"Have you considered fully," asked Marlow, "that I have neither fortune nor rank to offer her, that I am by no means--"
Sir Philip waved his hand almost impatiently. "What skills it talking of rank or wealth?" he said. "You are a gentleman by birth, education, manners. You have easy competence. My Emily will desire no more for herself, and I can desire no more for her. You will endeavor, I know, to make her happy, and will succeed, because you love her. As for myself, were I to choose out of all the men I know, you would be the man. Fortune is a good adjunct; but it is no essential. I do not promise her to you. That she must do; but if she says she will give you her hand, it shall be yours."
Marlow thanked him, with joy such as may be conceived; but Sir Philip's thoughts reverted at once to his daughter's situation at Mrs. Hazleton's. "She must stay there no longer, Marlow," he said; "I will send for her home without delay. Then you will have plenty of opportunity for the telling of your own tale to her ear, and seeing how you may speed with her; but, at all events, she must stay no longer in a house where she can meet with John Ayliffe. Mrs. Hazleton makes me marvel--a woman so proud--so refined!"
"It is but justice to say," replied Marlow, thoughtfully, "that I have some vague recollection of Mrs. Hazleton having intimated that they met that young gentleman by chance upon some expedition of pleasure. But had I not better communicate my hopes and wishes to Lady Hastings, my dear sir?"
"That is not needful," replied Emily's father, somewhat sternly; "I promise her to you, if she herself consents. My good wife will not oppose my wishes or my daughter's happiness; for do I suffer opposition upon occasions of importance. I will tell Lady Hastings my determination myself."
Marlow was too wise to say another word, but agreed to come on the following day to dine and sleep at the hall, and took his leave for the time. It was not, indeed, without some satisfaction that he heard Sir Philip order a horse to be saddled and a man to prepare to carry a letter to Mrs. Hazleton; for doubts were rapidly possessing themselves of his mind--not in regard to Emily--but in reference to Mrs. Hazleton herself.
The letter was dispatched immediately after his departure, recalling Emily to her father's house, and announcing that the carriage would be sent for her early on the following morning. That done, Sir Philip repaired to his wife's drawing-room, and informed her that he had given his consent to his young friend Marlow's suit to their daughter. His tone was one that admitted no reply, and Lady Hastings made none; but she entered her protest quite as well, by falling into a violent fit of hysterics.
CHAPTER XXII.
In a very gaudily furnished parlor, and in a very gaudy dress, sat a lady of some eight or nine and thirty years of age, with many traces of beauty still to be perceived in a face of no very intellectual expression. Few persons perhaps would have recognized in her the fair and faulty girl whom we have depicted weeping bitterly over the fate of Sir Philip Hastings' elder brother, and over the terrible situation in which he left her. Her features had much changed: the girlish expression--the fresh bloom of youth was gone. The light graceful figure was lost; but the mind had changed as greatly as the person, though, like it, the heart yet retained some traces of the original. When first she appeared before the reader's eyes, though weak and yielding, she was by no means ill disposed. She had committed an error--a great and fatal one; but at heart she was innocent and honest. She was, however, like all weak people, of that plastic clay moulded easily by circumstances into any form; and, in her, circumstances had shaped her gradually into a much worse form than nature had originally given her. To defraud, to cheat, to wrong, had at one time been most abhorrent to her nature. She had taken no active part in her father's dealings with old Sir John Hastings, and had she known all that he had said and sworn, would have shrunk with horror from the deceit. But during her father's short life, she had been often told by himself, and after his death had been often assured by the old woman Denby, that she was rightly and truly the widow of John Hastings, although because it would be difficult to prove, her father had consented to take an annuity for himself and her son, rather than enter into a lawsuit with a powerful man; and she had gradually brought herself to believe that she had been her lover's wife, because in one of his ardent letters he had called her so to stifle the voice of remorse in her bosom. The conviction had grown upon her, till now, after a lapse of more than twenty years, she had forgotten all her former doubts and scruples, believed herself and her son to be injured and deprived of their just rights, and was ready to assert her marriage boldly, though she had at one time felt and acknowledged that there was no marriage at all, and that the words her seducer had used were but intended to soothe her regret and terror. There was a point however beyond which she was not prepared to go. She still shrunk from giving false details, from perjuring herself in regard to particular facts. The marriage, she thought, might be good in the sight of heaven, of herself, and of her lover; but to render it good in the eyes of the law, she had found would require proofs that she could not give--oaths that she dared not take.
Another course, however, had been proposed for her; and now she sat in that small parlor gaudily dressed, as I have said, but dressed evidently for a journey. There were tears indeed in her eyes; and as her son stood by her side she looked up in his face with a beseeching look as if she would fain have said, "Pray do not drive me to this!"