"I don't quite see what—Ah, yes, to be sure! Yes, I see. Well, I should count upon eight weeks, if I were you. In eight weeks the boy will be independent of them all, and we shall go to England for the wedding."
"The wedding?" cried Ste. Marie. "What wedding?—Ah!"
"Arthur Benham and my daughter are to be married," said O'Hara, "so soon as he reaches his majority. I thought you knew that."
In a very vague fashion he realised that he had expected it. And still the definite words came to him with a shock which was like a physical blow, and he turned his back with a man's natural instinct to hide his feeling. Certainly that was the logical conclusion to be drawn from known premises. That was to be the O'Haras' reward for their labour. To Stewart the great fortune, to the O'Haras a good marriage for the girl and an assured future. That was reward enough surely for a few weeks of angling and decoying and luring and lying. That was what she had meant, on the day before, by saying that she could see all the to-morrows. He realised that he must have been expecting something like this, but the thought turned him sick nevertheless. He could not forget the girl as he had come to know her during the past week. He could not face with any calmness the thought of her as the adventuress who had lured poor Arthur Benham on to destruction. It was an impossible thought. He could have laughed at it in scornful anger, and yet—What else was she?
He began to realise that his action in turning his back upon the other man in the middle of a conversation must look very odd, and he faced round again trying to drive from his expression the pain and distress which he knew must be there plain to see. But he need not have troubled himself, for the other man was standing before the sext window and looking out into the morning sunlight, and his hard bony face had so altered that Ste. Marie stared at him with open amazement. He thought O'Hara must be ill.
"I want to see her married!" cried the Irishman suddenly. And it was a new voice, a voice Ste. Marie did not know. It shook a little with an emotion that sat uncouthly upon this grim stern man.
"I want to see her married and safe!" he said. "I want her to be rid of this damnable, roving, cheap existence. I want her to be rid of me and my rotten friends and my rotten life." He chafed his hands together before him, and his tired eyes fixed themselves upon something that he seemed to see out of the window, and glared at it fiercely.
"I should like," said he, "to die on the day after her wedding, and so be out of her way for ever. I don't want her to have any shadows cast over her from the past. I don't want her to open closet doors and find skeletons there. I want her to be free—free to live the sort of life she was born to and has a right to."
He turned sharply upon the younger man.
"You've seen her!" he cried. "You've talked to her, you know her! Think of that girl dragged about Europe with me ever since she was a little child! Think of the people she's had to know, the things she's had to see! Do you wonder that I want to have her free of it all, married and safe and comfortable and in peace? Do you? I tell you it has driven me as nearly mad as a man can be. But I couldn't go mad because I had to take care of her. I couldn't even die because she'd have been left alone, without any one to look out for her.