Shirley, Charlotte Brontë [free children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

again. The night is still. It listens. It is just leaning down to you, like a black priest to a blacker penitent. Confess, lad. Smooth naught down. Be candid as a convicted, justified, sanctified Methody at an experience meeting. Make yourself as wicked as Beelzebub. It will ease your mind.”

“As mean as Mammon, you would say. Yorke, if I got off horseback and laid myself down across the road, would you have the goodness to gallop over me, backwards and forwards, about twenty times?”

“Wi’ all the pleasure in life, if there were no such thing as a coroner’s inquest.”

“Hiram Yorke, I certainly believed she loved me. I have seen her eyes sparkle radiantly when she has found me out in a crowd; she has flushed up crimson when she has offered me her hand, and said, ‘How do you do, Mr. Moore?’

“My name had a magical influence over her. When others uttered it she changed countenance⁠—I know she did. She pronounced it herself in the most musical of her many musical tones. She was cordial to me; she took an interest in me; she was anxious about me; she wished me well; she sought, she seized every opportunity to benefit me. I considered, paused, watched, weighed, wondered. I could come to but one conclusion⁠—this is love.

“I looked at her, Yorke. I saw in her youth and a species of beauty. I saw power in her. Her wealth offered me the redemption of my honour and my standing. I owed her gratitude. She had aided me substantially and effectually by a loan of five thousand pounds. Could I remember these things? Could I believe she loved me? Could I hear wisdom urge me to marry her, and disregard every dear advantage, disbelieve every flattering suggestion, disdain every well-weighed counsel, turn and leave her? Young, graceful, gracious⁠—my benefactress, attached to me, enamoured of me. I used to say so to myself; dwell on the word; mouth it over and over again; swell over it with a pleasant, pompous complacency, with an admiration dedicated entirely to myself, and unimpaired even by esteem for her; indeed I smiled in deep secrecy at her naivete and simplicity in being the first to love, and to show it. That whip of yours seems to have a good heavy handle, Yorke; you can swing it about your head and knock me out of the saddle, if you choose. I should rather relish a loundering whack.”

“Tak patience, Robert, till the moon rises and I can see you. Speak plain out⁠—did you love her or not? I could like to know. I feel curious.”

“Sir⁠—sir⁠—I say⁠—she is very pretty, in her own style, and very attractive. She has a look, at times, of a thing made out of fire and air, at which I stand and marvel, without a thought of clasping and kissing it. I felt in her a powerful magnet to my interest and vanity. I never felt as if nature meant her to be my other and better self. When a question on that head rushed upon me, I flung it off, saying brutally I should be rich with her and ruined without her⁠—vowing I would be practical, and not romantic.”

“A very sensible resolve. What mischief came of it, Bob?”

“With this sensible resolve I walked up to Fieldhead one night last August. It was the very eve of my departure for Birmingham; for, you see, I wanted to secure Fortune’s splendid prize. I had previously dispatched a note requesting a private interview. I found her at home, and alone.

“She received me without embarrassment, for she thought I came on business. I was embarrassed enough, but determined. I hardly know how I got the operation over; but I went to work in a hard, firm fashion⁠—frightful enough, I dare say. I sternly offered myself⁠—my fine person⁠—with my debts, of course, as a settlement.

“It vexed me, it kindled my ire, to find that she neither blushed, trembled, nor looked down. She responded, ‘I doubt whether I have understood you, Mr. Moore.’

“And I had to go over the whole proposal twice, and word it as plainly as A.B.C., before she would fully take it in. And then, what did she do? Instead of faltering a sweet Yes, or maintaining a soft, confused silence (which would have been as good), she started up, walked twice fast through the room, in the way that she only does, and no other woman, and ejaculated, ‘God bless me!’

“Yorke, I stood on the hearth, backed by the mantelpiece; against it I leaned, and prepared for anything⁠—everything. I knew my doom, and I knew myself. There was no misunderstanding her aspect and voice. She stopped and looked at me.

“ ‘God bless me!’ she piteously repeated, in that shocked, indignant, yet saddened accent. ‘You have made a strange proposal⁠—strange from you; and if you knew how strangely you worded it and looked it, you would be startled at yourself. You spoke like a brigand who demanded my purse rather than like a lover who asked my heart.’

“A queer sentence, was it not, Yorke? And I knew, as she uttered it, it was true as queer. Her words were a mirror in which I saw myself.

“I looked at her, dumb and wolfish. She at once enraged and shamed me.

“ ‘Gérard Moore, you know you don’t love Shirley Keeldar.’ I might have broken out into false swearing⁠—vowed that I did love her; but I could not lie in her pure face. I could not perjure myself in her truthful presence. Besides, such hollow oaths would have been vain as void. She would no more have believed me than she would have believed the ghost of Judas, had he broken from the night and stood before her. Her female heart had finer perceptions than to be cheated into mistaking my half-coarse, half-cold admiration for true-throbbing, manly love.

“What next happened? you will say, Mr. Yorke.

“Why, she sat down in the window-seat and cried. She cried passionately. Her eyes not only rained but lightened. They flashed, open,