“It will be hard, I know,” Beatrice replied, “but it seems your only course, if he insists upon your marrying me.”
“But if I tell him you refused me, it may make a difference, and things can go on as they are until I get my profession,” Everard pleaded, with a shrinking which he knew was cowardly from all which the telling his father might involve.
“Even then you are but putting off the evil day, and a thing concealed grows worse as time goes on,” Bee said. “You must confess it some time, and why not do it now. At the most your father can but turn you from his door, and if he does that take your wife and go somewhere else. You are young, and the world is all before you, and if there is any true womanhood in Josephine, it will assert itself when she knows all you have lost for her. She will grow to your standard. She has a sweet, childish face, and must have a loving, affectionate nature. Give her a chance, Everard, to show what she is.”
This giving her a chance was just what Everard dreaded the most. So long as his life with Josephine was in the future, he could be tolerably content, and even happy, but when it looked him square in the face, as something which must be met, he shrank from meeting it.
“Oh, I cannot do that, at least, not yet,” he said. “It will hamper me so in my studies. I cannot tell father, and bear the storm sure to follow. Josephine must stay where she is till I see what I can do.”
“But is that best for her?” Beatrice asked. “What sort of a woman is her mother? She may be a lady, and still be very poor. What is she, Everard?”
He had refrained from speaking of Josephine’s antecedents to Beatrice. He would rather she should not know all he knew of the family. It would be kinder to Josephine to spare her so much; but when Beatrice appealed to him with regard to the mother, he told just who Mrs. Fleming was.
Bee Belknap was a born aristocrat, and some of the bluest blood of Boston was in her veins. Indeed, she traced her pedigree back to Miles Standish on her father’s side, while her mother came straight down from a Scottish earl, who married the rector’s daughter. She was proud of her birth, and the training she had received at home and abroad had tended to increase this pride, and it was hard for her to understand just how people like Roxie Fleming could stand on the same social platform with herself. She knew they did, but she rebelled against it, and for a moment Josephine’s cause was in danger of being lost so far as she was concerned. She had thought of her as probably the daughter of some poor, but highly respectable farmer, or mechanic, whose mother took boarders, as many women do to make a little money, and whose daughters, perhaps, stitched shoes or made bonnets, as New England girls often do, but now that she knew the truth she stood for a moment aghast, and then, her strong, sensible nature asserted itself and whispered to her, “a man’s a man for a’ that.” Josephine was no more to blame for the accident of her birth than was she, Beatrice Belknap, to be praised for hers. “I’ll stand by her all the same,” she said to herself, but she did not urge quite so strenuously upon Everard the necessity of telling his father at once, for she felt sure the irascible judge would leave no stone unturned to ascertain who his daughter-in-law was, and that the ascertaining would result even worse than Everard feared.
“It may be better to keep silent a little longer,” she said, and meanwhile she’d turn the matter over in her own mind and see what she could do to help him.
“But in order to have any peace at home I must tell father that you refused me,” Everard said, “and I have not yet gone through the farce of offering myself, or you of refusing the offer.”