"My dear daughter," he said, more simply and more sweetly than Lady Bridget-Mary had ever heard him speak before, "I think you love this brave gentleman sincerely?"
His daughter's large, beautifully-shaped hand closed strongly over the old ivory fingers. The great brilliant dark grey eyes looked at him through a sudden mist of tears, though she lifted her head and held it high. She said in a low, clear voice:
"Father, you remember how my mother loved you? And Richard is as dear to me as you were to her. I want words when it comes to speaking of so great a thing as the love I feel for him. But it is my life.... I seem to breathe with his breath, and think his thoughts, and speak with his voice, since we found out our secret, and we are each other's for Time and for Eternity." Then she added, with a lovely smile that had a touch of humour in it: "And he will be quite content to take me with only my share of mother's money."
"Tschah!" said the old father. "Nonsense! Of course, St. Barre will be delighted to provide for you. Excuse me ... I must go."
St. Barre, in the Castleclare nursery, had set up another squeal.
Thenceforwards the course of true love might have been expected to run smoothly for Lady Bridget-Mary and her gallant lover. But she had reckoned, not without her host, but without her Grey Hussar. In love there is always one who loves the more, and Lady Bridget-Mary, that fine, enthusiastic, tempestuous creature, was far from realising that she was less to her Richard than he was to her. The reason was not farther to seek than a few doors off in London, when the Ladies Bawne occupied their sombre old corner-house in Grosvenor Square. It was Lady Bridget-Mary's dearest Lucy and bosom-friend, who had married that handsome, grey-moustached martinet, Richard's Colonel. In Lady Lucy Hawting's drawing-room Lord Castleclare's elder daughter had met Captain Mildare, the hero of Futtehabad and Ahmed Khel. The Colonel's wife was a pretty, delicate, graceful creature, some three years older than her black-browed handsome friend, and much more learned, as, of course, befitted a married woman, in the ways of the world. And Lady Lucy saw the budding of young passion in the heart of her junior ... and it occurred to her that it would furnish a very excellent excuse for the constant presence of Captain Mildare, if ...! the sweetest and most limpid women have their turbid depths, their muddy secrets—and she had confided everything to dearest Bridget-Mary, except the one thing that mattered!
Well! We all know for what reason Le Roi Soleil addressed himself to the wooing of La Vallière. Louis fell genuinely in love with the decoy, not quite so Richard. But sometimes, when those proud lips meekly gave back his kisses, and that lofty beauty humbled itself to obey his will, he almost wished that he had never met the other. A day came when the secret orchard he had joyed in with that other was threaded with a golden clue, and the hidden bower unveiled to the cold-eyed staring day.
Captain Mildare and Lady Lucy Hawting went away together, and from Paris Richard wrote and broke to the girl who loved him, and had been his betrothed wife, the common, vulgar, horrible little truth. Bridget-Mary had been deceived by both of them from the very beginning. Estimate the numbing, overwhelming weight of that blow, delivered by a hand so worshipped, upon so proud a heart. Those who saw her, and should have honoured her great grief with decent reticence, say that she was mad for a while; that she grovelled on the earth in her abandonment, calling upon God and man to be merciful and kill her. Pass over this. I cannot bear to think that the mere love of a Richard Mildare should bring that lofty head so low.
While the scandal lived in the mouths of Society, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne remained unseen. She was pitied—oh, burning, intolerable shame! She was commiserated as a catspaw, and sneered at as a dupe. Her sisters and her stepmother, her father and her seven aunts, her relatives, innumerable as stars in the Milky Way, found infinite relish in the comfortable conviction that every one of them had said from the very outset that Bridget-Mary would regret the step she had taken in engaging herself to that Captain Mildare. Sharp claws of steel were added to her scourge of humiliation by a thousand petty liberties taken with this, her great, sacred sorrow, as by letters of sympathy from friends, who wrote as if she had suffered the loss of a pet hunter, or a prize Persian cat.
A suitor ventured to propose for that white rejected hand, addressing himself with stammering diffidence to Lord Castleclare. A young man, the son of an industrious father who had consolidated the sweat of his brow into three millions and a Peerage, hideously conscious of the raw newness of his title, painfully burdened with the bosom-weight of a genuine, if incoherent love, he seemed to Lady Bridget-Mary's family tolerable, almost desirable, nearly quite the thing....