“Will the Marquise do that?” said Philip, arching his eyebrows.
“So Merton Fillmore says: and he is to conduct her case.”
“Well,” said Philip, beginning to smile, “she could not have done anything that pleases me better; for I have gained much wisdom since I saw you last, and am as anxious to be rid of that burden as ever you were. So, if you agree, my darling, we’ll give her the twenty thousand pounds, without putting her to the trouble to sue for it: for there’s only one kind of wealth worth having, and that is what I have been enjoying ever since I caught sight of you on the doorsteps.”
“But, Philip, you know we have spent ever so much money on that miserable house in town. What are we to do about that? for the money from ‘Iduna’ will not be enough to pay it.”
“Why, that is all right, too,” said Philip, laughing: “for, though I had forgotten it till this moment, Lord Seabridge, who is not expected to live more than a week, said when I saw him the other day that he put five thousand pounds in his will for me, ‘just to buy my wife a present.’ We can pay our debts with that, and still have a few hundreds left to begin life again in this old house.” He put his arm round her waist, and added, looking down at her, “You won’t object to my receiving that legacy, will you?”
“Oh, Philip!” said Marion, with a long sigh, hiding her face on his shoulder; “I wish.... I think.... I hear my mother and Lady Flanders coming down stairs!”
CHAPTER XXXVII.
WHEN the Marquise Desmoines received from Fillmore a letter announcing that the defendants in the case of Desmoines vs. Lancaster declined to defend, she uttered a sharp cry, and dropped the letter as if it had been poisonous. That strange sense of justice—of what is fairly due to one as a human being—which is perhaps the last thing to die out of even the least deserving of God’s creatures, told her heart that she had been outraged. All things had slipped away from her. Despite all her powers, and her desperate yearning to exercise them, she was powerless. There could scarcely be, for her, a keener suffering. With some natures, the very intensity of anguish is its own partial antidote; the faculties are so far stunned as to be unable, for a time, to gauge the poignancy of the disaster. But Perdita’s clear and vigorous intellect would not permit her such an escape. She immediately saw her position in all its bearings and prospects. Her mind shed a pitiless light upon every aspect of her defeat and humiliation. Something vital within her seemed to gasp and die.
After a long, breathless pause, she took up the letter again, and read it to the end. It contained a request on the part of the writer to be allowed to call on her at a certain hour that evening. It was not difficult to see what that meant. She had made the surrender of herself to Fillmore contingent upon his recovery of the legacy: and he was coming to claim the fulfillment of her promise. She would be called on to play the part of a complaisant fiancée. At this picture, Perdita laughed; and then, setting her teeth with rage, tore the paper into fragments. Such rage is deadly. Had Fillmore been present, his fiancée would have attempted his life. And yet it was not he that could enrage her: nothing that he could have done could have affected one pulsation of her heart. She had passed into a region of emotion almost infinitely more intense than any with which he could be connected. But, as sometimes a woman will kiss a child or a dog, thinking “this kiss is for my lover!” so might Perdita have driven a dagger to Fillmore’s heart, and said, “Be Philip and die!”
She looked at her hands: how white and fine they were,—how beautifully formed! She rose and walked to and fro in the room; every movement was grace and elasticity,—the harmonious play of parts exquisitely fashioned and proportioned. She paused before the looking-glass, and contemplated the form and features imaged there. She drew out her comb, and shook down on her shoulders a soft depth of bright-hued hair. She loosened the front of her dress, and exposed a bosom white as milk and curved like the bowl of Ganymede, save for the slight indentation of a scar, on the right breast. She gazed into the sparkling reflection of her eyes, as if some mystery were hidden there. “I have seen no woman more beautiful than you,” she said aloud. “What is the use of beauty? Why was I born?”