There was a long pause. Berwick was at an utter loss for words, and every moment he expected the woman before him to make some more direct allusion to the condition under which he held his fortune. He felt a kind of helpless rage to think of his affairs being thus discussed, even by one so good-natured and well-meaning as had evidently been, in this matter, the Duchess of Appleby and Kendal. But what did all this preamble signify?
"I am glad you do understand," he said at last in a hoarse voice which he scarcely recognised as his own. "I know I must have seemed a great brute."
"If you had only trusted me more," she said plaintively. "Of course I should have understood at once! I should have known that what I could offer was not enough—that there was no comparison——"
Berwick made a sudden movement. Was it really necessary that he should listen to this? Was it part of his punishment that he should endure such unforgettable abasement? But, alas for him! Louise Marshall was in a sense enjoying both the scene and the situation. While she was speaking, there came into the still air of the room the sound of distant melody, and she felt as if she were looking on at a touching last act in some sentimental play. Also there was, after all, something uplifting in the sensation—to her a novel one—of doing a noble action, for so had the Duchess, with innocent cunning, represented her renunciation of James Berwick.
This frivolous, egoistical woman, ever guided by her instincts, never by her heart or conscience, thoroughly understood, as many shrewd and clever women fail to do, the value of money. From the plane whence Mrs. Marshall took her survey of life, the gratification of that instinct which she called love had always been a luxury, and the possession of wealth with which to gratify all other instincts an absolute necessity of existence. The contempt which most women, even those themselves ignoble, naturally feel for a man whom they suspect of putting material possessions before the deepest feelings of the heart, would to her have savoured of gross hypocrisy.
The Duchess—clever woman as she was, and dealing, in this case, with one whose intellect she despised—would have been surprised indeed had she known that what had really impressed and influenced Louise Marshall during their painful talk that day, had been the short statement, thrown in as an after-thought, of Berwick's financial position and of what he would lose if he married again. That, so Mrs. Marshall at once told herself, made all the difference. To her mind it absolutely justified James Berwick in rejecting the offer practically made by her within a few weeks of her husband's death, for what were her few thousands a year compared to the huge income which he would lose on a second marriage? She was, however, inclined to consider that he had shown false delicacy in not at once telling her the circumstances of the case. Then, at any rate, they might have sorrowed together over the inscrutable dictates of Providence. But instead of taking that sincere and manly course, Berwick, during that interview which even she shrank from recalling, had actually implied that his distaste to her was personal, his horror of marriage a singular idiosyncracy! Now it behoved her to beat a dignified retreat. And so, "As things are——"
Berwick began to realise that the woman before him had prepared what she wished to say, nay more, that she had probably rehearsed the present scene—
"As things are, Jimmy, I think it will be best for us to part, and so I have made up my mind to go to India with the Thorntons." She hurried over the words, honestly afraid of provoking in herself emotion of a disfiguring nature, for the thought of her unselfishness naturally brought the tears to her eyes. "That's all," she said in abrupt conclusion, "and now I think we had better go back to the ball-room."
She gave Berwick a quick, furtive look, and suddenly felt sorry for him. How he must have cared after all! For, as he stood opening the door for her to pass through, his face had turned ashen, and his blue eyes were sunken. So might a man look who, suddenly relieved of an intolerable weight, is, for a moment, afraid to move or to speak, lest the burden should again descend upon his shrinking shoulders.