“Why, mad? Because I do not wish to be Lady Audley?” she said, facing him calmly, with her hands behind her.
“Mad!” he repeated, bitter self-reproach in his voice. For he felt himself to blame, he felt the full burden of his responsibility. He had left the papers with her, the true value of which she might not have known! And she had done this dreadful, this fatal, this irreparable thing!
She faced his anger without a quiver. “Why, mad!” she repeated. She was quite at her ease now. “Because, having been jilted by my cousin, I do not wish for this common, this vulgar, this poor revenge? Because I will not stoop to the game he plays and has played? Because I will not take from him what is little to me who have not had it, but much, nay all, to him who has?”
“But your uncle?” he cried. He was striving desperately to collect himself, trying to see the thing all round and not only as she saw it, but in its consequences. “Your uncle, whose one aim, whose one object in life——”
“Was to be Lord Audley? Believe me,” she replied gently, “he sees more clearly now. And he is dead.”
“But there are still—those who come after you?”
“Will they be better, happier, more useful?” she answered. “Will they be less Audleys, with less of ancient blood running in their veins because of what I have done? Because I have refused to rake up this old, pitiful, forgotten stain, this scandal of Queen Elizabeth? No, a thousand times no! And do not think, do not think,” she continued more soberly, “that I have acted in haste or on impulse. I have not had this out of my thoughts for a moment since I knew the truth. I have weighed, carefully weighed, the price, and as carefully decided to pay it. My duty? I can do it, I hope, as well in one station as another. For the rest there is only one who will lose by it”—she faced him bravely now—“only one who will have the right to blame me—ever.”
“I may have no right——”
“No you have no right at present.”
“Still——”