WHICH WINDS UP THE BUSINESS.
He stood before her, pale and stern, his eyes fixed upon her, as a culprit before his judge waiting sentence of death.
But Mollie never looked. After that one brief, irrepressible cry, she had fallen back, her face bowed and hidden in her hands.
"You shrink from me, Mollie," Hugh Ingelow said; "you will not even look at me. I knew it would be so. I know I deserve it; but if I were never to see you again, I must tell you the truth all the same. Yes, Mollie, recoil from me, hate me, spurn me, for the base, unmanly part I have acted. It is not Doctor Oleander who is the dastard, the villain, the abductor of weak women—it is I!"
She did not speak, she did not move, she made no sign that she even heard him.
"It will avail me little, I know," he continued, "to tell you I have repented the dastardly deed in bitterness of spirit since. It will avail nothing to tell you how I have hated myself for that cruel and cowardly act that made me your husband. I think you maddened me, Mollie, with your heartless, your insulting rejection, and I did love you passionately. I swore, in my heart of hearts, I would be avenged, and, Mollie, you know how I kept my vow."
Still no reply, still no movement on Mollie's part. She stood half bowed, her head averted, her face covered by her hands.
"It drove me into a sort of frenzy, the thought of your becoming Sir Roger Trajenna's wife. If he had been a young man, and you had loved him, I would have bowed my head, as before a shrine, and gone my way and tried to forgive you and wish you happiness. But I knew better. I knew you were selling yourself for an old man's rank, for an old man's gold, and I tried to despise and hate you. I tried to think that no base act I could commit would be baser than the marriage you were ready to make. A plan—mad, impracticable as my own mad love, flashed across my brain, and, like many other things impossible in theory, I did it! It seemed an impossiblity to tear you from the very altar, and make you my wife, all unknown, but I did it. I had this house here, uninhabited, furnished. I had a friend ready to help me to the death. I disguised myself like a hero of romance, I decoyed you here, forced you to consent, I married you!"
Still mute, still dropping, still averted, still motionless. There was a tremor in Hugh Ingelow's steady voice when he went on.
"How hard it was for me, what a cruel, cold-blooded monster I felt myself, how my very heart of hearts was touched by your suffering here, I can not tell. Besides, it would seem like mockery, since all my compassion did not make me spare you. But from the moment you set foot here I considered it too late; and then, besides, Mollie, I was mad with love of you. I could not let you go. You yielded—you consented to barter yourself for freedom, as once before you consented for gold. I brought the Reverend Raymond Rashleigh here—he married me under my second name of Ernest—as you know."