A smile of quiet irony accompanied the words. As it curved her lips alluringly, Lord Hurdly felt himself touched with the sudden sense of her powerful charm. No one else on earth would have dared to say this to him, or anything remotely comparable with it. There was something very piquant to his jaded palate in the flavor of this audacious speech. Instead of scowling, therefore, he smiled.
“I have heard,” he said, amiably, “that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, and certainly you seem to warrant one in accepting that belief.”
Bettina, a good deal relieved at this turn of affairs, took the opportunity that the moment gave her to say, gravely:
“No; I do not consider myself free. I have bound myself, in my marriage to you, and I have no intention or desire to forget the duties which I owe you. But I tell you frankly, Lord Hurdly, that I am not accustomed to either surveillance or tyranny, and I shall not tamely submit to them. In the carrying out of this resolution, at least, you will find that I can be brave.”
She looked more than ordinarily beautiful as she stood erect before him and said these words, and he had not gazed so fully into her eyes for a long time. He had almost forgotten their magnetic loveliness. At sight of them now his pulses beat quicker. A desire for the mastery of this splendid creature returned to him with a force he would not have believed possible.
“Bettina,” he said, in a voice which showed an emotion most unusual to him, “have you ever known what it was to love, I wonder?”
“Once—once only,” she answered, a quaver in her voice and a sudden suffusion of tears in her eyes. “I loved my mother. No one that ever lived could have loved more truly and more ardently than I loved her; but there it began and ended. I never deceived you as to that. I promised you duty and good faith, and I have not failed in these. I never shall so fail. But love, no! I haven’t it to give.”
She made a movement to go forward, and he stood aside and let her pass him. She avoided meeting his gaze, and perhaps it was well that she did. For slowly its expression changed. A look of hardness that was almost significant of dislike came into his eyes and compressed his lips. From the day of their marriage this woman had thwarted and baffled him. He had tried to get the mastery of her, but he had failed, and the sense of that failure angered him. He had been used to dominating every one with whom he came into any sort of close contact. He had married this American girl with the determination to dominate her, and he had found himself as powerless as if she had been a mist maiden. There was no way in which he could lay hold upon her.
Concerning Bettina’s attitude toward him he had a theory. He believed that she had really loved Horace. She was too absolutely in the shadow of the sorrow of her mother’s death to give full play to any other feeling, but he had always felt, in every effort that he had made to win her, that it was the image of Horace Spotswood in her mind which put him in total eclipse. This theory time had deepened. His suspicious watchfulness over her every word and look had made him aware that she listened with interest when Horace’s name was mentioned, and his imagination heightened the effect of her interest, and caused him to conjecture as to what she might have heard and felt at such times as he was not by. Moreover, a certain secret consciousness in his own soul stimulated him in his suspicions.