“You have said a great deal too much already. After this,” he said, sarcastically, “you will perhaps think that your brother—of three and twenty, without a penny or a prospect—did Miss Lance honour by forcing a proposal upon her, making love to her at the end of all——”
“Miss Lance!” Bee said, with a sharp cry.
The Colonel took no notice of the interruption. He went on with a kind of disdainful comment to himself rather than to her.
“After all, there are things which a lady has to put up with, which we don’t take into consideration. A young fool whom she has been kind to, knowing he has nobody near to look after him, no mother”—his voice even grew a little tender at this point—“and by way of reward the idiot falls in love with her, asks a woman like that to share his insignificant little life! Jove! What a piece of impertinence!” the Colonel said, with an angry laugh.
“Did you say,” said Bee, with faltering lips, “Miss Lance, papa?”
He turned upon her with a look of extreme surprise.
“Why shouldn’t I have said Miss Lance? What is there unusual in the name?”
Bee looked at him with a dumb rebellion, an almost scorn and passion far greater than his own. He had forgotten the name—but Bee had not forgotten it. The fact that Bee’s own young life had suffered shipwreck had perhaps escaped from his memory altogether, though it was she who had done it. Bee looked at him with her blue eyes blazing, remembering everything that he had forgotten. Her brother had gone out of her mind, and all the history of his Laura, and the way in which he had been enfolded in this fatal web. She went back to her own wrongs—forgetting that she had keenly confirmed her father’s decision and rejected Aubrey on what she thought to be other and sufficient grounds. She thought only of the moment when sudden darkness had fallen upon her in the first sunshine of her life, and she had struggled against the rigid will of her father, who would listen to no explanations—who would not understand. And all for the sake of this woman—the spider who dragged fly after fly into her net; the witch, the enchantress of whom all poems and stories spoke! Her exasperation was so intense that she forgot all the laws of respect and obedience in which her very being had been bound, and looked at her father as at an equal, an enemy whom she scorned as well as feared.
“What is the meaning of these looks,” he said, “I am altogether at a loss to understand you, Bee. Why this fury at a name—which you have never heard before, so far as I know.”
“You think I have never heard it before?” said Bee, in her passion. “It shows how little you think of me, or care for anything that has happened to me. Oh, I have heard it before, and I shall hear it again, I know. I know I shall hear it again. And you don’t mind, though you are our father! You don’t remember!” Bee was still very young, and she had that fatal woman’s weakness which spoils every crisis with inevitable tears. Her exasperation was too great for words. “You don’t remember!” she cried, flinging the words at him like a storm; and then broke down in a passion of choking sobs, unable to say more.