“And I am expected to buy him, I suppose?”
“Don’t be so coarse! Now listen to me, Ned. I want this match. Of course I should not move in the matter if I did not respect the Duke, and if Augusta didn’t love him as much as she is capable of loving. But I want this English alliance—and there may never be another opportunity. I will state the fact plainly—it would give me the greatest possible satisfaction to know that my position was as assured in England as it is in America——”
“Good God! What is the matter with you American women? If you sat down and worked it out, could you tell why you are all so mad about the English nobility? Or wouldn’t you blush if you could? As I said the other day it is a germ disease—a species of brain-poisoning. It eats and rots. It demoralises like morphine and alcohol. After a woman has once let herself go, she is good for nothing else for the rest of her life. She eats, drinks, sleeps, thinks English aristocracy. Even you, if I gave you your head, would find it in you to become a veritable coronet-chaser—you!—my God! Well, it won’t be in my time; and if Augusta runs off with this debased dishonoured little wretch she’ll not get one cent of mine. And there will be no breaking of wills; I’ll dispose of my fortune before I die. I shall take good care to let him know this at once, for I make no doubt he’s desperate——”
Mrs. Forbes sprang to her feet. “You never spoke so to me before,” she cried furiously. “I do not believe you love me. So long as I spend my life studying your wishes—and I have studied them for twenty-two years—you are amiable and charming enough; but now that your wife and daughter want something that you don’t wish to give them, that doesn’t happen to suit your fancy, you turn upon me in your true character of a tyrant——”
“Virginia! hush!” said Mr. Forbes sternly. “I have done nothing of the sort. You are talking like a petulant child. Come here and tell me that you will think no more of this wretched business——”
He went forward, but she moved rapidly aside.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “I am not in the mood to be touched. And I shall never be happy again if you refuse your consent to this marriage.”
“Never be what? Has our happiness rested on so uncertain a foundation as that? I thought that you loved me.”
“Oh, I do. Of course I do. But can’t you understand that love isn’t everything to a woman?—any more than it is to a man? I would be married to no other man on earth, not to a prince of the blood. But it is not everything to me any more than it is everything to you. Suppose you were suddenly stripped of your tremendous political influence, of your financial power, and reduced to the mere domestic and social round? Would I suffice? Not unless you were eighty and in need of a nurse.”
She had drawn herself up to her full commanding height. Her head was thrown back, her nostrils were distended, her lips were a scarlet undulating line. There was no other colour in her face. It looked as opaque, as hard as ivory. The eyes were merciless; even their brown had lost its warmth. The jewels with which she was hung, which glowed with deep rubescent fire on her robe and neck and brow, gave her the appearance of an idol—an idol which had suddenly been informed with the spirit of pitiless ambition and spurned its creator.