JOAN HASTE, H. RIDER HAGGARD [free ereaders TXT] 📗

he said, "for you know that I did not really mean what I told you about breaking off our engagement. The fact is that, what between one thing and another, I scarcely knew what I was saying."

"Indeed!" answered Ellen. "Well, I hope that you know what you are saying now. If our engagement is to be continued, there must be no further talk of breaking it off on the next occasion that you happen to have a quarrel with my brother, or to be angry about the mortgages on this property."

"The only thing that I bargain about your brother is, that I shall not be asked to see him, or have anything to do with him. He can go to the deuce in his own way so far as I am concerned, and we can cut him when we are married--that is, if he becomes bankrupt and the rest of it. I am sorry if I have behaved badly, Ellen; but really and truly I do mean what I say about our engagement, and I tell you what, I will go home and put it on paper if you like, and bring you the letter this afternoon."

"That is as you like, Edward," she answered, with a perceptible softening of her manner. "But after what has happened, you may think yourself fortunate that I ever consent to see you again."

Edward attempted no reply, at least in words, for he was crushed; but, bending down, he imprinted a chaste salute upon Ellen's smooth forehead, which she acknowledged by touching him frostily on the cheek with her lips.

This, then, is the history of the great quarrel between these lovers, and of their reconciliation.

"Upon my word," said Ellen to herself, as she watched him depart, "I am by no means certain that Henry's obstinacy and violence have not done be a good turn for once. They have brought things to a crisis, there has been a struggle, and I have won the day. Whatever happens, I do not think it likely that Edward will try to match himself against me again, and I am quite certain that he will never talk any more of breaking off our engagement."

CHAPTER XVII(BETWEEN DUTY AND DUTY)

 

For a while Ellen stood silent, enjoying the luxury of a well-earned victory; then she turned and went upstairs to Henry's room. The first thing that she saw was the crutch which her brother had used as a missile of war with such effect, still lying where it had fallen on the carpet. She picked it up and placed it by his chair.

"How do you do, Henry?" she said blandly. "I hear that you have surpassed yourself this morning."

"Now, look here, Ellen," he answered, in a voice that was almost savage in its energy, "if you have come to bait me, I advise you to give it up, for I am in no mood to stand much more. You sent Mr. Milward up here to insult me, and I treated him as he deserved; though now I regret that under intolerable provocation I forgot myself so far as to condescend to violence. I am very sorry if I have interfered with your matrimonial projects, though there is a certain justice about it, seeing how constantly you attempt to interfere with mine; but I could not help it. No man of honour could have borne the things that fellow thought fit to say, and it is your own fault for encouraging him to say them."

"Oh, pray, my dear Henry, let us leave this cant about 'men of honour' out of the question. It really seems to me that after all that has happened and is happening, the less said of honour the better. It is quite useless for you to look angry, since I presume that you will not try to silence /me/ by throwing things in my face. And now let me tell you that, although you have done your best, you have not succeeded in 'interfering with my matrimonial projects,' which, in fact, were never so firmly established as they are at this moment."

"Do you mean to say," asked Henry in astonishment, "that the man has put up with--well, with what I was obliged to inflict upon him, and that you still contemplate marrying him after the way in which he has threatened to jilt you?"

"Certainly I mean to say it. We have set the one thing against the other and cried quits, though of course he has bargained that he shall have nothing more to do with you, and also that, should you persist in your present conduct, he shall not be forced to receive you at his house after our marriage."

"Really he need not have troubled to make that stipulation."

"We are not /all/ fools, Henry," Ellen went on; "and I did not feel called upon to break an engagement that in many ways suits me very well because you have chosen to quarrel with Edward and to use violence towards him. Do not be afraid, Henry: I have not come here to lecture you; I come to say that I wash my hands of you. In the interests of the family, of which you are the head, I still venture to hope that you will repent of the past and that better counsels may prevail as to the future. I hope, for instance, that you will come to see that your own prosperity and good name should not be sacrificed in order to gratify a low passion. But this is merely a pious wish and by the way. You are a middle-aged man, and must take your own course in life; only I decline to be involved in your ruin. If in the future I should however be able to do anything to mitigate its consequences so far as this property is concerned, I will do it; for I at least think more of my family than of myself, and most of all of the dying wishes of our father. And now, Henry, as a sister to a brother I say good-bye to you for so long as you persist in your present courses. Henceforth when we meet it will be as acquaintances and no more. Good-bye, Henry." And she left the room.

"That is a pleasant speech to have to listen to," reflected Henry as the door closed behind her. "Of the two I really think that I prefer Mr. Milward's mode of address, for he can be answered, or at any rate dealt with; but it is difficult to answer Ellen, seeing that to a great extent she has the right on her side. What a position for a man! If I had tried, I could not have invented a worse one. I shall never laugh again at the agonies of a heroine placed between love and duty, for it is my own case. Or rather let us leave the love out of it, and say that I stand between duty and duty, the delicate problem to deceive being: Which is the higher of these duties and who shall be sacrificed?"

As he thought thus, sadly enough, there was a knock upon his door, and Lady Graves entered the room, looking very sorrowful and dignified in her widow's robe.

"So I haven't seen the worst of it," Henry muttered. "Well, I may as well get it over." Then he added aloud, "Will you sit down, mother? I am sorry that I cannot rise to receive you."

"My boy," she said in a low voice, "I have been thinking a great deal of the sad scene which took place in connection with your dear father's death, and of my subsequent conduct towards you, and I have come to apologise to you. I do not know the exact circumstances that led you to act as you have done--I may even say that I scarcely wish to know them; but on reflection I feel that nothing but the strongest reasons of considerations of honour would have induced you to refuse your father's last request, and that I have therefore no right to judge you harshly. This came home to me when I saw you leaving the room yonder a few nights since, and your face showed me what you were suffering. But at that time my heart was too frozen with grief, and, I fear, also too much filled with resentment against you to allow me to speak. If you can tell me anything that will give me a better understanding of the causes of all this dreadful trouble, I shall be grateful to you; for then we may perhaps consult together and find some way out of it. But I repeat that I do not come to force your confidence. I come, Henry, to express my regret, and to mourn with you over a husband and a father whom we both loved dearly,"--and, moved by a sudden impulse of affection, she bent down and kissed her son upon the forehead.

He returned the embrace, and said, "Mother, those are the first kind words that I have heard for a long while from any member of my family; and I can assure you that I am grateful for them, and shall not forget them, for I thought that you had come here to revile me like everybody else. You say that you do not ask my confidence, but fortunately a man can speak out to his mother without shame, even when he has cause to be ashamed of what he must tell her. Now listen, mother: as you know, I never was a favourite in this house; I dare say through my own fault, but so it is. From boyhood everybody more or less looked down upon me, and, with the exception of yourself, I doubt if anybody cared for me much. Well, I determined to make my own way in the world and to show you all that there was something in me, and to a certain extent I succeeded. I worked hard to succeed too; I denied myself in many ways, and above all I kept myself clear from the vices that most young men fall into in one shape or another. Then came this dreadful business of my brother's death, and just as I was beginning really to get on I was asked to leave the profession which was everything to me. From the letters that reached me I gathered that in some mysterious way it lay in my power, and in mine alone, to pull the family affairs out of the mire if I returned home. So I retired from the Service and I came, because I thought that it was my duty, for hitherto I have tried to do my duty when I could see any way to it. On the first night of my arrival here I learned the true state of affairs from Ellen, and I learned also what it was expected that I should do to remedy it--namely, that I should marry a young lady with whom I had but a slight acquaintance, but who, as it chances, is the owner of the mortgages on this estate."

"It was most indiscreet of Ellen to put the matter like that," said Lady Graves.

"Ellen is frequently