“Be sure you tell Prince Rimânez!”
Her white figure disappeared; and I walked out of the house in a chaotic state of mind, divided between pride, ecstasy and pain,—the engaged husband of an earl’s daughter,—the lover of a woman who had declared herself incapable of love and destitute of faith.
[p 208]
XVIII
Looking back through the space of only three years to this particular period of my life, I can remember distinctly the singular expression of Lucio’s face when I told him that Sibyl Elton had accepted me. His sudden smile gave a light to his eyes that I had never seen in them before,—a brilliant yet sinister glow, strangely suggestive of some inwardly suppressed wrath and scorn. While I spoke he was, to my vexation, toying with that uncanny favourite of his, the ‘mummy-insect,’—and it annoyed me beyond measure to see the repulsive pertinacity with which the glittering bat-like creature clung to his hand.
“Women are all alike,”—he said with a hard laugh, when he had heard my news,—“Few of them have moral force enough to resist that temptation of a rich marriage.”
I was irritated at this.
“It is scarcely fair of you to judge everything by the money-standard,”—I said,—then, after a little pause I added what in my own heart I knew to be a lie,—“She,—Sibyl,—loves me for myself alone.”
His glance flashed over me like lightning.
“Oh!—sets the wind in that quarter! Why then, my dear Geoffrey, I congratulate you more heartily than ever. To conquer the affections of one of the proudest girls in England, and win her love so completely as to be sure she would marry you even if you had not a sou to bless yourself with—this is a victory indeed!—and one of which you may [p 209] well be proud. Again and yet again I congratulate you!”