On this mother and son, between whom there had hung a faint cloud of displeasure, kissed, not without tears; and it was agreed that for these two henceforward the name of Harold Marchant should be a dead letter.
CHAPTER XVI.
TO LIVE FORGOTTEN AND LOVE FORLORN.
Vansittart had made up his mind. Were that which he accounted but a dark suspicion to be made absolute certainty he meant still to cleave to the girl whom he had chosen for his wife, and who had given him her whole heart. He would marry her, even although his hand had shed her brother’s blood, that brother whom of all her kindred she loved best, with the romantic affection which clings round the image of a friend lost in childhood, when the feelings are warmest, and when love asks no questions.
Once, in the little room in Bruton Street, between two stolen kisses, he said to her, “You pretend to be very fond of me, Eve. I wonder whom you love next best?”
“Harold,” she answered quickly. “I used to think I should never give any one his place in my heart. But you have stolen the first place. He is only second now, poor dear—dead or living, only second.”
The tears welled up in her eyes as she spoke of him. A brother is not often loved so fondly; hardly ever, unless he is a scamp.
And would she marry him, Jack Vansittart, if she knew that he had killed her brother? Alas, no! That dark story would make an impassable gulf between them. Loving him with all her heart, dependent upon him for all the happiness and prosperity of her future life, she would sacrifice herself and him to the manes of that worthless youth, slain by the man his brutality had provoked to responsive violence.
“There was not much to choose between us,” Vansittart told himself; “ruffians both. And are two lives to be blighted because of those few moments of fury, in which the brute got the upper hand of the man? No, a thousand times no. I will marry her, and let Fate do the worst to us both. Fate can but part us. Why should I anticipate evil by taking the initiative? A man who has happiness in his hand and lets it go, for any question of conscience, may be a fine moral character, but he is not the less a fool. Life is not long enough for scruples that part faithful lovers.”
He looked the situation full in the face. He told himself that it was for Eve’s welfare as well as for his own that he should keep from her the knowledge of his wrong-doing. Would she be happier, would mankind be any the better off for his self-abnegation, if he should tell her the truth, and accept his dismissal? Knowing what he knew she could scarcely lay her hand in his and take him for her husband; but once the vow spoken, once his wife, he thought that she might forgive him even her brother’s blood.