After this he met her very often, and while other young men avoided her on account of her bitter tongue, he showed a preference for her society, and encouraged her to confide in him. She went everywhere, chaperoned by Mr. Mortimer, a dreary twaddler, who was for ever expounding theories of art which he had picked up, parrot-wise, in a London art-school thirty years before. His latest ideas were coeval with Maclise and Mulready. Mrs. Mortimer was by way of being an invalid, and sat and nursed her neuralgia at home, while her husband and Miss Faux went into society.
It was at the beginning of spring that an American lady of wealth and standing invited the Mortimers and their protégée to a picnic, to which Mr. Ransome was also bidden; and it was this picnic which sealed George Ransome’s fate. Pity for Vivien’s lonely position had grown into a sincere regard. He had discovered warm feelings under that cynical manner, a heart capable of a profound affection. She had talked to him of a child, a kind of adopted sister, whom she had passionately loved, and from whom she had been parted by the selfish cruelty of the little girl’s parents.
“My school-life in England had soured me before then,” she said, “and I was not a very amiable person even at fifteen years old; but that cruelty finished me. I have hated my fellow-creatures ever since.”
He pleaded against this wholesale condemnation.
“You were unlucky,” he said, “in encountering unworthy people.”
“Ah, but one of those people, the child’s father, had seemed to me the best of men. I had believed in him as second only to God in benevolence and generosity. When he failed I renounced my belief in human goodness.”
Unawares, George Ransome had fallen into the position of her confidant and friend. From friendship to love was an easy transition; and a few words, spoken at random during a ramble on an olive-clad hill, bound him to her for ever. Those unpremeditated words loosed the fountain of tears, and he saw the most scornful of women, the woman who affected an absolute aversion for his sex, and a contempt for those weaker sisters who waste their love upon such vile clay—he saw her abandon herself to a passion of tears at the first word of affection which he had ever addressed to her. He had spoken as a friend rather than as a lover; but those tears bound him to her for life. He put his arm round her, and pillowed the small pale face upon his breast, the dark impassioned eyes looking up at him drowned in tears.
“You should not have said those words,” she sobbed. “You cannot understand what it is to have lived as I have lived—a creature apart—unloved—unvalued. O, is it true?—do you really care for me?”
“With all my heart,” he answered, and in good faith.
His profound compassion took the place of love; and in that moment he believed that he loved her as a man should love the woman whom he chooses for his wife.