God's Good Man, Marie Corelli [me reader .txt] 📗

and my position. You have refused me a score of times, and I am not discouraged—you refuse me still, and I am not baffled. But I ask why? I am not deformed or idiotic. I would try to make you happy. A woman is best when she has entirely her own way,—I would let you have yours. You would be free to follow your own whims and caprices. Provided you gave me lawful heirs, I should ask no more of you. No reasonable man ought to ask more of any reasonable woman. Life could be made very enjoyable to us both, with a little tact and sense on either side. I should amuse myself in the world, and so I hope, would you. We understand modern life and appreciate its conveniences. The freedom of the matrimonial state is one of those conveniences, of which I am sure we should equally take advantage.”

He puffed at his cigar for a few minutes complacently.

“You profess to hate me,”—he went on—“Again I ask, why? You tell your aunt that you want to be ‘loved.’ You consider love the only lasting good of life. Well, you have your desire. I love you!”

She raised her eyes,—and then suddenly laughed.

“You!” she said—“You ‘love’ me? It must be a very piecemeal sort of love, then, for I know at least five women to whom you have said the same thing!”

He was in nowise disconcerted.

“Only five!” he murmured lazily—“Why not ten—or twenty? The more the merrier! Women delight in bragging of conquests they have never made, as why should they not? Lying comes so naturally to them! But I do not profess to be a saint,—I daresay I have said ‘I love you’ to a hundred women in a certain fashion,—but not as I say it to you. When I say it to you, I mean it.”

“Mean what?” she asked.

“Love.”

She stopped in her walk and faced him.

“When a man loves a woman—really loves her,”—she said, “Does he persecute her? Does he compromise her in society? Does he try to scandalise her among her friends? Does he whisper her name away on a false rumour, and accuse her of running after him for his title, while all the time he knows it is he himself that is running after her money? Does he make her life a misery to her, and leave her no peace anywhere, not even in her own house? Does he spy upon her, and set others to do the same?—does he listen at doors and interrogate servants as to her movements—and does he altogether play the dastardly traitor to prove his ‘love’?”

Her voice shook—her eyes were ablaze with indignation. Roxmouth flicked a little ash off his cigar.

“Why, of course not!” he replied—“But who does these dreadful things? Are they done at all except in your imagination?”

“YOU do them!” said Maryllia, passionately—“And you have always done them! When I tell you once and for all that I have given up every chance I ever had of being my aunt’s heiress—that I shall never be a rich woman,—and that I would far rather die a beggar than be your wife, will you not understand me?—will you not leave me alone?”

He looked at her with quizzical amusement.

“Do you really want to be left alone?” he asked—“Or in a ‘solitude a deux’—with the parson?”

She was silent, though her silence cost her an effort. But she knew that the least word she might say concerning Walden would be wilfully misconstrued. She knew that Roxmouth was waiting for her to burst out with some indignant denial of his suggestions—something that he might twist and turn in his own fashion and repeat afterwards to all his and her acquaintances. She cared nothing for herself, but she was full of dread lest Walden’s name should be bandied up and down on the scurrilous tongues of that ‘upper class’ throng, who, because they spend their lives in nothing nobler than political intrigue and sensual indulgence, are politely set aside as froth and scum by the saner, cleaner world, and classified as the ‘Smart Set.’ Roxmouth watched her furtively. His clear-cut face, white skin and sandy hair shone all together with an oily lustre in the moonlight;—there was a hard cold gleam in his eyes.

“It would be a pretty little story for the society press,” he said, after a pause—“How the bewitching Maryllia Vancourt resigned the brilliancy of her social life for a dream of love with an elderly country clergyman! By Heaven! No one would believe it! But,”—and he waited a minute, then continued—“It’s a story that shall never be told so far as I am concerned—if—” He broke off, and looked meditatively at the end of his cigar. “There is always an ‘if’— unfortunately!”

Maryllia smiled coldly.

“That is a threat,”—she said—“But it does not affect me! Nothing that you can do or say will make me consent to marry you. You have slandered me already—you can slander me again for all I care. But I will never be your wife.”

“You have said so before,”—he observed, placidly—“And I have put the question many times—why?”

She looked at him steadily.

“Shall I tell you?”

“Do! I shall appreciate the favour!”

For a moment she hesitated. A great pain and sorrow clouded her eyes.

“No woman marries a leper by choice!”—she said at last, slowly.

He glanced at her,—then shrugged his shoulders.

“You talk in parables. Pardon me if I am too dull to understand you!”

“You understand me well enough,”—she answered—“But if you wish it, I will speak more plainly. I dream of love---”

“Most women do!” he interrupted her, smilingly—“And I am sure you dream charmingly. But is a middle-aged parson part of the romantic vision?”

She paid no heed to this sarcasm. She had moved a pace or two away from him, and now stood, her head slightly uplifted, her eyes turned wistfully towards the picturesque gables of the Manor outlined clearly in the moon against the dense night sky.

“I dream of love!”—she repeated softly,—while he, smoking tranquilly, and looking the very image of a tailor’s model in his faultlessly cut dress suit, spotless shirt front, and aggressively neat white tie, studied her face, her figure and her attitude with amused interest—“But my dream is not what the world offers me as the dream’s realisation! The love that I mean—the love that I seek- the love that I want-the love that I will have,”—and she raised her hand involuntarily with a slight gesture which almost implied a command—“or else go loveless all my days—is an honest love,— loyal, true and pure!—and strong enough to last through this life and all the lives to come!”

“If there are any!”—interpolated Roxmouth, blandly.

She looked at him,—and a vague expression of something like physical repulsion flitted across her face.

“It is no use talking to you,”—she said—“For you believe in nothing—not even in God! You are a man of your own making—you are not a man in the true sense of manhood. How can you know anything of love? You will not find it in the low haunts of Paris where you are so well known,—where your name is a byword as that of an English ‘milord’ who degrades his Order!”

“What do YOU know of the low haunts of Paris?” he queried with a cold laugh—“Is Louis Gigue your informant?’

“I daresay Louis Gigue knows as much of you as most men do,”—she replied, quietly—“But I never speak of you to him. Indeed, I never speak of you at all unless you are spoken of, and not always then. You do not interest me sufficiently!”

She moved towards the house. He followed her.

“Your remarks have been somewhat rambling and disjointed,”—he said- “But essentially feminine, after all. And they merely tend to one thing-that you are still an untamed shrew!”

She looked back at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed in the moonlight,—a faint smile curved her pretty mouth.

“If I am, it will need someone braver than you are to tame me!” she said—“A trickster is always a coward!”

With an angry exclamation he flung away the end of his cigar,—it fell into a harmless bed of mignonette and seared the sweet blossom, burning redly in the green like a wicked eye. And then he caught her hand firmly and held it grasped as in a vice.

“You insult me!” he said, thickly—“And I shall not forget it! You talk as a child talks—though you are no child! You are a woman of the world—you have travelled—you have had experience—and you know men. You are perfectly aware that the sentimental ‘love’ you speak of exists nowhere except in poems and story-books—you know that no sane man alive would tie himself to one woman save for the law’s demand that his heirs shall be lawfully born. You are no shrinking maid in her teens, that you should start and recoil or blush, at the truth of the position, and it is the merest affectation on your part to talk about ‘love lasting forever,’ for you are perfectly aware that it cannot last very long over the honeymoon. The natural state of man is polygamous. Englishmen are the same as Turks or Hottentots in this respect, except for the saving grace of hypocrisy, which is the chief prop of European civilisation. If it were not for hypocrisy, we should all be savages as utterly and completely as in primaeval days! You know all this as well as I do—and yet you feign to desire the impossible, while all the time you play the fool with a country parson! But I’ll make you pay for it—by Heaven, I will! You scorn me and my name—you call me a social leper---”

“You are one!” she said, wrenching her hand from his clasp—“And what is more, you know it, and you glory in it! Who are your associates? Men who are physically or morally degenerate—women who, so long as their appetites are satisfied, seek nothing more! You play the patron to a certain literary ‘set’ who produce books unfit to be read by any decent human being,—you work your way, by means of your title and position, through society, contaminating everything you touch! You contaminate ME by associating my name with yours!—and my aunt helps you in the wicked scheme! I came here to my own home—to the house where my father died—thinking that perhaps here at least I should find peace,”—and her voice shook as with tears—“that here, at least, the old walls might give me shelter and protection!—but even here you followed me with your paid spy, Marius Longford—and I have found myself surrounded by your base tools almost despite myself! But even if you try to hound me into my grave, I will never marry you! I would rather die a hundred times over than be your wife!”

His face flushed a dark red, and he suddenly made an though he would seize her in his arms. She retreated swiftly.

“Do not touch me!” she said, in a low, strained voice—“It will be the worse for you if you do!”

“The worse for me—or for YOU?” he muttered fiercely,—then regaining his composure, he burst into an angry laugh. “Bah! You are nothing but a woman! You fling aside what you have, and pine for what you have not! The old, old story! The eternal feminine!”

She made no reply, but moved on towards the house. “Quel ravissement de la lune!” exclaimed a deep guttural voice at this juncture, and Louis Gigue came out from the dark embrasure of the Manor’s oaken portal into the full splendour of the moonlight—“Et la belle Mademoiselle Vancourt is ze adorable