On that morning it chanced that Sir Barnes had left home with Mr Speer, his legal adviser; and hereupon the Marquis asked to see Miss Newcome; nor could the lodge-keeper venture to exclude so distinguished a person from the Park. His lordship drove up to the house, and his name was taken to Miss Ethel. She turned very pale when she heard it; and my wife divined at once who was her visitor. Lady Anne had not left her room as yet. Laura Pendennis remained in command of the little conclave of children, with whom the two ladies were sitting when Lord Farintosh arrived. Little Clara wanted to go with her aunt as she rose to leave the room—the child could scarcely be got to part from her now.
At the end of an hour the carriage was seen driving away, and Ethel returned looking as pale as before, and red about the eyes. Miss Clara’s mutton-chop for dinner coming in at the same time, the child was not so presently eager for her aunt’s company. Aunt Ethel cut up the mutton-chop very neatly, and then, having seen the child comfortably seated at her meal, went with her friend into a neighbouring apartment (of course, with some pretext of showing Laura a picture, or a piece of china, or a new child’s frock, or with some other hypocritical pretence by which the ingenuous female attendants pretended to be utterly blinded), and there, I have no doubt, before beginning her story, dearest Laura embraced dearest Ethel, and vice versa.
“He is gone!” at length gasps dearest Ethel.
“Pour toujours? poor young man!” sighs dearest Laura. “Was he very unhappy, Ethel?”
“He was more angry,” Ethel answers. “He had a right to be hurt, but not to speak as he did. He lost his temper quite at last, and broke out in the most frantic reproaches. He forgot all respect and even gentlemanlike behaviour. Do you know he used words—words such as Barnes uses sometimes when he is angry! and dared this language to me! I was sorry till then, very sorry, and very much moved; but I know more than ever, now, that I was right in refusing Lord Farintosh.”
Dearest Laura now pressed for an account of all that had happened, which may be briefly told as follows. Feeling very deeply upon the subject which brought him to Miss Newcome, it was no wonder that Lord Farintosh spoke at first in a way which moved her. He said he thought her letter to his mother was very rightly written under the circumstances, and thanked her for her generosity in offering to release him from his engagement. But the affair—the painful circumstance of Highgate, and that—which had happened in the Newcome family, was no fault of Miss Newcome’s, and Lord Farintosh could not think of holding her accountable. His friends had long urged him to marry, and it was by his mother’s own wish that the engagement was formed, which he was determined to maintain. In his course through the world (of which he was getting very tired), he had never seen a woman, a lady who was so—you understand, Ethel—whom he admired so much, who was likely to make so good a wife for him as you are. “You allude,” he continued, “to differences we have had—and we have had them—but many of them, I own, have been from my fault. I have been bred up in a way different to most young men. I cannot help it if I have had temptations to which other men are not exposed; and have been placed by—by Providence—in a high rank of life; I am sure if you share it with me you will adorn it, and be in every way worthy of it, and make me much better than I have been. If you knew what a night of agony I passed after my mother read that letter to me—I know you’d pity me, Ethel,—I know you would. The idea of losing you makes me wild. My mother was dreadfully alarmed when she saw the state I was in; so was the doctor—I assure you he was. And I had no rest at all, and no peace of mind, until I determined to come down to you; and say that I adored you, and you only; and that I would hold to my engagement in spite of everything—and prove to you that—that no man in the world could love you more sincerely than I do.” Here the young gentleman was so overcome that he paused in his speech, and gave way to an emotion, for which, surely no man who has been in the same condition with Lord Farintosh will blame him.
Miss Newcome was also much touched by this exhibition of natural feeling; and, I dare say, it was at this time that her eyes showed the first symptoms of that malady of which the traces were visible an hour after.
“You are very generous and kind to me, Lord Farintosh,” she said. “Your constancy honours me very much, and proves how good and loyal you are; but—but do not think hardly of me for saying that the more I have thought of what has happened here,—of the wretched consequences of interested marriages; the long union growing each day so miserable, that at last it becomes intolerable and is burst asunder, as in poor Clara’s case;—the more I am resolved not to commit that first fatal step of entering into a marriage without—without the degree of affection which people who take that vow ought to feel for one another.”
“Affection! Can you doubt it? Gracious heavens, I adore you! Isn’t my being here a proof that I do?” cries the young lady’s lover.
“But I?” answered the girl. “I have asked my own heart that question before now. I have thought to myself,—If he comes after all,—if his affection for me survives this disgrace of our family, as it has, and every one of us should be thankful to you—ought I not to show at least gratitude for so much kindness and honour, and devote myself to one who makes such sacrifices for me? But, before all things I owe you the truth, Lord Farintosh. I never could make you happy; I know I could not: nor obey you as you are accustomed to be obeyed; nor give you such a devotion as you have a right to expect from your wife. I thought I might once. I can’t now! I know that I took you because you were rich, and had a great name; not because you were honest, and attached to me as you show yourself to be. I ask your pardon for the deceit I practised on you.—Look at Clara, poor child, and her misery! My pride, I know, would never have let me fall as far as she has done; but oh! I am humiliated to think that I could have been made to say I would take the first step in that awful career.”