"Lydia—Lydia, what are you?" cried Lord Dunstable; "a fiend—thus to treat a wounded man who is so completely at your mercy!"
"And how did you treat me when I was at your mercy at the house of your equally abandoned friend Cholmondeley?" continued Lydia. "Was not the wine which I drank, drugged for an especial purpose? Or, even if it were not—and supposing that I was intemperate,—granting, I say, that the stupefaction into which I fell was the result of my own imprudence in drinking deeply of a liquor till then unknown to me,—did you act honourably in availing yourself of my powerlessness to rob me of the only jewel I possessed? I was poor, my lord—but I was still virtuous:—you plundered me of that chastity which gave me confidence in myself and was the element of my good name! No prowling—skulking—masked thief ever performed a more infernal part than did you on that foul night!"
"And now that years have passed, you regret the loss of a bauble—call it a jewel, indeed!—which I certainly seized an opportunity to steal, but which you would have given me of your own accord a few days later, had I chosen to wait?" said Dunstable, speaking contemptuously, and yet with great difficulty.
"It is false—it is false—it is false!" replied Lydia, in a hoarse voice that indicated the rage which these words excited in her bosom. "I never should have yielded to you: never—never! But when once I was lost, I became like all women in the same state—reckless, indifferent! Villain that you are, you make light of your crimes. Oh! I am well aware that seduction—rape, even, under such circumstances as those in which you ravished me—are not deemed enormities in the fashionable world: they are achievements at which profligates like yourself laugh over their wine, and which render them favourites with the ladies! Yon call seductions and rapes by the noble name of 'conquests!' O glorious conqueror that you were, when you lay down by the side of a mere girl who was insensible, and rifled her of the only jewel that adorned her! How was your victory celebrated? By my tears! What have been its consequences? My ruin and utter degradation! Detestable man, of what have you to boast? Of plunging a poor, defenceless woman into the depths of misery—of hurrying her father to the grave with a broken heart—of murdering her brother! Those are your conquests, monster that you are!"
Weak as was the young nobleman's frame,—attenuated as was his mind by suffering and by prostration of the physical energies, it is not to be wondered at if those terrible reproaches produced a strange effect upon him,—uttered as they were, too, in a tone of savage malignity, and by a woman with whom he found himself alone at an hour when all the other inmates of the mansion were probably rocked in slumber.
That evanescent gleam of a naturally spirited disposition which had enabled him to meet her first taunts with a contemptuous reply, had disappeared; and he now found himself prostrated in mind and body—rapidly yielding to nervous feelings and vague alarms—and almost inclined to believe himself to be the black-hearted criminal which Lydia represented him.
"And when such profligates as you appear in the fashionable world, after some new conquest," proceeded Lydia, "how triumphant—how proud are ye, if the iniquity have obtained notoriety! Ye are the objects of all conversation—of all interest! And what is your punishment at the hands of an outraged society? Ladies tap you with their fans, and say slyly, 'Oh! the naughty man!' And the naughty man smiles—displays his white teeth—and becomes the hero of the party! But all the while, how many bitter tears are shed elsewhere on his account! what hearts are breaking through his villany! Such has doubtless been your career, Lord Dunstable: and I do not envy you the feelings which must now possess you. For should that wound prove fatal—should mortification ensue—should this, in a word, be your death-bed, how ill-prepared are you to meet that all-seeing and avenging Judge who will punish you the more severely on account of the high station which you have held in the world!"
"Water, Lydia—water!" murmured Lord Dunstable: "my throat is parched. Water—I implore you!"
"How could I give you so poor a drink as water, when you gave me wine?"