With an angry exclamation he flung away the end of his cigar,—it fell into a harmless bed of mignonette and seared the sweet blossom, burning redly in the green like a wicked eye. And then he caught her hand firmly and held it grasped as in a vice.
"You insult me!" he said, thickly—"And I shall not forget it! You talk as a child talks—though you are no child! You are a woman of the world—you have travelled—you have had experience—and you know men. You are perfectly aware that the sentimental 'love' you speak of exists nowhere except in poems and story-books—you know that no sane man alive would tie himself to one woman save for the law's demand that his heirs shall be lawfully born. You are no shrinking maid in her teens, that you should start and recoil or blush, at the truth of the position, and it is the merest affectation on your part to talk about 'love lasting forever,' for you are perfectly aware that it cannot last very long over the honeymoon. The natural state of man is polygamous. Englishmen are the same as Turks or Hottentots in this respect, except for the saving grace of hypocrisy, which is the chief prop of European civilisation. If it were not for hypocrisy, we should all be savages as utterly and completely as in primaeval days! You know all this as well as I do—and yet you feign to desire the impossible, while all the time you play the fool with a country parson! But I'll make you pay for it—by Heaven, I will! You scorn me and my name—you call me a social leper—-"
"You are one!" she said, wrenching her hand from his clasp—"And what is more, you know it, and you glory in it! Who are your associates? Men who are physically or morally degenerate—women who, so long as their appetites are satisfied, seek nothing more! You play the patron to a certain literary 'set' who produce books unfit to be read by any decent human being,—you work your way, by means of your title and position, through society, contaminating everything you touch! You contaminate ME by associating my name with yours!—and my aunt helps you in the wicked scheme! I came here to my own home—to the house where my father died—thinking that perhaps here at least I should find peace,"—and her voice shook as with tears—"that here, at least, the old walls might give me shelter and protection!—but even here you followed me with your paid spy, Marius Longford—and I have found myself surrounded by your base tools almost despite myself! But even if you try to hound me into my grave, I will never marry you! I would rather die a hundred times over than be your wife!"
His face flushed a dark red, and he suddenly made an though he would seize her in his arms. She retreated swiftly.
"Do not touch me!" she said, in a low, strained voice—"It will be the worse for you if you do!"
"The worse for me—or for YOU?" he muttered fiercely,—then regaining his composure, he burst into an angry laugh. "Bah! You are nothing but a woman! You fling aside what you have, and pine for what you have not! The old, old story! The eternal feminine!"
She made no reply, but moved on towards the house. "Quel ravissement de la lune!" exclaimed a deep guttural voice at this juncture, and Louis Gigue came out from the dark embrasure of the Manor's oaken portal into the full splendour of the moonlight—"Et la belle Mademoiselle Vancourt is ze adorable fantome of ze night! Et milord Roxmouth ze what-you-call?—ze gnome!—ze shadow of ze lumiere! Ha-ha! C'est joli, zat little chanson of ze little rose- tree! Ze music, c'est une inspiration de Cicely—and ze words are not so melancolique as ze love-songs made ordinairement en Angleterre! Oui—oui!—c'est joli!"
He turned his shrewd old face up to the sky, and blinked at the dim stars,—there was a smile under his grizzled moustache. He had interrupted the conversation between his hostess and her objectionable wooer precisely at the right moment, and he knew it. Roxmouth's pale face grew a shade paler, but he made a very good assumption of perfect composure, and taking out his case of cigars offered one to Gigue, who cheerfully accepted it. Then he lit one for himself with a hand that trembled slightly. Maryllia, pausing on the step of the porch as she was about to enter, turned her head back towards him for a moment.
"Are you staying long at Badsworth Hall?" she asked.
"About a fortnight or three weeks,"—he answered carelessly, "Mr. Longford is doing some literary work and needs the quiet of the country—and Sir Morton Pippitt is good enough to wish us to extend our visit."