"Very well! go away at once, and return to Bagnères; on my part, I promise you that you shall have my reply within forty hours."
"But what will become of me, great God! during that century of suspense?"
"You will hope," said Lavinia, hurriedly closing the door, as if she were afraid of saying too much.
Lionel did hope. His reasons for hoping were a word from Lavinia and all the arguments of his own self-esteem.
"You are wrong to abandon the game," said Henry, as they rode away; "Lavinia was beginning to melt. On my word, Lionel, that doesn't seem like you. Even if for no other reason than not to leave Morangy master of the field—— But I see that you are more in love with Miss Ellis than I thought."
Lionel was too preoccupied to listen to him. He passed the interval fixed by Lavinia, locked in his room, representing that he was ill; and did not deign to confide in Sir Henry, who lost himself in conjectures concerning his conduct. At last the letter arrived; it was in these terms:
"Neither the one nor the other! When you receive this letter, when Monsieur de Morangy, whom I have sent to Tarbes, receives his reply, I shall be far from you both; I shall have gone, gone forever, gone irrevocably, so far as you and he are concerned.
"You offer me name and rank and fortune; you believe that a brilliant position in society has a great fascination for a woman. Oh, no! not for her who knows society and despises it as I do. Do not think, however, Lionel, that I disdain the offer you made to sacrifice a brilliant marriage, and bind yourself to me forever.
"You realized what a cruel blow it is to a woman's self-esteem to be abandoned, what a glorious triumph it is to bring back a once faithless swain to her feet, and you thought to compensate me by that triumph for all I have suffered; so I give you my esteem once more, and I would forgive you the past had I not done so long ago.
"But understand, Lionel, that it is not in your power to repair the wrong. No, it is in no man's power. The blow I received was a deadly blow; it killed the power to love in me forever; it extinguished the torch of illusions, and life appears to me in a dull and miserable light.
"But I do not complain of my destiny; it was bound to come, sooner or later. We all live to grow old, and to see all our joys overshadowed by disappointments. My disillusionment came when I was rather young, to be sure, and the craving for love survived for a long while the faculty of having faith in man. I have struggled long and often against my youth, as against a desperate foe; I have always succeeded in beating it.
"And do you imagine that this last struggle against you, this resistance to the promises you have made, is not exceedingly hard and painful? I may confess it, now that flight has placed me beyond all danger of surrender: I love you still, I feel it; the imprint of the first object of one's love is never entirely effaced; it seems to have vanished; we fall asleep, oblivious of the pain we have suffered; but let the image of the past arise, let the old idol reappear, and we are ready to bend the knee as before. Oh! fly, fly, phantom and falsehood! you are but a shadow, and if I should venture to follow you, you would lead me again among the reefs, and leave me there shattered and dying. Fly! I no longer believe in you. I know that you cannot arrange the future as you will, and that, though your lips may be sincere to-day, the frailty of your heart will force you to lie to-morrow.
"And why should I blame you for being like that? are we not all weak and fickle? Was I not myself calm and cold when I approached you yesterday? Was I not perfectly certain that I could not love you? Had I not encouraged the Comte de Morangy's suit? And yet, in the evening, when you sat beside me on that rock, when you spoke, to me in such an impassioned tone, amid the wind and the storm, did I not feel my heart soften and melt? Ah! now that I reflect, I know that it was your voice of the old days, your passion of the old days, you, my first love, my youth, that came back to me all at once, for a moment!
"And now, when my blood is cool, I feel a deathly depression; for I am awake, and I remember that I dreamed a lovely dream in the midst of a melancholy life.
"Farewell, Lionel! Assuming that your desire to marry me should last until the moment of its fulfilment (and even now, perhaps, you are beginning to feel that I may be right in refusing you), you would have been unhappy in the constraint imposed by such a bond; you would have found that the world—always ungrateful and sparing of praise for our good deeds—would look upon yours as the performance of a duty, and would deny you the triumph which perhaps you would expect. Then you would have thrown away self-content, and have failed to obtain the admiration upon which you counted. Who knows! perhaps I myself should have forgotten too quickly all that was noble in your return to me, and have accepted your new love as a reparation due to your honor. Oh! let us not mar the hour of honest impulse and mutual confidence we enjoyed last night; let us remember it always, but never seek to repeat it.
"Have no fear for your self-esteem so far as the Comte de Morangy is concerned; I have never loved him. He is one of the innumerable weak creatures who have failed—even with my assistance, alas!—to make my dead heart beat again. I would not even want him for a husband. A man of his rank always sells too dear the protection he bestows, by always making it felt. And then, I detest marriage, I detest all men, I detest everlasting pledges, promises, plans, the arranging of the future, in advance, by contracts and bargains at which Destiny always snaps its fingers. I no longer care for anything but travel, reverie, solitude, the uproar of the world, to walk through it and laugh at it, and poetry to endure the past, and God to give me hope for the future."
Sir Lionel Bridgemont's self-esteem was deeply mortified at first; for, to console those readers who may have become too warmly interested in him, we must say that in forty hours he had reflected seriously. In the first place, he thought of taking horse, following Lady Blake, overcoming her resistance, and triumphing over her cold common-sense. Then he thought that she might persist in her refusal, and that, meanwhile, Miss Ellis might take offence at his conduct, and break off the match.—He remained.
"Well," said Henry to him, the next day, when he saw him kiss Miss Margaret's hand, who bestowed that mark of forgiveness on him, after a sharp quarrel concerning his absence; "next year, we will enter Parliament."
[2]Written thus, in English, in the original.