“Dead! He died a year ago—of drink, I’m afraid—lung-complaint complicated with del. trem. Poor fellow!”
She breathed a deep sigh, with that little pensive air which in a young lady of experience is as much as to say, “He was the only man I ever loved,” and then she turned the conversation and talked of the supper and the champagne, which she sweepingly condemned.
Harrington hated that talk about the supper. He would have preferred talking of the stars like a schoolgirl, or Claude Melnotte, “wondering what star should be our home when love becomes immortal.” To be told that the wine which now glowed in his veins and intensified his passion was not worth three-and-sixpence a bottle jarred upon his finer feelings. “You are such a cynic,” he said. “I think I shall never get any nearer to your real self—for I know there is a heart under that mocking vein.”
And then he repeated his simple story of a humble, devoted love—humble because the woman he loved was the loveliest among all womankind, and because she occupied a higher plane than that on which his youth had been spent.
“But you have taught me what ambition means,” he said. “Only promise to be my wife and you shall see that I am in earnest—that it is in me to succeed.”
She had long been wavering—touched by his truthfulness, his boyish devotion—very weary of life at the Mount, where the mother scolded and the sister sneered, where the underfed and underpaid servants were frankly disobliging, where her brother rarely saw his womankind except at meals, which periods of family life he enlivened by a good deal of strong language, grumbling at the cookery, and at the deterioration of landed property in general, and his own in particular. The rest of his home-life he spent in the billiard-room or the stables, since he found the society of the saddle-room more congenial than the dreariness of the drawing-room, where his mother and sisters were not always on speaking terms.
From such a house as the Mount—goodly and fair to look upon without as many other whited sepulchres—any escape would be welcome. Juliet felt that she was a great deal too good for a young man of uncertain prospects and humdrum surroundings; but he was very much in love, and he was good-looking, and in her own particular phraseology she was beginning to be rather weak about him. She was so weak that she let him hold her unresisting hand as they stood side by side in the garden, and devour it with kisses.
“You certainly ought to do well in the world,” she said, sweetly; “for you are the most persistent person I ever knew.”
He looked round, saw that they were alone in the garden, and clasped her in his arms, polar bear and all, and kissed the unresisting lips, as he had kissed the unresisting hand.
“My dearest,” he exclaimed, “that means for life, does it not?”