She would not eat the bread and butter which he had, according to the homely gallantry of the generation, prepared specially for her consumption.
She refused to sing to him.
She ventured to cry aloud coldly, “Oh! Mr. Trevor, don’t make such a pother,” when he insisted on her being promoted to the card-table on the single occasion that Squire Godwin condescended to sit down for a family game, with Mrs. Die launching at her brother her madly malicious innuendoes.
CHAPTER VIII.
MARRIED IN A DAY.
All was utterly in vain, as futile as Lady Bell’s dressing herself in her dowdiest clothes with her shabbiest, least “setting” top-knots. If Lady Bell had only known in her youthful inexperience, there was something irresistibly piquant and provocative in her pouts and flouts, her sulks and déshabillés, to most men who had her in their power. The mere circumstance that her resistance, sincere to anguish as it was, in its openness, was weak as her age, would have been enough to all, save a generous man, in the conduct of such an attack, while to a man like Squire Trevor, any opposition, however feeble, served but as tinder to flame.
Lady Bell’s next move was made in the utmost alarm on the arrival of a pair of valuable buckles set with diamonds, and a necklace with an emerald “bob,” for which Squire Trevor had sent a messenger expressly, and which were put by his direction, and with the connivance of others, in their cases with the lids open, on the little table before the mirror in Lady Bell’s closet.
She ventured to seek her uncle when he was alone in the dining-room, and to tell him plainly, “Uncle Godwin, I am sorry to plague you, but I will not marry Squire Trevor.”
For his answer, Mr. Godwin raised his eyebrows, and having nearly demolished Lady Bell by this simple operation, and its supercilious reception of her declaration of war, he proceeded further to annihilate her.
“My Lady Bell, let me ask you, and forgive me for the indelicacy of the question, have you any means of subsistence except what I grant you?”
“No, sir,” answered Lady Bell, faint and low at the home-thrust; and she was not able to tell her uncle, because in the annals of her rank she had not yet heard of such an enterprise, and was ignorant how to set about it, that she would no longer be indebted to his bounty—she would go forth and earn her own bread, or perish without it, but she would not barter herself, for the sake of his making a better bargain in the sale of an unentailed fragment of his estate, or that he might be permanently rid of the burden of her maintenance.