At these words Morar started slightly, and looked for a moment confused. “Newly married!” he said; “Lord help us! so we are. Some way, I fancied we had been married for years. Well, we have not taken long to discover each other, and will have the more leisure to repent. I understand you, madam, into the very core; there is not a vein of your body hides a secret from me. I was mistaken; I thought your beauty something more than a pink cheek; I thought you generous till I saw how generous you could be at my expense, and how much the rent-roll of Morar weighed with you in your decision to marry me. I thought you humble and unaffected, and now I see you posing about this business of bare feet on the sand, the morning breeze in your gown, breakfasts of berries and water.”
“Pray go on,” cried the lady. “Pray go on. Every word you say confirms the character I now see in your face.”
“I thought you truthful, so you are—in the letter and the word; but the flattery you have for those you would conciliate, the insincerity of your laugh in the presence of those you would please, the unscrupulousness of your excuses for the omission of duties unpleasant to you—what are these but lies of the worst kind?”
“Oh heavens,” she cried, “I was not always so! If I am so now I must be what you made me. I remember—” she drew her hand across her brow; “I seem to remember some one else I thought was me, that loved you, and could not be too good and pure for you even in her imagination. You seemed a king to that poor foolish girl’s imagination; she loved you so—she loved you so, she was so happy!”
“Just so!” said Morar. “You had, seemingly, well deceived yourself. And now I can tell you that you may cry your eyes out, for I know what a woman gets her tears so readily for. It is that when she is crying and lamenting she may not betray her chagrin and ill-temper in her face. Have done with it, and let us get out of this! I see the men put out the boat; they will be with us in a moment; for Heaven’s sake let us have no more theatricals. The fate of us both is sealed, and we must, I suppose, live the rest of our lives together like the other married fools we know—putting as fair a face as we can on a ghastly business.”
She was standing beside tall blades of shelister—the iris of the isles—and when he spoke like this to her she suddenly plucked a handful and began to tear them wantonly with her fingers.
“I assure you that you have seen the last of my tears,” said she. “I would not cry out if you struck me! There is something almost as sweet as love, and that is hate, and I seem to have come from a race that must have either. I have a feeling in me that I could have loved eternally if I had found the proper object, but now I know that I can always be sure you will keep me hating, and I am not sorry. Yes, yes, you have said it, Morar, a ghastly business; but I will not put any fair face on it to deceive the world, I assure you! It could not be deceived: blind would it be, indeed, if it could not see the sneer in your face, and hear the coward in your voice.”
“Silence, you fool; the men are coming!” he said, clutching at her wrist and twisting it cruelly.
She gave a little shriek of pain, and caught at her breast with the other hand that held the broken blades of shelisters.
“Oh, you have struck me!” she cried. “That is the end of my shame, and I shall make you suffer.”