"And I need not ask," said I, trying in vain to conceal my indignation, "how Miss Trevanion received your monstrous proposition!"
Vivian's pale cheek grew paler, but he made no reply.
"And if we had not arrived, what would you have done? Oh, dare you look into the gulf of infamy you have escaped!"
"I cannot, and I will not bear this!" exclaimed Vivian, starting up. "I have laid my heart bare before you, and it is ungenerous and unmanly thus to press upon its wounds. You can moralise, you can speak coldly—but I—I loved!"
"And do you think," I burst forth—"do you think that I did not love too!—love longer than you have done; better than you have done; gone through sharper struggles, darker days, more sleepless nights than you,—and yet—"
Vivian caught hold of me.
"Hush!" he cried; "is this indeed true! I thought you might have had some faint and fleeting fancy for Miss Trevanion, but that you curbed and conquered it at once. Oh no; it was impossible to have loved really, and to have surrendered all chance as you did!—have left the house, have fled from her presence! No—no, that was not love!"
"It was love! and I pray Heaven to grant that, one day, you may know how little your affection sprang from those feelings which make true love sublime as honour, and meek as is religion! Oh cousin, cousin!—with those rare gifts, what you might have been! what, if you will pass through repentance, and cling to atonement—what, I dare hope, you may yet be! Talk not now of your love; I talk not of mine! Love is a thing gone from the lives of both. Go back to earlier thoughts, to heavier wrongs!—your father—that noble heart which you have so wantonly lacerated, that much-enduring love which you have so little comprehended!"
Then with all the warmth of emotion I hurried on—showed him the true nature of honour and of Roland (for the names were one!)—showed him the watch, the hope, the manly anguish I had witnessed, and wept—I, not his son—to see; showed him the poverty and privation to which the father, even at the last, had condemned himself, so that the son might have no excuse for the sins that Want whispers to the weak. This, and much more, and I suppose with the pathos that belongs to all earnestness, I enforced, sentence after sentence—yielding to no interruption, over-mastering all dissent; driving in the truth, nail after nail, as it were, into the obdurate heart, that I constrained and grappled to. And at last, the dark, bitter, cynical nature gave way, and the young man fell sobbing at my feet, and cried aloud, "Spare me, spare me!—I see it all now! Wretch that I have been!"