She stood up alone, calling upon heaven and earth, as it were, to see; while the two clung together dismayed and pitiful, yet holding fast by each other still. It was the everlasting struggle so continually repeated; the past against the present and the future—the old love against the new—and not any question of worldly interest. It was the tragic figure of disappointment and desolation and age in face of hope and love and joy. What she had been doing was poor and mean enough. She had been intoxicated by the vision of sudden wealth, and had expected every body to be abject before her; but now a deeper element had come in. She forgot the fortune, the money, though it was still on her lips, and cried out, in the depth of her despair, over the loss of the only real wealth she had in the world. No tears came to her old eyes—her old meagre arms rose rigid, yet trembling. “She chooses him before me!” she said, with a cry of despair, which came from the bottom of her heart.
“Mamma,” cried poor little Pamela, tearing her hand from that of her lover, and coming doubtfully into the midst between the two, “I don’t choose! oh, mamma, how can I choose? I never was away from you in my life—he promised we never were to be parted. How am I to give him up? Oh, why, why should you ask me to give him up?” cried the poor child. Floods of tears came to her aid. She put her pretty hands together like a child at prayer—every line in her sweet face was in itself a supplication. Jack, behind her, stood and watched and said nothing. Perhaps he saw, notwithstanding, that it was against his interests—and in his heart had a certain mournful pity for the despair in the old woman’s terrible face.
“But I expect you to choose,” she said wildly; “things have come to that. It must be him or me—him or me; there’s no midway between us. I am your old mother, your poor old mother, that would pluck my heart out of my breast to give it you. I’ve survived them all, and done without them all, and lived for your sake. And he is a young man that was taken with your pretty face—say it was your pretty face—say the best that can be said. If you were like death—if you lost all your beauty and your pretty ways—if you were ugly and ailing and miserable,—it would be all the same to me; I would love you all the more—all the more; and he—he would never look at you again. That’s nature. I require you to choose. It must be him or me.”
As she stood listening, a change came over Pamela’s face. Her first appeal to her mother had been full of emotion, but of a gentle, hopeful, almost superficial kind. She had taken tears to her aid, and pleading looks, and believed in their success now as always. But as Mrs. Preston spoke, Pamela’s little innocent soul was shaken as by an earthquake. She woke up and opened her eyes, and found that she was in a world new to her—a world no longer of prayers, and tears, and sweet yielding, and tender affection. It was not tender affection she had to do with now; it was fierce love, desperate and ruthless, ready to tear her asunder. Her tears dried up, her pretty checks grew pale as death, she looked from one to the other with a wild look of wonder, asking if it was true. When her mother’s voice ceased, it seemed to Pamela that the world stood still for the moment, and every thing in heaven and earth held its breath. She looked at Jack; he stood motionless, with his face clouded over, and made no answer to her pitiful appeal. She looked at Mrs. Preston, and saw her mother’s eager face hollow and excited, her eyes blazing, her cheeks burning with a strange hectic heat. For one moment she stood irresolute. Then she made one tottering step to her mother’s side, and turned round and looked at her lover. Once more she clasped her hands, though she had no longer any hope in pleading. “I must stay here,” she said, with a long-drawn sobbing sigh—“I must stay here, if I should die.”
They stood thus and looked at each other for one of those moments which is as long as an age. The mother would have taken her child to her arms, but Pamela would not. “Not now, not now!” she said, putting back the embrace. Jack, for his part, stood and watched with an intensity of perception he had never exercised before—all power of speech seemed to have been taken from him. The struggle had ascended into a higher region of passion than he knew of. He turned and went to the door, with the intention, so far as he had any intention, of retiring for the moment from the contest. Then he came back again. Whatever the pressure on him might be, he could not leave Pamela so.
“Look here,” he said abruptly; “I am going away. But if you think I accept this as a choice or decision, you are much mistaken. You force her to give in to you, and then you think I am to accept it! I’ll do no such thing. She could not say any thing else, or do any thing else—but all the same, she is mine. You can’t touch that, do what you like. Pamela, darling, don’t lose heart; it’s only for a little while.”
He did not stop to listen to what her mother said; he turned at once and went out, unconsciously, in his excitement, thrusting Mrs. Swayne out of his way, who was in the passage. He went off up the avenue at a stretch without ever drawing breath. A hundred wild thoughts rose in his mind; her mother! what was her mother to him? He was ready to vow with Hamlet, that twenty thousand mothers could not have filled up his sum of love; and yet he was not blaming his Pamela. She could not have done otherwise. Why had he never been told? why had not he known that this downfall was hanging over him? Why had he been such a fool as to give in at all to the sweet temptation? Now, of course, when things had come this length, he would as soon have cut his own throat as given Pamela up. And what with love and rage, and the sudden calamity, and the gradual exasperation, he was beside himself, and did not well know what he was about. He was almost too much absorbed in his own affairs to be able to understand Sara, who came to him as he entered the house, and drew him aside into the dining-room to speak to him. Sara was pale enough to justify her pretext of headache, but otherwise she was full of energy and spirit, and met the emergency with a courageous heart.
“We must face it out as well as we can, Jack,” she said, with her eyes shining out large and full from her white face. “We must keep up before all these people. They must not be able to go away and say that something went terribly wrong at Brownlows. We must keep it up to the last.”
“Pshaw! what does it matter what they think or what they say?” said Jack, sitting down with a sigh of weariness. As for Sara, who was not tired, nor had any personal complication to bow her down, she blazed up at his indifference.
“It matters every thing!” she cried. “We may not be a county family any more, nor fine people, but we are always the Brownlows of Masterton. Nobody must have a word to say about it—for papa’s sake.”