“You see,” said Rob, triumphantly, with a wonderful sense of relief, “she will not cast me off as you bid her. She is mine. You will never be able to separate us if we are true to each other. Margaret, my darling, lift your sweet face and look at me. All the brothers in the world cannot separate us. Give me your hand, darling, for it is mine.”
“Stand off, sir!” cried Sir Ludovic, furious; and Mrs. Bellingham, coming down from her chair as from a throne, came and stood between them, putting out her hand to put the intruder away. Jean was all but speechless with wonder and rage. She put her other hand upon Margaret’s shoulder and pushed her from her, giving her a shake, as she did so, of irrepressible wrath. “What is the meaning of all this? Put those people out, Ludovic! put this strange woman, I tell you, to the door!”
“Put us out!” cried Mrs. Glen. “I’ll daur ye to do that at your peril! Look at what I’ve got here. I have come straight from my ain house to bring this, that has never left my hands since that frightened lassie there wrote it out. It’s her promise and vow before God, that is as good as marriage in Scots law, as everybody kens. Na, you’ll no get it out of my hands. There it is! You may look till you’re tired. You’ll find no cheatery here.”
“Did you write this, Margaret?” said her brother, in tones of awful judicial severity, as it seemed to her despairing ears. They all gathered round, with a murmur of excitement.
“Marriage in Scots law! good Lord, anything is marriage in Scots law,” Mrs. Bellingham said, under her breath, in a tone of horror. Grace burst out into a little scream of excitement, wringing her hands.
“Did you write this, Margaret?” still more solemnly Sir Ludovic asked again. Margaret uncovered her face. She looked at them all with her heart sinking. Here was the final moment that must seal her fate. It seemed to her that after she had made her confession there would be nothing for her to do but to go forth, away from all she cared for, with the two strangers who had her in their power. She clasped her hands together, and looked at the group, which was all blurred and indistinct in her eyes. She could not defend herself, or explain herself at such a moment, but breathed out from her very soul a dismal, reluctant, almost inaudible “Yes!” which seemed the very utterance of despair.
“Ay, my bonnie lady,” said Mrs. Glen, triumphant, “you never were the one to go against your ain act and deed. Me and my Rob, we ken you better than all your grand friends. Weel I kent that whatever they might say, you would never go against your ain hand of write.”
Rob had been standing passive all this time, with such a keen sense of the terror in Margaret’s eyes, and the contempt that lay under the serious trouble of the others, as stung him to the very centre of his being. The unworthiness of his own position, the bewildered misery of the girl whom he was persecuting, the seriousness of the crisis as shown by the troubled looks of the brother and sister who were bending their heads over the paper which his mother held out so triumphantly—all this smote the young man with a sudden, sharp perception. He was not of a mean nature altogether. The quick impulses which swayed him turned as often to generosity as to self-interest; and all this while there had been films about this pursuit of the young heiress which had partially deceived him as to its true nature.
What is there in the world more hard than to see ourselves as we appear to those on the other side? A sudden momentary overwhelming revelation of this came upon him now. He did not hear the whispers of “compromise it”—“offer him something—offer him any thing,” which Jean, utterly frightened, was pouring into her brother’s ear. He saw only the utter abandonment of misery in Margaret’s face, the vulgar triumph in his mother’s, the odious position in which he himself stood between them. In a moment his sudden resolution was taken: he pushed in roughly into the group, in passionate preoccupation, scarcely seeing them, and snatched the scrap of paper she held out of his mother’s hands. “Margaret!” he cried, loudly, in his excitement, “look here! and here! and here!” tearing it into a thousand fragments. He pushed his mother aside, who rushed with a shriek upon him to save them, and tossed the little white atoms into the air. “I asked for your love,” he said, his eyes moistening, his face glowing, “not for papers or promises. Give me that, or nothing at all.”
Sudden tears rushed to Margaret’s eyes; she did not know what had happened, but she felt that she was saved.