“Certainly I mean to say it. We have set the one thing against the other and cried quits, though of course he has bargained that he shall have nothing more to do with you, and also that, should you persist in your present conduct, he shall not be forced to receive you at his house after our marriage.”
“Really he need not have troubled to make that stipulation.”
“We are not all fools, Henry,” Ellen went on; “and I did not feel called upon to break an engagement that in many ways suits me very well because you have chosen to quarrel with Edward and to use violence towards him. Do not be afraid, Henry: I have not come here to lecture you; I come to say that I wash my hands of you. In the interests of the family, of which you are the head, I still venture to hope that you will repent of the past and that better counsels may prevail as to the future. I hope, for instance, that you will come to see that your own prosperity and good name should not be sacrificed in order to gratify a low passion. But this is merely a pious wish and by the way. You are a middle-aged man, and must take your own course in life; only I decline to be involved in your ruin. If in the future I should however be able to do anything to mitigate its consequences so far as this property is concerned, I will do it; for I at least think more of my family than of myself, and most of all of the dying wishes of our father. And now, Henry, as a sister to a brother I say good-bye to you for so long as you persist in your present courses. Henceforth when we meet it will be as acquaintances and no more. Good-bye, Henry.” And she left the room.
“That is a pleasant speech to have to listen to,” reflected Henry as the door closed behind her. “Of the two I really think that I prefer Mr. Milward’s mode of address, for he can be answered, or at any rate dealt with; but it is difficult to answer Ellen, seeing that to a great extent she has the right on her side. What a position for a man! If I had tried, I could not have invented a worse one. I shall never laugh again at the agonies of a heroine placed between love and duty, for it is my own case. Or rather let us leave the love out of it, and say that I stand between duty and duty, the delicate problem to decide being: Which is the higher of these duties and who shall be sacrificed?”
As he thought thus, sadly enough, there was a knock upon his door, and Lady Graves entered the room, looking very sorrowful and dignified in her widow’s robe.
“So I haven’t seen the worst of it,” Henry muttered. “Well, I may as well get it over.” Then he added aloud, “Will you sit down, mother? I am sorry that I cannot rise to receive you.”
“My boy,” she said in a low voice, “I have been thinking a great deal of the sad scene which took place in connection with your dear father’s death, and of my subsequent conduct towards you, and I have come to apologise to you. I do not know the exact circumstances that led you to act as you have done,—I may even say that I scarcely wish to know them; but on reflection I feel that nothing but the strongest reasons or considerations of honour would have induced you to refuse your father’s last request, and that I have therefore no right to judge you harshly. This came home to me when I saw you leaving the room yonder a few nights since, and your face showed me what you were suffering. But at that time my heart was too frozen with grief, and, I fear, also too much filled with resentment against you to allow me to speak. If you can tell me anything that will give me a better understanding of the causes of all this dreadful trouble, I shall be grateful to you; for then we may perhaps consult together and find some way out of it. But I repeat that I do not come to force your confidence. I come, Henry, to express my regret, and to mourn with you over a husband and a father whom we both loved dearly,”—and, moved by a sudden impulse of affection, she bent down and kissed her son upon the forehead.
He returned the embrace, and said, “Mother, those are the first kind words that I have heard for a long while from any member of my family; and I can assure you that I am grateful for them, and shall not forget them, for I thought that you had come here to revile me like everybody else. You say that you do not ask my confidence, but fortunately a man can speak out to his mother without shame, even when he has cause to be ashamed of what he must tell her. Now listen, mother: as you know, I never was a favourite in this house; I dare say through my own fault, but so it is. From boyhood everybody more or less looked down upon me, and, with the exception of yourself, I doubt if anybody cared for me much. Well, I determined to make my own way in the world and to show you all that there was something in me, and to a certain extent I succeeded. I worked hard to succeed too; I denied myself in many ways, and above all I kept myself clear from the vices that most young men fall into in one shape or another. Then came this dreadful business of my brother’s death, and just as I was beginning really to get on I was asked to leave the profession which was everything to me. From the letters that reached me I gathered that in some mysterious way it lay in my power, and in mine alone, to pull the family affairs out of the mire if I returned home. So I retired from the Service and I came, because I thought that it was my duty, for hitherto I have tried to do my duty when I could see my way to it. On the first night of my arrival here I learned the true state of affairs from Ellen, and I learned also what it was expected that I should do to remedy it—namely, that I should marry a young lady with whom I had but a slight acquaintance, but who, as it chances, is the owner of the mortgages on this estate.”
“It was most indiscreet of Ellen to put the matter like that,” said Lady Graves.
“Ellen is frequently indiscreet, mother; but doubtless it never occurred to her that I should object to doing what she is so ready to do for herself—marry for money. I am glad you see, however, that her method was not exactly calculated to prepossess any man in favour of a marriage, of which he did not happen to have thought for himself. Still the young lady came, and I liked her exceedingly; I liked her more than any woman that I had met before, the one inexplicable thing about her to my mind—being why on earth she should wish to marry me, as I understand is, or was, the case.”