“No,” he replied. “Not yet. Miss Western, I value your good opinion more than that of any one living. I cannot let you go like this. It is my last chance. Do you not know what I feel for you—can you not see what you are making me suffer? I have never loved any woman before—am I to give up all hope on account of this terrible prejudice of yours? But for that I could have made you care for me—I know I could—could I not? Mary, tell me.”
His voice softened into a tenderness, compared with which the gentlest tones he had ever addressed to his sister were hard. But little heard Mary of tenderness or softness in his words. She stood aghast, literally aghast with astonishment—amazement rather—so intense that at first she could scarcely believe that her ears were not deceiving her. Then, as the full meaning of his words came home to her, indignation, overwhelming indignation, took the place of every other feeling, and burning words rose to her lips. For the moment “the Tartar” was, indeed, uppermost.
“You say this to me!” she exclaimed. “You dare to say this to me. You, the man who, in deference to contemptible class-prejudice and to gratify some selfish schemes, did not hesitate to trample a woman’s heart under foot, and to spoil the best chance for good that ever came to a man you profess to care for—you, selfish, heartless, unprincipled man, dare to tell me, Mary Western, that you love me! Are you going out of your senses, Mr Cheviott? Do you forget that I am Lilias’s sister?”
“No,” he said, in atone which somehow compelled her attention. “I do not forget it, and I am not ashamed to say so. I do not offer you—for it would but be thrown at my feet with scorn—but I would have offered you a man’s honest, disinterested devotion, were you able to believe in such a thing as coming from me. But you are blinded by prejudice—you will take into account nothing but your own preconceived interpretation. You will not allow the possibility of my being innocent of what you accuse me of. So be it. But there have been women who have known an honest man when they found such a one, and have not found their trust misplaced.”
Some answering chord was touched for the instant in Mary’s heart. Her tone was less hard, less cruelly contemptuous when she spoke again.
“I am not doubting your sincerity as regards myself,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “I suppose you do mean what you say, however extraordinarily incomprehensible it appears to me. But that makes things no better—oh! if you had but left me under the delusion that there was something to respect in you! I thought you narrow-minded and prejudiced to a degree, but I had grown to think you had some principle—that in what you did you were actuated by what you believed to be right. But what am I to think now? Where are all the well-considered reasons for interfering between your cousin and my sister that you would have had me believe in, now that—that—you find the case your own, or fancy it is so? What can I, too, think of your principle and disinterestedness?”
“What you choose,” said Mr Cheviott, bitterly. “It can matter little. But you make one mistake. I never gave you any reasons for my interference. I told you I had acted for the best, and I madly imagined it possible that having come to know me, you might have begun to believe it possible that my conduct was honest and disinterested. I had not intended to confess to you what I have done. My object in speaking to you again was purely—believe me or not, as you like—to try to gain for my sister the hope of sometimes seeing you. I was going on to volunteer to absent myself from Romary, if personal repugnance to me was the obstacle, if only you would sometimes come. But I am only human; your words and your tone drove me into what I little intended—into what I must have been mad to say to you.”
He stopped; he had spoken in a strangely low tone, but he had spoken very fast, and Mary’s first sensation when his voice ceased was of bewilderment approaching almost to a kind of mental chaos, and of vague but galling self-reproach. But for a moment she said nothing, and Mr Cheviott was already turning away, when she called him back, faintly and irresolutely, but he heard her still.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, brokenly. “I suppose I have said what I should not. I suppose I let my anger get the better of me. But I have never learned to dissimulate. Your words seemed to me, remembering what I did, an insult. I suppose I should have thanked you for—for the honour. But it has all been a mistake. You must see I could never have cared for you—never; were I ten times satisfied you had done Lilias no wrong, your conduct to her remains the same. But I wish to be reasonable. Let us forget all this, and, so far as can be, let us part friends.”
She held out her hand, this time in vain.