John turned to Mrs. Egerton with a piteous look.
‘It is you that must tell her,’ he said, ‘how can I do it? I’m young, too. I only know you mustn’t decide, Elly, at your age. You don’t know the world; you don’t know what you’re doing. If everything had been straightforward with me, you are still above me, gentlefolks, while I am nobody. You said so——’
‘Oh, Jack, Jack!’ said Mrs. Egerton, as if this was a reproach.
‘Everything is straightforward with you,’ said Elly. She had drawn away from him with a little movement of pride. ‘But,’ she said, ‘it is true enough. I don’t know the world, and neither do you. Perhaps we are too young. If you say that, or if Aunt Mary says that, I will not make any objection, Jack—how should I? I don’t want to force you to—to have me before the time——’
The extreme youth of both gave them a simplicity of words and good faith which elder lovers could not have ventured on. He accepted what she said in all seriousness and humility.
‘But there’s more than that,’ he said. ‘Oh, Elly, I can’t deny it, I can’t disguise it, there’s more than that. If it was only that we were too young! But everything is against us. And how could I, loving you all my life, owing everything to you as I do——’
‘You owe me nothing, nothing, Jack! It is all the other way.’
‘Ah, don’t say that, for I know better. I was just thinking—it’s all you, Elly. I should have gone into an office, or wherever they pleased to put me. I should not have minded. It was all your lighthouse. And to think,’ said Jack, as if that furnished him with a new argument, ‘that I should bring you to shame! Never, Elly; I would rather die.’ He paused a moment and shook his head. ‘It’s no good talking of dying, is it, at my age? I’d rather—live alone as I’ve always done, and do my work the best I could, and agree that there was nothing more for me in this world.’
‘Jack!’ cried Elly, with a kind of shriek of exasperation and tenderness and contradiction; and then she turned from him, her eyes flaming bright under the dew of tears, her cheeks like two deep roses, her mouth quivering, smiling, touched with fine scorn. She wanted some one to vent her loving wrath, her disdain of all mean arguments, her boundless, fiery indignation upon. ‘Aunt Mary,’ she cried, ‘how dare you to say so, or to think it? My father is a gentleman! He may not be much as a parson—it’s not for me to say: but he’s as fine a gentleman as Chaucer’s knight. Say all the bad things you please, you two, I know what’s in papa! He will no more forbid me to marry John than he would turn against the poor boy himself for what’s no fault of his. But I won’t do it now,’ Elly added, magnanimously, breaking into a laugh, which much resembled crying. ‘Not now. I’ll wait till I’m one-and-twenty. And then I’ll do it with my father’s full consent, whatever you may do or say, you two!’
With which defiance flung at them, Elly majestically marched out of the room, leaving them to conclude the conference together. What she did after, whether she did anything but retire to her room and cry, burying her face in the coverlet of her bed where she had thrown herself, no one can say; for nobody ever knew from Elly what torrents of tears came after that thunderstorm, nor how she trembled, and wondered, and doubted if papa were really so noble, so good, so fine a gentleman as she had asserted him to be.