“Permit me to remind you, Mrs. Spofford,” he interrupted, a trifle coldly, “that you just remarked that you know nothing whatever about me. Isn't it barely possible that my life may contain something desirable in the shape of family, position and environment?”
“I recall that Mr. Gray did speak of knowing the Percival family. My niece never allows me to forget it.”
“Mr. Gray did not know my family. He knew of my family, Mrs. Spofford, if that conveys anything to you. Not that they would not have been proud to have known him, for he was a gentleman. As for my own case, I can only say that I am not a fugitive from justice, nor have I done anything more disgraceful than the average young man who has been through college and who, ignoring the counsel of his father, proceeds to find out for himself the same things that his father had found out a great many years before,—and his father before him, and so on back to the beginning of man. My great-great-grandfather on my mother's side was a comparatively recent settler in America. He didn't come over from Scotland until about 1750. My father's people came over in the days of Lord Baltimore. Most of my remote ancestors were very wicked men. You will find that one of them was executed in the Tower of London the same week that Lady Jane Grey went to her death, and another was openly in love with Mistress Nell Gwyn, thereby falling into disgrace with a monarch named Charles. I admit that I come of very bad stock.”
A fleeting twinkle lurked in her eyes.
“You are very adroit, Mr. Percival.”
“Which is as much as to say that I have an agreeable and interesting way of lying. Is that what you wish to imply, Mrs. Spofford?”
“Not at all. I say you are adroit because you place me in an embarrassing position. If I believe your confession that you come of bad stock, I must also believe that you come of an exceedingly good old Maryland family.” He bowed very low. “My niece, Mr. Percival, is an orphan. I am and have been her protector since she was fourteen years of age. She is the possessor of a large fortune in her own right. Her father,—who was my brother,—gave her into my care when he was on his death-bed. I leave you to surmise just what were his dying words to me. She was his idol. I have not failed him in any respect. You ask me to give my consent to your marriage. I cannot do so. No doubt you will be married, just as you have planned. She loves you. I have known it for months. I have seen this day and hour coming,—yes, I have seen it even more clearly than she, for while she struggled desperately to deceive herself she has never been able to deceive me. You are a strong, attractive man. The glamour of mystery rests upon you. You have done prodigious deeds here, Mr. Percival. All of this I recognize, and I should be unfair to my own sense of honour were I to deny you my respect and gratitude. I must be fair. Fear has been the cause of my attitude toward you,—not fear of you, sir, but fear for my niece. Now I am confronted by the inevitable. The thing I have tried so hard to avoid has come to pass. In these circumstances, I am forced to confess that I have not been without a real, true admiration for you. I admit that I have felt a great security with you in command of our camp. But, even so, you are not the man I would have chosen to be Ruth's husband. The time is surely coming when we will be delivered from this island prison, when we will return to the life and the people and the conditions we knew before catastrophe made a new world for us. I am thinking of that time, Mr. Percival, and not of the present. I fear my niece is thinking only of the present and not of the future.”
He had listened with grave deference. “Forgive me if I appear impertinent, Mrs. Spofford, but is it not, after all, the past you are thinking about?”
She did not answer at once. His question had startled her.
“Youth does not live in the past,” he went on quietly. “It deals only with the present. I love Ruth Clinton,—I love her with the cleanest love a man can feel for a woman. It will not alter when we leave this island. If we are fated to spend the rest of our lives here, it will endure to the end.”