“What did my poor mother say on her deathbed? They sent me away from her to be ‘made a lady of.’ Lord Hurstmanceaux, your wife must be one born, not made.”
He was silent; he was the most truthful of men and he believed intensely in race.
“Listen to me,” he said at last. “I should be false to the tenets of my life if I denied the influence of race. But there are exceptions to all laws. There are beggars whom a Burleigh fitly mates with; that is, I think, for Burleigh himself to judge. She cannot judge because, like all generous persons, if she had the casting vote, she would vote against herself. Let me speak for once; and only for once, of a subject which is to me intolerable pain and shame. My sister, my best-beloved sister, who is thoroughbred in every pulse of her blood and every fibre of her being, dropped to the level of a courtezan for sake of money. She was—there can be no doubt of it—your father’s mistress; of details I know nothing, but the fact is beyond doubt.”
She tried to silence him.
“Oh, why—oh, why distress yourself thus? He is dead—she is married again——”
“Those circumstances alter nothing. The fact must have been—what I say. You yourself must have learnt or concluded it from his papers.”
She made no reply. She could not deny what was obvious.
“Now,” said Hurstmanceaux, and his face was white with pain as he spoke, “race did not keep unsoiled in her either our name or her own womanhood. I believe that you would keep both my honor and your own immaculate. If you could care for me, do not let apprehensions and doubts and mistrust divide our lives. I love you; is love so strange a word to you that you cannot even guess what it wishes and suffers?”
His eyes rested on hers as he spoke. It seemed as if a blaze of unbearable light inundated her soul.
“You love me!” she said in a hushed voice of great amaze.