“Tell me,” she said; “I will keep my word all the same. It will make no difference to me. Papa, tell me! it is better I should know at once.”
“You ought not to have asked me that question, Sara,” said Mr. Brownlow, recovering himself; “if I ask such a sacrifice of you, you shall know all about it in good time. I can’t tell; my own scheme does not look so reasonable to me as it did—I may give it up altogether. But in the mean time don’t ask me any more questions. And if you should repent, even at the last moment—”
“But if it is necessary to you, papa?” said Sara, opening her eyes—“if it has to be done, what does it matter whether I repent or not?”
“Nothing is necessary to me that would cost your happiness,” said Mr. Brownlow. And then they went on again for some time in silence. As for Sara, she had no inclination to have the magnificence of her sacrifice thus interfered with. For the moment her feeling was that, on the whole, it would even be better that the marriage to which she devoted herself should be an unhappy and unfit one. If it were happy it would not be a sacrifice; and to be able to repent at the last, like any commonplace young woman following her own inclinations, was not at all according to Sara’s estimation of the contract. She went on by her father’s side, thinking of that and of some other things in silence. Her thoughts were of a very different tenor from his. She was not taking the matter tragically as he supposed—no blank veil had been thrown over Sara’s future by this intimation, though Mr. Brownlow, walking absorbed by her side, was inclined to think so. On the contrary, her imagination had begun to play with the idea lightly, as with a far-off possibility in which there was some excitement, and even some amusement possible. While her father relapsed into painful consideration of the whole subject, Sara went on demurely by his side, not without the dawnings of a smile about the corners of her mouth. There was nothing said between them for a long time. It seemed to Mr. Brownlow as if the conversation had broken off at such a point that it would be hard to recommence it. He seemed to have committed and betrayed himself without doing any good whatever by it; and he was wroth at his own weakness. Softening of the brain! there might be something in what the Rector said. Perhaps it was disease, and not the pressure of circumstances, which had made him take so seriously the first note of alarm. Perhaps his whole scheme to secure Brownlows and his fortune to Sara was premature, if not unnecessary. It was while he was thus opening up anew the whole matter, that Sara at last ventured to betray the tenor of her thoughts.
“Papa,” she said, “I asked you a question just now, and you did not answer me; but answer me now, for I want to know. This—this—gentleman—Mr. Powys. Is he—a gentleman, papa?”
“I told you he was my clerk, Sara,” said Mr. Brownlow, much annoyed by the question.
“I know you did, but that is not quite enough. A man may be a gentleman though he is a clerk. I want a plain answer,” said Sara, looking up again into her father’s face.
And he was not without the common weakness of Englishmen for good connections—very far from that. He would not have minded, to tell the truth, giving a thousand pounds or so on the spot to any known family of Powys which would have adopted the young Canadian into its bosom. “I don’t know what Powys has to do with the matter,” he said; and then unconsciously his tone changed. “It is a good name; and I think—I imagine—he must belong somehow to the Lady Powys who once lived near Masterton. His father was well born, but, I believe,” added Mr. Brownlow, with a slight shiver, “that he married—beneath him. I think so. I can’t say I am quite sure.”
“I should have thought you would have known every thing,” said Sara. “Of course, papa, you know I am dying to ask you a hundred questions, but I won’t, if you will only just tell me one thing. A girl may promise to accept any one—whom—whom her people wish her to have; but is it as certain,” said Sara, solemnly, “that he—will have me?”
Then Mr. Brownlow stood still for a moment, looking with wonder, incomprehension, and a certain mixture of awe and dismay upon his child. Sara, obeying his movement, stood still also with her eyes cast down, and just showing a glimmer of malice under their lids, with the color glowing softly in her cheeks, with the ghost of a smile coming and going round her pretty mouth. “Oh child, child!” was all Mr. Brownlow said. He was moved to smile in spite of himself, but he was more moved to wonder. After all, she was making a joke of it—or was it really possible that, in this careless smiling way, the young creature, who had thrust her life into his hands like a flower, to be disposed of as he would, was going forward to meet all unknown evils and dangers? The sober, steady, calculating man could understand a great many things more abstruse, but he could not understand this.