He tried to take her hand again, but she drew herself away from him with a superb gesture of mingled surprise and scorn.
"There was nothing further from my mind than that you could desire to marry me, except that you should wish to degrade me," she said in a voice graver than his own.
Her face was colourless, but she stood erect and firm, and had no look of swooning.
"Degrade you? Do you call it degradation to be the idol of my life, to be the beloved companion of a man who can lavish all this world knows of luxury and pleasure upon your lot, who will carry you to the fairest spots of earth, show you all that is noblest in art and nature, all that makes the bliss of intelligent beings, who will protect your interests by the most generous settlements ever made by a lover?"
"Oh, my lord, stop your inventory of temptation!" exclaimed Antonia. "The price you offer is extravagant, but I am not for sale. I thought you were my friend—indeed, for me you had become a dear and cherished friend. I was deceived, cruelly deceived! I shall know better another time when a man of your rank pretends to offer me the equality of friendship!"
There were tears in her eyes in spite of her courage, in which Roman virtue she far surpassed the average woman.
"Curse my rank!" he cried angrily. "It is myself I offer—myself and all that I hold of worldly advantages. What can my name matter to you—to you of all women, friendless and alone in the world, your existence unknown to more than some half-dozen people? I stand on a height where the arrows of ridicule fly thick and fast. Were I to marry a young woman—I who was deceived and deserted by a handsome wife before I was thirty—you cannot conceive what a storm of ridicule I should provoke, how Selwyn would coruscate with wit at my expense, and Horry Walpole scatter his contemptuous comments on my folly over half the continent of Europe. I suffered that kind of agony once—knew myself the target of all the wits and slanderers in London. I will not suffer it again!"
He was pacing the room, which was too small for the fever of his mind. To be refused without an instant's hesitation, as if he had tried to make a queen his mistress! To be scorned by Bill Thornton's daughter—Thornton, the old jail-bird whom he had helped to get out of prison—the fellow who had been sponging on him more or less for a score of years, most of all in this last year!
He looked back at his conquests of the past. How triumphant, how easy they were; and what trumpery victories they seemed, as he recalled them in the bitterness of his disappointment to-day.
Tonia stood by the open window, listening mechanically to the roll of wheels which rose and fell in the distance with a rhythmical monotony, like the sound of a summer sea. Kilrush stopped in his angry perambulation, saw her in tears, and flew to her side on the instant.