“You need not speak,” she cried, bitterly, as he opened his lips as if to defend himself. “I never wish to hear your voice again, and if I could paralyze your tongue so that you could never cheat a trusting woman again, I would do it; but it is not for me to avenge—your punishment is coming; it is nearer even than you dream. You are ambitious, but that very ambition has overreached itself, as you will find before you are a great deal older. You are a cheat, a liar, and a coward; and now let me tell you that I would not marry you if my doing so would save both your life and mine. I will bear my shame alone, and some day your eyes will be opened, and you will curse yourself with bitterest curses that you have dared to do the thing that you have done. I was a young and inexperienced girl; you won my fresh, pure love, and ruined me, to pass away a dull hour and have a ‘jolly good time.’ A day, an hour will come when you will turn sick with remorse, and be willing to give the best years of your life to undo the foul wrong which you have so heartlessly wrought; but you will never see Marion Vance, the girl with neither ‘name,’ nor ‘wealth,’ nor ‘position,’ again.”
She turned and walked, with a quick, firm tread, from the room, before he could recover his almost stupefied senses.
He had never dreamed that the simple, trusting, loving girl, whom he had hitherto been able to mold to his lightest wish, possessed so much spirit and reserve power, and her burning, blighting words had fallen upon him like flashes of lightning, blinding and bewildering him with their vividness.
But she was gone—that farce was played out to the end, and though the end had been anything but agreeable, yet it was over at last; and, smoothing his ruffled brow and calling a smile to his false lips, he went back to his boon companions, and tried to drown the heart-broken words of a ruined girl in copious draughts of sparkling champagne.
CHAPTER XXIII
A STARTLING DISCOVERY
Marion Vance, after leaving the man whom, during that one hour’s interview, she had learned to loathe and despise as intensely as before she had loved him, returned directly to Wycliffe, where in the silence of her own room, she waited in dumb despair for the return of the marquis.
Then, with a stern, set face, she sought everything—how she had refused while away on her visit to be introduced as his daughter, and thus brought upon herself this misery—and that when she found that the one upon whom she had lavished her affection cared only for position and wealth, she had kept silence, resolving rather to suffer her shame than to gratify his ambition when he proved to be so heartless and base. The only thing she reserved was the name of the man for whom she had sacrificed her birthright; and no amount of persuasions or threats could compel her to reveal it.
The marquis sat stern and rigid while listening to this confession from his only child.
He uttered no reproaches, he gave way to no violent passion or grief, only when she had concluded, he pointed with shaking finger to the door, saying, with perfectly hueless lips:
“Do you know, Marion Vance, what you have done? You have cut off the inheritance forever from my heirs—you have sold your birthright for a mess of pottage, and it will go to Arthur Tressalia’s son, your cousin Paul. Do you hear? You have ruined both yourself and me. You have made me worse than childless. Go, and never let me look upon your face again while you live.”