'At all events your mother and Janet heard me—heard me when they knew I was engaged to you, and they told me nothing. It was infamous, unpardonable. They knew how I hated that man before I was married. They knew that I would rather have become allied to a Hottentot than to such an one as he. They let me marry you in ignorance—it was a fraud; and how, I ask'—he raised his voice in boiling anger—'how can I trust you when you profess your ignorance?' He sprang to his feet and walked across the room. 'I don't believe in your innocence. It was a base, a vile plot hatched between you all, Schofield and the rest of you. Here am I—just set on my feet and pushing my way in an honest business, and find myself bound by an indissoluble bond to the daughter of the biggest scoundrel on the face of the globe.'
Salome did not speak. To speak would be in vain.
He was furious; he had lost his trust in her.
She began to tremble, as she had trembled when Mrs. Sidebottom had seen her on the stairs—a convulsive shivering extending from the shuddering heart outwards to the extremities, so that every hair on her head quivered, every fold in her gown.
'And now,' pursued Philip, 'the taint is transmitted to my child. It might have been endurable had I stood alone. It is intolerable now. These things run in the blood like maladies.'
She was nigh on fainting; she lifted one hand slightly in protest; but he was too angry to attend to any protest.
'Can I doubt it? The clever swindler defrauded my father, and the clever daughter uses the inherited arts and swindles the son. How do I know but that the same falsehood, low, cunning, and base propensities may not lurk inherent in my child, to break out in time and make me curse the day that I gave to the world another edition of Beaple Yeo, alias Schofield, bearing my hitherto untarnished name?'
Then she turned and walked to the door, with her hands extended as one blind, stepping slowly, stiffly, as if fearful of stumbling over some unseen obstacle. She went out, and he, looking sullenly after her, saw of her only the white fingers holding the door, and drawing it ajar, and trying vainly to shut it, pinching them in so doing, showing how dazed she was—instinctively trying to shut the door, and too lost to what she was about to see how to do it.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE FLIGHT OF EROS.