“Yes,” he said, “it is quite true. I am one that it might have been supposed likely you would turn to. Natural feeling should have made you turn to me. I have always tried to stand by you; and you have got what would have enriched the whole family—all to yourself. Nature pointed to me as your nearest; and yet you have never,” he said, pausing to give additional bitterness to his words, and feeling himself caught in an eddy, and whirling round in that violent stream without any power of his own, “never shown the slightest inclination to turn or to cling to me.”
“Indeed, indeed, Philip—” Lucy began.
“Why should you say indeed, indeed? What is indeed, indeed? Just what I tell you. You have never singled me out, whoever might be your favorite. All your family have been put at a disadvantage for you; but you never singled me out, never showed me any preference—which would have been the best way of setting things right.”
There was a look of alarm on Lucy’s face.
“If it is my money, Philip, I wish you had the half of it, or the whole of it,” she said. “I wish I could put it all away, and stand free.”
“It is not your money,” he said, “it is your—” And here he stopped short, and looked at her with staring troubled eyes. The eddy had nearly whirled him away, when he made a grasp at the bank, and felt himself, all at once, to recover some mastery of his movements. He did not know very well what he had been going to say; “your—” what? love? It was not love surely. Not such a profanation as that. He looked at her with a sudden suspicious threatening pause. Then he burst again into a harsh laugh. “What was I going to say? I don’t know what I was going to say.”
“What is the matter with you, Philip? I am your friend and your cousin; there is something wrong—tell me what it is.” Lucy came up to him full of earnest sympathy, and put her hand on his shoulder, and looked with hectic anxiety in his face. “Tell me what it is,” she said, with a soft tone of entreaty. “I am as good as your sister, Philip. If I could not do anything else I could be sorry for you at least.”
He looked up at her with the strangest staring look, feeling his head go round and round; and then he gave another loud sudden laugh, which alarmed her more. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “yes, I’ll tell you. It is the best thing I can do. I was going—to make love to you, Lucy—love!—for your money.”
She patted him softly on the shoulder, soothing him as if he had been a child confessing a fault. “No, no, Philip, no. I am sure you were not thinking of anything so unkind.”
“Lucy!” he said, seizing her hand, the other hand. She never even removed the one which lay softly, soothing him, on his shoulder. “You are a good girl. You don’t deserve to have a set of mean hounds round you as we all are. And yet—there are times when I feel as if I could not endure to see you give your fortune, the great Rainy fortune, to some—other fellow. There! that is the truth.”