“You little coquette; You keep all your coquetries for your own old father, I do believe.”
“Then tell me that I am worth a thousand, father—a thousand acres of good rich land with trees and hedges, and cows and sheep—surely I never can be worth all that: or at any rate not to you, papa.”
“You are worth to me,” said Sir Roland Lorraine—as she fell into his arms, and sobbed, and kissed him, and stroked his white beard, and then sobbed again—“not a thousand acres, but ten thousand—land, and hearth, and home, and heart!”
“Then after all you do love me, father. I call nothing love that loves anything else. And how much,” she asked, with her arms round his neck, and her red lips curving to a crafty whisper—“how much should I be worth, if I married a man I despise and dislike? Enough for my grave, and no more, papa; just the size of your small book-table.”
Here she fell away, lost in her father’s arms, and for the moment could only sigh, with her lips and eyelids quivering; and Sir Roland watching her pale loving face, was inclined to hate his own mother. “You shall marry no one, my own child,” he whispered through her unbraided hair; “no one whom you do not love dearly, and who is not thoroughly worthy of you.”
“Then I will not marry any one, papa,” she answered, with a smile reviving; “for I do not love any one a bit, papa, except my own father, and my own brother; and Uncle Struan, of course, and so on, in an outer and milder manner. And as for being worthy of me, I am not worth very much, I know. Still, if I am worth only half an acre, I must be too good for that Captain Chapman.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
IN THE DEADLY BREACH.
The stern and strong will of a single man is a very fine thing for weaker men—and still more so for women—to dwell upon. But the stern strong will of a host of men, set upon one purpose, and resolved to win it or die for it, is a power that conquers the powers of earth and of nature arrayed against them. The British army was resolved to carry by storm Badajos; and their vigorous manner of setting about it, and obstinate way of going on with it, overcame at last the strength of all that tried to stand before them.
This was the more to their credit, because—the worst of all things for a man to get over—even the weather itself was against them. Nothing makes a deeper depression in the human system than long spite of weather does. The sense of luck is still over us all (in spite of philosophy and mathematics), and of all the behaviour of fortune, what comes home to our roofs and hats so impressively as the weather does?