‘That may be so, that may be so! you cannot tell unless you know everything,’ she said. Then, after a pause, ‘But whether it was right or wrong, it is done now, and I cannot alter it. It is not a matter upon which another can decide for you. Obedience at my age cannot be absolute. When you have to make the one choice of your life, can your father do it, or anyone but yourself? Did you think so when you were like me?’ she said, with an appeal full of earnestness which was almost impassioned. This appeal took Heathcote entirely by surprise, and changed all the current of his thoughts.
‘I was never like you,’ he said, hastily—‘like you! I never could compare myself—I never could pretend—I thought I loved half-a-dozen women. Did I ever make the one choice of my life? No, no! A wandering man afloat upon the world can never be like—such as you: there is too great a difference. We cannot compare things so unlike——’
‘But I thought’—she said, then stopped: for his story which she had heard bore a very different meaning. And what right had she to advert to it? ‘I don’t know if you speak in—in respect—or in contempt?’
‘In contempt—could that be? Here is the state of the case as concerns yourself—leaving the general question. My offer to break the entail has no attractions for your father, because he thinks he cannot secure Mount to you. It is doing something against his own heart, against all he wishes, to punish you. Don’t you know, Miss Mountford—but most likely you never felt it—that
to be wroth with those we love
Doth work like madness in the brain?’
‘Love?—that would be great love, passionate love—we have not anything of the kind in our house,’ said Anne, in a low tone of emotion. ‘If there was that, do you think I would go against it, even for——’
Here she stopped with a thrill in her voice. ‘I think you must be mistaken a little, Mr. Heathcote. But I do not see how I can change. Papa asked of me—not the lesser things in which I could have obeyed him, but the one great thing in which I could not. Were I to take your advice, I do not know what I could do.’
Then they walked in silence round the side of the house, under the long line of the drawing-room windows, from which indeed the interview had been watched with much astonishment. Rose had never doubted that the heir of the house was on her side. It seemed no better than a desertion that he should walk and talk with Anne in this way. It filled her with amazement. And in such a cold night too! ‘Hush, child!’ her mother was saying; ‘he has been with papa to Hunston, he has heard all the business arrangements talked over. No doubt he is having a little conversation with Anne, for her good.’
‘What are the business arrangements? What is going to happen? Is he trying to make her give up Mr. Douglas?’ said Rose: but her mother could not or would not give her any information. By-and-by Heathcote came in alone. Anne was too much disturbed by this strange interview to appear when it was over in the tranquil circle of the family. She went upstairs to take off her wraps, to subdue the commotion in her mind and the light in her eyes, and tame herself down to the every-day level. Her mind was somewhat confused, more confused than it had yet been as to her duty. Cosmo somehow had seemed to be gently pushed out of the first place by this stranger who never named him, who knew nothing of him, and who certainly ignored the fact that, without Cosmo, Anne no longer lived or breathed. She was angry that he should be so ignorant, yet too shy and proud to mention her lover or refer to him save by implication. She would have been willing to give up corresponding with him, to make any immediate sacrifice to her father’s prejudice against him—had that been ever asked of her. But to give up ‘the one choice of her life,’ as she had said, would have been impossible. Her mind was affected strongly, but not with alarm, by the intelligence that something was being done mysteriously in the dark against her, that the threat under which she had been living was now being carried out. But this did not move her to submit as Heathcote had urged—rather it stimulated her to resist.
Had Cosmo but been at hand! But if he had been at hand, how could he have ventured to give the advice which Heathcote gave? He could not have asked her to yield, to dissemble, to please the old man while his life lasted, to pretend to give himself up. Nothing of this could he have suggested or she listened to. And yet it was what Cosmo would have liked to advise; but to this state of Cosmo’s mind Anne had no clue.