"But, Mon Dieu, what a great change there will be! You will be everything and I shall be nothing! A poor actress, a doubtful lady! Oh! I shall be nothing to you, I can see, I can see! Mon Dieu, but this is only to bring more trouble upon me!"
Crabbe, as he will still be called, was at this much astonished. To do him justice he had for some time, ever since Ringfield's advent in the village in fact, found himself wishing that he might sincerely reform and offer Pauline the honour of marriage, and with it some hopes of a respectable competence.
"What nonsense are you saying?" he returned angrily. "Isn't money what we both require, what we have always required? And here it is now, as much as we want, and more, a great deal more, than we deserve or we expected! Why, I'll marry you now, Pauline, and you'll keep me steady; you and the travel and all the strangeness and the glory of it. You don't need any educating, any furbishing up—thank Heaven you were always a lady!—but we'll go abroad, of course, for a while and I'll show you Paris, Pauline, Paris, where you told Father Rielle you wanted to go and act; and you shall buy all you want at the shops, and I'll take you to the Louvre. Oh, yes, and you must go and see Mme. Bernhardt if she is acting; you might have been her rival if you'd begun earlier, with your moods and fancies and tempers. Then we'll come back to London, and I'll take you for a day to my old lodgings in Jermyn St., just to square up things. Then we'll progress quietly to the Towers, Langmere, Suffolk; that's the estate; not the most interesting of counties, but everything will be new and equally interesting to you, and thus we'll sober down to the regulation old English married couple. Dost like the picture, my lady of St. Ignace, my châtelaine of Clairville?"
"Always Clairville, always St. Ignace." She clasped her hands above her head in weariness. "If something could happen like what you describe, but no—it is impossible. They say that Henry's sight is going now, that very soon he will not be able to walk about by himself at all, that he is better in body but worse in mind, that he is forgetting all caution and speaking openly of the child—what is to be the end of it?"
"If anything could happen! Something has happened. What I am telling you is true. I am rich, able to take care of you, to put an end to this sordid existence; you shall be taken away from Henry and the child, and the old associations. Don't you believe me?"
"I should like to; but it's too much, too sudden, too good to be true."
"But it is true; here are the letters; here is money, a little of what is due, and here are the poems. You see, even if there were any mistake, any hitch about the estate, I still have a career open to me. There's an old manuscript novel of mine lying about somewhere; I believe I can get that taken; and I feel, I know there's something in it,—life, truth, suffering! But there's no hitch, no mistake, I swear it to you, Pauline; and whenever you're ready, I am; and we will, in melodramatic language, fly together from these dreary wilds. Fortunately residence at St. Ignace doesn't imply creditors. I've taken a room here at Poussette's, and I shall live in comfort for the short time that may elapse before we start. One thing, I hope, I hope, I shall keep sober. Would you take me if you thought I wouldn't, lady dear?"
He sat, stooping forward, his hair slightly disarranged, his blue eyes no longer choleric but gently smiling. She realized that he was still goodlooking, still a gentleman, a man of culture and even talent, young enough to move the world, and almost as young in appearance as herself; for mental anxiety and care of any kind always showed directly in her mobile features, and she was already beginning to track a few grey hairs and a few unbecoming wrinkles.
"There's another reason," she said evasively. "You have no idea how persistent this young man, the minister, has become. I have warned him, I have told him—not everything, of course, but a great deal—yet still he follows me, and to-day, I cannot remember what I said; but I have certainly led him to expect that I shall marry him."
"What! The parson! I thought you had more sense. Never do, never in the world. And now in the light of my proposals, see what you would be throwing away."