moment she stood motionless, watching the girl quiver in her emotion, and as the sobbing subsided, she stretched forth her hand again, and caught her by the shoulder.
“Look up at me,” she said, and the girl, obedient, rose from her seat and gazed imploringly in her mother’s face. No Neapolitan fish-wife was ever more eager to barter her daughter than was this lady of acknowledged piety and refinement, and the face into which her daughter looked and shrank from bore no trace of pity or compassion. “Tell me if you dare,” she continued, “tell me why it is that you refuse? What more do you want? Are you a princess of the blood? Perhaps you will say you don’t love him! And what if you don’t? I loved your father and look at me now! Beside, you have had enough of that – there, don’t stare at me in that way. I know, and so do you. Now take your choice – accept this offer or get to your lover – and this very night. As for me, I disown you, I – ”
But the flood of words was interrupted – the girl had fainted. The simulachre of death had extended its kindly arms, and into them she had fallen as into a grateful release.
By the morrow her spirit was broken. Two days later Mr. Incoul called with what success the reader has been already informed, and on that same evening in obedience to the note, came Lenox Leigh.
CHAPTER IV.
AN EVENING CALL
When Leigh entered the drawing-room he found Miss Barhyte already there. “It is good of you to come,” she said, by way of greeting.
The young man advanced to where she stood, and in a tender, proprietary manner, took her hand in his; he would have kissed her, but she turned her face aside.
“What is it?” he asked; “you are pale as Ophelia.”
“And you, my prince, as inquisitive as Hamlet.”
She led him to a seat and found one for herself. Her eyes rested in his own, and for a moment both were silent.
“Lenox,” she asked at last, “do you know Mr. Incoul?”
“Yes, of course; every one does.”
“I mean do you know him well?”
“I never said ten words to him, nor he to me.”
“So much the better. What do you suppose he did the other evening after you went away?”
“Really, I have no idea, but if you wish me to draw on my imagination, I suppose he went away too.”
“He offered himself.”
“For what?”
“To me.”
“Maida, that mummy! You are joking.”
“No, I am not joking, nor was he.”
“Well, what then?”
“Then, as you say, he went away.”
“And what did you do?”
“I went away too.”
“Be serious; tell me about it.”
“He came here this afternoon, and I – well – I am to be Mrs. Incoul.”
Lenox bit his lip. Into his face there came an expression of angered resentment. He stood up from his seat; the girl put out her hand as though to stay him: “Lenox, I had to,” she cried. But he paid no attention to her words and crossed the room.
On the mantel before him was a clock that ticked with a low, dolent moan, and for some time he stood looking at it as were it an object of peculiar interest which he had never before enjoyed the leisure to examine. But the clock might have swooned from internal pain, he neither saw nor heard it; his thoughts circled through episodes of the winter back to the forest and the fringes of the summer sea. And slowly the anger gave way to wonder, and presently the wonder faded and in its place there came a sentiment like that of sorrow, a doubled sorrow in whose component parts there was both pity and distress.
It is said that the rich are without appreciation of their wealth until it is lost or endangered, and it was not until that evening that Lenox Leigh appreciated at its worth the loveliness that was slipping from him. He knew then that he might tread the highroads and faubourgs of two worlds with the insistence of the Wandering Jew, and yet find no one so delicious as she. And in the first flood of his anger he felt as were he being robbed, as though the one thing that had lifted him out of the brutal commonplaces of the every day was being caught up and carried beyond the limits of vision. And into this resentment there came the suspicion that he was not alone being robbed, that he was being cheated to boot, that the love which he had thought to receive as he had seemed to give love before, was an illusory representation, a phantom constructed of phrases.
But this suspicion faded; he knew untold that the girl’s whole heart was his, had been his, was yet his and probably would be his for all of time, till the grave opened and closed again. And then the wonder came. He knew, none better, the purity of her heart, and knowing, too, her gentleness, the sweetness of her nature, her abnegation of self, he began to understand that some tragedy had been enacted which he had not been called upon to witness. Of her circumstances he had been necessarily informed. But in the sensitiveness of her refinement the girl had shrunk from unveiling to a lover’s eyes the increasing miseries of her position, and of the poignancy of those miseries he had now, uninformed, an inkling. If she sold herself, surely it was because the sale was imperative. The white impassible face of the girl’s mother rose before him and then, at once, he understood her cry, “Lenox, I had to.”
As he moved from her, Maida had seen the anger, and knowing the anger to be as just as justice ever is, she shook her head in helpless grief, yet her eyes were tearless as had she no tears left to shed. She had seen the anger, but ignorant of the phases of thought by which it had been transfigured she stole up to where he stood and touched his arm with a shrinking caress.
He turned and would have caught her to him, but she drew back, elusively, as might a swan. “No, not that, Lenox. Only say that you do not hate me. Lenox, if you only knew. To me it is bitterer than death. You are the whole world to me, yet never must I see you again. If I could but tell you all. If I could but tell him all, if there were anything that I could do or say, but there is nothing, nothing,” she added pensively, “except submission.”
Her voice had sunk into a whisper: she was pleading as much with herself as with him. Her arms were pendant and her eyes downcast. On the mantel the clock kept up its low, dolorous moan, as though in sympathy with her woe. “Nothing,” she repeated.
“But surely it need not be. Things cannot be so bad as that – Maida, I cannot lose you. If nothing else can be done, let us go away; at its best New York is tiresome; we could both leave it without a regret or a wish to return. And then, there is Italy; we have but to choose. Why, I could take a palace on the Grand Canal for less than I pay for my rooms at the Cumberland. And you would love Venice; and in winter there is Capri and Sorrento and Palermo. I have known days in Palermo when I seemed to be living in a haze of turquoise and gold. And the nights! You should see the nights! The stars are large as lilies! See, it would be so easy; in a fortnight we could be in Genoa, and before we got there we would have been forgotten.”
He was bending forward speaking rapidly, persuasively, half hoping, half fearing, she would accept. She did not interrupt him, and he continued impetuously, as though intoxicated on his own words.
“When we are tired of the
