"To discuss the Tressillian," said I. "But that surprises me less, old fellow, than that you should champion her. What's it for? Has hate turned to the other thing? Have you come to think that, though she'd make a very bad mother-in-law, she'd make a charming wife? 'Pon my life, if you have——"
"Hush! Don't jest!"
I knew by the tone of those three little monosyllables that the Major was done for—caught, conquered, and fettered by his dangerous foe.
Telfer sat silent for some minutes, looking out of the window where the dawn was rising over the hills, with a settled gloom upon his face. Then he rose, and began swinging about the room with his firm cavalry tread, his arms crossed on his chest, and his head bent down.
"By Heaven! Vane," he said at length, in a tone low, but passionate and bitter, "I have gone on like a baby or a fool, playing with tools till they have cut me. Against my will, against my judgment, against reason, hope, everything, I have lingered in that girl's fascinations till I am bound by them hand and foot. I cannot deceive myself, I cannot shut the truth out; it was not honor, nor chivalry, nor friendship that made me to-night insult the man who spoke jestingly of her; it was love—love as mad, as reckless, as misplaced, as ever cursed a man and drove him to his ruin." He paused, breathing hard, with his teeth set, then broke out again: "I, who held love in such disdain, who have so long kept my passions in such strong control, who thought no woman had the power to move me against my will—I love at last, despite myself, though I know that she is pitiless, that nothing I have said has been able to touch her into softer feeling, and that, mad as my passion is for her, if her nature be as hard and haughty as I fear, I dare not, if I could, make her my wife. No, Vane, no," he went on, hastily, as I interrupted. "She does not love me, she has no gentler feeling in her; I thought she had, but I was mistaken. I tried her several times, but she will never forgive my first injustice to her; and to one with so little softness in her nature I dare not trust my peace. It were a worse hell even than that I now endure, to have her with me, loving her as I do, and feel that her cold heart gave no response to mine; to possess her glorious beauty, and yet know that her love and her soul were dead in their chill pride to me——"
He paused again, and leaned against the window, his chest heaving, and hot tears standing in his haughty eyes, wrung from the very anguish of his soul. The pride that had never before bent to any human thing, was now cast in the dust before a woman who never did, and probably never would, love him in return.
V.
THE DUEL, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
The contemptible young puppy, for whom Telfer considered the honor of a ball from his pistol a great deal too good in the morning, sent Heavysides, of the 40th, a chum of his found up at the Bad, to claim "satisfaction," the valor produced in him by Sillery over night having been kept up since by copious draughts of cognac and Seltzer. Having signified to Heavysides that the Major would do Mr. Snobley the favor of shooting him in the retired valley of Königshöhle at sunrise the next day, I went to tell Telfer, who had a hearty laugh at the young fellow's challenge.