She had risen to her feet, and was leaving the garret, but Frank held her back. He could not part with her thus; he could not risk the probable consequences of her going to Roger, as she had said she would. But one result could follow such a step, and that result was death to all Frank most desired. Millbank weighed as nothing when compared with Magdalen, and Frank made her listen to him again, and worked upon her pity for Roger until, worried and bewildered, and half-crazed with excitement, she cried out, “I’ll think about it, Frank. I will love you, if I can. Give me a week in which to decide; but let me go now, or I shall surely die.”
She tore herself from him, and was hurrying down the stairs with the will grasped in her hands, when suddenly she stopped, and, offering it to Frank, said to him, “Put it under the floor where I found it. Let it stay there till the week is up.”
There was hope in what she said, and Frank hastened to do her bidding, and then went softly down the stairs, and passed unobserved through the hall out into the rain, which seemed so grateful to him after his recent excitement. He did not care to meet his mother just then, and so he quietly left the house, and walked rapidly down the avenue toward the village, intending to strike into the fields and go back to Millbank at the usual dinner hour, so as to excite no suspicions.
To say that Frank felt no elation at the thought of Millbank belonging to him, would be wrong; for, as he walked along, he was conscious of a new and pleasant feeling of importance, mingled with a feeling that he was very magnanimous, too, and was doing what few men in his position would have done.
“All mine, if I choose to claim it,” he said to himself once, as he paused on a little knoll and looked over the broad acres of the Irving estate, which stretched far back from the river toward the eastern hills. “All mine, if I choose to have it so.”
Then he looked away to the huge mill upon the river, the shoe-shop farther on, and thought of the immense revenue they yielded, and then his eye came back to Millbank proper,—the handsome house, embowered in trees, with its velvety lawn and spacious grounds, and its ease and luxury within. “All his,” unless he chose to throw it away for a girl, who did not love him, and who, he believed, preferred Roger and poverty and toil, to luxury and Millbank and himself. Had he believed otherwise, had no suspicion of her preference for Roger entered his mind, he might have hesitated a moment ere deciding to give up the princely fortune which had come so suddenly to him. But the fact that she was hard to win only enhanced her value, and he resolutely shut his eyes to the sacrifice he was making for her sake, and thought instead how he would work for her, deny himself for her, and become all that her husband ought to be.
“She shall love me better than she loves Roger. She shall never regret her choice if she decides for me,” he said, as he went back to the house, which he reached just as dinner was announced.
Mrs. Walter Scott had not seen him when he first came home in the afternoon, but she saw him leave the house and hurry down the avenue, while something in his manner indicated an unusual degree of perturbation and excitement A few moments later she found Magdalen in her own room, lying upon the sofa, her face as white as marble, and her eyes wearing so scared a look that she was greatly alarmed, and asked what was the matter.
“A headache; it came on suddenly,” Magdalen said, while her lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears, which ran down her cheeks in torrents, as Mrs. Irving bent to kiss her, smoothing her forehead and saying to her, “Poor child, you look as if you were suffering so much. I wish I could help you. Can I?”
“No, nobody can help me,—nobody. Oh, is it a sin to wish I had never been born?” was Magdalen’s reply, which confirmed Mrs. Walter Scott in her suspicion that Frank had something to do with her distress.