It was long ere she could speak, for anguish. Yet when she did speak, it was with a sort of deadly calm.
"Go tell the truth to her, as you have done to me; and, if she can forgive you, all the better for you. I can never forgive you, nor yet can harm you. My child! my child! Thy father is our ruin. O, begone, man, or the sight of you will kill us both."
Then he fell at her knees; kissed, and wept over her cold hand; and, in his pity and despair, offered to cross the seas with her and her child, and so repair the wrong he had done her.
"Tempt me not," she sobbed. "Go, leave me! None here shall ever know thy crime, but she whose heart thou hast broken, and ruined her good name."
He took her in his arms, in spite of her resistance, and kissed her passionately; but, for the first time, she shuddered at his embrace; and that gave him the power to leave her.
He rushed from her, all but distracted, and rode away to Cumberland; but not to tell the truth to Kate, if he could possibly help it.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
At this particular time, no man's presence was more desired in that county than Griffith Gaunt's.
And this I need not now be telling the reader, if I had related this story on the plan of a miscellaneous chronicle. But the affairs of the heart are so absorbing, that, even in a narrative, they thrust aside important circumstances of a less moving kind.
I must therefore go back a step, before I advance further. You must know that forty years before our Griffith Gaunt saw the light, another Griffith Gaunt was born in Cumberland: a younger son, and the family estate entailed; but a shrewd lad, who chose rather to hunt fortune elsewhere than to live in miserable dependence on his elder brother. His godfather, a city merchant, encouraged him, and he left Cumberland. He went into commerce, and in twenty years became a wealthy man,—so wealthy that he lived to look down on his brother's estate, which he had once thought opulence. His life was all prosperity, with a single exception; but that a bitter one. He laid out some of his funds in a fashionable and beautiful wife. He loved her before marriage; and, as she was always cold to him, he loved her more and more.