Squire Trevor pulled out a bundle of bank-notes from his pocket-book, and put them uncounted into Mrs. Kitty’s hand.
Lady Bell saw the deed from the windowrecess in which she was standing, shivering with agitation. She came out and instantly acted on it.
“Squire Trevor,” she declared, “I for one cannot consent that my friends and I shall live on your charity, while I will not marry you. I will marry you, sir, now, when you please.”
He turned briskly. “So, you’ve come to your senses, my lady,” he remarked drily; “I am glad to hear it;” and he took her at her word.
Need one say that she hated him the more for so taking her, and that she repented of her word the moment it was spoken?
Lady Bell was married within a few days, as soon as Mrs. Kitty could repair in a decent manner, by Mr. Trevor’s bounty, the destruction at St. Bevis’s.
On the morning of her marriage-day Lady Bell stood, for the last time, at the parlour window, looking out on the prospect which had claimed her on her arrival, and had since become familiar and almost home-like.
It was a soft summer rain—so soft that the rooks were cawing and the blackbirds singing through the wet, as if they knew how the corn was sprouting, and the fruit germs, from which the blossoms were falling, were setting in the genial, timely moisture.
The very fragment of the great house, which one man had begun, but no man would finish, because beams and copestones had been launched away on horses’ heels, and rattled down with throws of the dice—seemed as if it were wept upon by the patient sky’s purifying tears.
Lady Bell was no longer wrathful and wounded to the quick in her self-respect, her maidenly pride, and her noble birth. She was sick and sad, wishing that she could die in her youth, with this day, and that the rain might be falling on her grave.