I had been generous and honourable, if I had been such a man as you, Vere, how much happier we should all be now; but no, I had my own ends in view, and I determined to work out my own purpose, without looking to the right or left, without turning aside for friend or foe. Besides, I hardly knew you then, Vere. I did not appreciate your good qualities. I did not know your courage, and constancy, and patience, and kindliness. I did not know yours was just the clinging, womanly nature, that would never get over the crushing of its best affections--and I know it now too well. Oh, Vere, you never can forgive me! And yet," he added, musingly, more to himself than to me,--"and yet, even had I known all this, had you been my own brother, I fear my nature was then so hard, so pitiless, so uncompromising, that I should have gone straight on towards my aim, and blasted your happiness without scruple or remorse. Remorse," and the old look came over him, the old sneering look, that wreathed those handsome features in the wicked smile of a fallen angel--"if a man means to repent of what he has done, he had better not do it. My maxim has always been, 'never look back,'--'vestigia, nulla retrorsum'--and yet to-day I cannot help retracing, ay, and bitterly regretting, the past.
"I have told you I had my own ends in view. I wished to marry the heiress myself. Not that I loved her, Vere--do not be angry with me for the confession--I never loved her the least in the world. She was far too placid, too conventional, too like other girls, to make the slightest impression on me. My ideal of a woman is, a bold, strong nature, a keen intellect, a daring mind, and a dazzling beauty that others must fall down and worship. I never was one of your sentimentalists. A violet may be a very pretty flower, and smell very sweet, but I like a camellia best, and all the better because you require a hothouse to raise it in. But, if I did not care for Miss Beverley, I cared a good deal for Beverley Manor, and I resolved that, come what might, Beverley Manor should one day be mine. The young lady I looked upon as an encumbrance that must necessarily accompany the estate. You know how intimate I became with her father, you know the trust he reposed in me, and the habit into which he fell, of doing nothing without my advice. That trust, I now acknowledge to you, I abused shamefully; of that habit I took advantage, solely to further my own ends, totally irrespective of my friend. He confided to me in very early days his intention of marrying his daughter to the son of his old friend. He talked it over with me as a scheme on which he had set his heart, and, above all, insisted on the advantage to himself of making, as he called it, his own terms with you about settlements, etc. I have already told you he was involved in difficulties, from which his daughter's marriage could alone free him, with the consent of her husband. I need not enter into particulars. I have the deeds and law papers at my fingers' ends, for I like to understand a business thoroughly if I embark on it at all, but it is no question of such matters now. Well, Vere, at first I was too prudent to object overtly to the plan. Sir Harry, as you know, was an obstinate, wilful man, and such a course would have been the one of all others most calculated to wed him more firmly than ever to his original intention; but I weighed the matter carefully with him day by day, now bringing forward arguments in favour of it, now starting objections, till I had insensibly accustomed him to consider it by no means as a settled affair. Then I tried all my powers upon the young lady, and there, I confess to you freely, Vere, I was completely foiled. She never liked me even as an acquaintance, and she took no pains to conceal her aversion. How angry she used to make me sometimes!--I hated her so, that I longed to make her mine, if it were only to humble her, as much as if I had loved her with all my heart and soul. Many a time I used to grind my teeth and mutter to myself, 'Ah! my fair enemy, I shall live to make you rue this treatment;' and I swore a great oath that, come what might, she should never belong to Vere Egerton. I even tried to create an interest in her mind for Victor de Rohan, but the girl was as true as steel. I have been accustomed to read characters all my life, women's as well as men's, it is part of my profession;" and Ropsley laughed once more his bitter laugh; "and many a trifling incident showed me that Constance Beverley cared for nobody on earth but you. This only made me more determined not to be beat; and little by little, with hints here and whispers there, assisted by your own strange, solitary habits, and the history of your poor father's life and death, I persuaded Sir Harry that there was madness in your family, and that you had inherited the curse. From the day on which he became convinced of this, I felt I had won my race. No power on earth would then have induced him to let you marry his daughter, and the excuse that he made you on that memorable afternoon, when you had so gallantly rescued her from death, was but a gentlemanlike way of getting out of his difficulty about telling you the real truth. Vere, that girl's courage is wonderful. She came down to dinner that night with the air of an empress, but with a face like marble, and a dull, stony look in her eyes that made even me almost rue what I had done. She kept her room for a fortnight afterwards, and I cannot help feeling she has never looked as bright since.
"When you went away I acknowledge I thought the field was my own. In consideration of my almost ruining myself to preserve him from shame, Sir Harry promised me his daughter if I could win her consent, and you may depend upon it I tried hard to do so. It was all in vain; the girl hated me more and more, and when we all met so unexpectedly in Vienna, I saw that my chance of Beverley Manor was indeed a hopeless one. Sir Harry, too, was getting very infirm. Had he died before his daughter's marriage, his bills for the money I had lent him were not worth the stamps on which they were drawn. My only chance was her speedy union with some one rich enough to make the necessary sacrifices, and again I picked out Victor de Rohan as the man. We all thought then you were engaged to his sister Valèrie."