"I should like to tell you why," he went on.
"Very well," returned Katherine, who felt a little uneasy.
"I am pretty considerably in debt, to begin with. If I paid up I should have about three half-pence a year to live on. Besides my debts I have an unconscionably ancient relative whose title and a beggarly five thousand a year must come to me when he dies, if he ever dies. This venerable impediment has some hundred or more thousands which he can bequeath to whom he likes. Hitherto he has not considered me a credit to the family. Well, I went to him the other day, on his own invitation, and to my amazement he offered to pay my debts—on one condition."
"I do hope he will," cried Katherine, as De Burgh paused. She was quite interested and relieved by the tone of his narrative.
"Ay, but there's the rub. I can't fulfil the condition, I fear. It is that I should marry a woman rich enough to replace the money my debts will absorb; a particular woman who doesn't care for me, and whom, knowing the hideous tangle of motives that hangs round the central idea of winning her, I am almost ashamed to ask; but a woman that any man might court; a woman I have loved from the first moment my eyes met hers, who has haunted and distracted me ever since, and who is, I dare say, a great deal too good for me; but a creature I will strive to win, no matter what the cost of success. This girl or rather (for there is a richness and ripeness of nature about her which deserves the term) this fair, sweet woman—I need not name her to you." He stopped, and his passionate pleading eyes held hers. Katherine grew white, half with fear, half with sincere compassion. She tried to speak. At last the words came.
"You make me terribly sad, Mr. De Burgh," she said, with trembling lips. "You make me so sorry that I cannot marry you; but I cannot—indeed I cannot. Will Lord De Burgh not pay your debts if he knows you have done your best to persuade me to marry you?"
De Burgh laughed a cynical laugh. "You are infinitely practical, Katherine. (I am going to call you Katherine for the next few minutes. Because I think of you as Katherine, I love to speak your name to yourself; it seems to bring me a little nearer to you.) Listen to me. Don't you think you could endure me as a husband? I am a better fellow than I seem, and mine is no foolish boy's fancy. I am a better man when I am near you. Then this old cousin of mine will leave me all he possesses if you are my wife, and the Baroness de Burgh, with money enough to keep her place among her peers, would have no mean position; nor is a husband passionately devoted to you unworthy of consideration."
"It is not indeed. But, Mr. De Burgh, do you honestly think that devotion would last? These violent feelings often work their own destruction."
"Ay: God knows they do, amazingly fast," he returned, with a sigh and a far-away look. "But what you say applies to all men. If you ever marry you must run the risk of inconstancy in the man you accept. I am at least old enough and experienced enough to value a good woman when I have found one, especially when she does not make her goodness a bore. And you—you have inspired me with something different from anything I have ever felt before. Yes, yes," he went on, angrily, as he noticed a slight smile on her lips. "I see you try to treat this as only the stereotype talk of a lover who wants your money more than yourself; but if you listen to the judgment of your own heart, it is true and honest enough to recognize truth in another, and it will tell you that, whatever my faults (and they are legion), sneaking and duplicity are not among them. It is quite true that when first I heard of you I thought your fortune would be just the thing to put me right, as I have no doubt my dear friend Mrs. Ormonde has impressed upon you, but from the moment I first spoke to you I felt, I knew, there was something about you different from other women. I also knew that in the effort to win the heiress I was heavily handicapped by the sudden strong passion for the woman which seized me."
"That surely ought to have been a means of success?" said Katherine, a good deal interested in his account of himself.