For twenty years he had sneered at women, and at men’s belief in them; and now, at the end of twenty years, he believed; and, escaping out of the prison which he had made for himself, he spread his recovered wings and was free.
A sigh escaped from Eleanor’s lips as she listened to her lover. The time in which she could have hoped to pay him back all this great debt which he was heaping upon her, was past and gone. She felt a sense of oppression beneath the load of this obligation. She began to perceive—as yet only dimly, so intense was the egotism engendered out of the single purpose of her life—that she was binding herself to something that she might not be able to perform; she was taking upon herself a debt that she could scarcely hope to pay. For a moment she thought this, and was ready, under this new impulse, to draw back and say, “I cannot become your wife; I am too much tied and bound by the obligations of the past, to be able to fulfil the duties of the present. I am set apart from other women, and must stand alone until the task I have set myself is accomplished, or the hope of its fulfilment abandoned.”
She thought this, and the words trembled on her lips; but in the next moment the image of her father arose angry and reproachful, as if to say to her, “Have you so little memory of my wrongs and my sorrows that you can shrink from any means of avenging me?”
This idea banished every other consideration.
“I will keep my promise first, and do my duty to Gilbert Monckton afterwards,” thought Eleanor. “It will be easy to be a good wife to him. I used to like him very much.”
She recalled the old days in which she had sat a little way apart from the lawyer and his ward, envying Laura Mason her apparent influence over Mr. Monckton; and for a moment a faint thrill of pleasure and triumph vibrated through her veins as she remembered that henceforth her claim upon him would be higher than that of any other living creature. He would be her own—her lover, her husband—adviser, friend, instructor; everything in the wide world to her.
“Oh, let me avenge my father’s cruel death,” she thought, “and then I may be a good and happy wife.”
Mr. Monckton could have stood for ever by the side of his betrothed wife in the sunny window looking out upon the mews. The prospect of the half-open stable doors; the lounging grooms smoking and drinking in the intervals of their labour; the scantily draperied women hanging out newly-washed linen, and making as it were triumphal arches of wet garments across the narrow thoroughfare; the children playing hop-scotch, or called away from that absorbing diversion to fetch damp steaming quartern loaves and jugs of beer for their elders,—all these things were beautiful in the eyes of the owner of Tolldale Priory. An overplus of that sunshine which filled his own breast glorified these common objects, and Mr. Monckton gazed upon the angular proportions of the bony Roman-nosed horses, the classic outlines of decrepit Hansom cabs, and all the other objects peculiar to the neighbourhood of the Pilasters, with such a radiance of contentment and delight upon his countenance as might have induced the observer, looking at the lawyer’s face, and not at the prospect, to believe that the bay of Naples was spread out in purple splendour under the open window of Miss Vane’s sitting-room.
Signora Picirillo returned from her day’s labours, and found Eleanor’s visitor thus absorbed; but he understood directly who she was, and greeted her with a cordiality that very much astonished the music-mistress. Eleanor Vane slipped out of the room while Mr. Monckton was explaining himself to the Signora. She was only too glad to get away from the man to whom she had so rashly bound herself. She went to the glass to brush her hair away from her hot forehead, and then threw herself on the bed, prostrated by all the excitement she had undergone, powerless even to think.
“I almost wish I could lie here for ever,” she thought: “it seems so like peace to lie still and leave off thinking.” Her youth had held out bravely against the burdens she had put upon her strength and spirits, but the young energies had given way at last, and she fell into a heavy dreamless slumber: a blessed and renovating sleep, from which nature takes compensation for the wrongs that have been done her.