The Infidel. M. E. Braddon

that hateful hour I swore that I would never again give a woman the power of dishonouring my name. My heart might break from a jilt's ill-usage—but that, the name which belongs not to me only, but to all of my race who have borne it in the past or who will bear it in the future—that should be out of the power of woman's misconduct. And so to you whom I love with a passion more profound, more invincible than this heart ever felt for another since it began to beat, I cannot offer a legal tie; but I lay my adoring heart, my life, my fortune at your feet, and I swear to cleave to you and honour you with a constant and devoted affection which no husband upon this earth can surpass."

      He tried to take her hand again, but she drew herself away from him with a superb gesture of mingled surprise and scorn.

      "There was nothing further from my mind than that you could desire to marry me, except that you should wish to degrade me," she said in a voice graver than his own.

      Her face was colourless, but she stood erect and firm, and had no look of swooning.

      "Degrade you? Do you call it degradation to be the idol of my life, to be the beloved companion of a man who can lavish all this world knows of luxury and pleasure upon your lot, who will carry you to the fairest spots of earth, show you all that is noblest in art and nature, all that makes the bliss of intelligent beings, who will protect your interests by the most generous settlements ever made by a lover?"

      "Oh, my lord, stop your inventory of temptation!" exclaimed Antonia. "The price you offer is extravagant, but I am not for sale. I thought you were my friend—indeed, for me you had become a dear and cherished friend. I was deceived, cruelly deceived! I shall know better another time when a man of your rank pretends to offer me the equality of friendship!"

      There were tears in her eyes in spite of her courage, in which Roman virtue she far surpassed the average woman.

      "Curse my rank!" he cried angrily. "It is myself I offer—myself and all that I hold of worldly advantages. What can my name matter to you—to you of all women, friendless and alone in the world, your existence unknown to more than some half-dozen people? I stand on a height where the arrows of ridicule fly thick and fast. Were I to marry a young woman—I who was deceived and deserted by a handsome wife before I was thirty—you cannot conceive what a storm of ridicule I should provoke, how Selwyn would coruscate with wit at my expense, and Horry Walpole scatter his contemptuous comments on my folly over half the continent of Europe. I suffered that kind of agony once—knew myself the target of all the wits and slanderers in London. I will not suffer it again!"

      He was pacing the room, which was too small for the fever of his mind. To be refused without an instant's hesitation, as if he had tried to make a queen his mistress! To be scorned by Bill Thornton's daughter—Thornton, the old jail-bird whom he had helped to get out of prison—the fellow who had been sponging on him more or less for a score of years, most of all in this last year!

      He looked back at his conquests of the past. How triumphant, how easy they were; and what trumpery victories they seemed, as he recalled them in the bitterness of his disappointment to-day.

      Tonia stood by the open window, listening mechanically to the roll of wheels which rose and fell in the distance with a rhythmical monotony, like the sound of a summer sea. Kilrush stopped in his angry perambulation, saw her in tears, and flew to her side on the instant.

      "My beloved girl, those tears inspire me with hope. If you were indifferent you would not weep."

      "I weep for the death of our friendship," she answered sorrowfully.

      "You should smile at the birth of our love. Great Heaven! what is there to stand between us and consummate bliss?"

      "Your own resolve, my lord. You are determined to take no second wife; and I am determined to be no man's mistress. Be sure that in all our friendship I never thought of marriage, nor of courtship—I never angled for a noble husband. But when you profess yourself my lover, I must needs give you a plain answer."

      "Tonia, surely your soul can rise above trivial prejudices! You who have boldly avowed your scorn of Churchmen and their creeds, who have neither hope of heaven nor fear of hell, can you think the tie between a man and woman who love as we do—yes, dearest, I protest you love me—can you believe that bond more sacred for being mumbled by a priest, or stronger for being scrawled in a parish register? By Heaven, I thought you had a spirit too lofty for vulgar superstitions!"

      "There is one superstition I shall ever hold by—the belief that there are honest women in the world."

      "Pshaw, child! Be but true to the man who adores you, and you will be the honestest of your sex. Fidelity to her lover is honour in woman; and she is the more virtuous who is constant without being bound. Nance Oldfield, the honestest woman I ever knew, never wore a wedding-ring."

      "I think, sir," she began in a low and earnest voice that thrilled him, "there are two kinds of women—those who can suffer a life of shame, and those who cannot."

      "Say rather, madam, that there are women with hearts and women without. You are of the latter species. Under the exquisite lines of the bosom I worship nature has placed a block of ice instead of a heart."

      A street cry went wailing by like a dirge, "Strawberries, ripe strawberries. Who'll buy my strawberries?"

      Kilrush wiped the cold dampness from his forehead, and resumed his pacing up and down, then stopped suddenly and surveyed the room, flinging up his hands in a passionate horror.

      "Good God! that you should exist in such a hovel as this, while my great empty house waits for you, while my coach-and-six is ready to carry us on the road to an Italian paradise! There is a villa at Fiesole, on a hill above Florence. Oh, to have you there in the spring sunshine, among the spring flowers, all my own, my sweet companion, animæ dimidium meæ, the dearer half of my soul. Antonia, if you are obstinate and reject me, you will drive me mad!"

      He dropped into a chair, with his head averted from her, and hid his face in his hands. She saw his whole frame shaken by his sobs. She had never seen a man cry before, and the spectacle unnerved her. If she could have yielded—if that stubborn pride of womanhood, which was her armour against the tempter, could have given way, it would have been at the sight of his tears. For a moment her lot trembled in the balance. She longed to kneel at his feet, to promise him anything he could ask rather than to see his distress; but pride came to the rescue.

      Choking with tears, she rushed to the door.

      "Farewell, sir," she sobbed; "farewell for ever."

      She ran downstairs to the bottom of the house, and to Mrs. Potter's parlour behind the kitchen, empty at this hour, where she threw herself upon the narrow horsehair sofa, and sobbed heart-brokenly. Yet even in the midst of her weeping she listened for the familiar step upon the stairs above, and for the opening and shutting of the street door. It was at least ten minutes before she heard Kilrush leave the house, and then his footfall was so heavy that it sounded like a stranger's.

      CHAPTER VII.

      PRIDE CONQUERS LOVE.

      Except the awful, the inexorable blank that Death leaves in the heart of the mourner, there is no vacancy of mind more agonizing than that which follows the defeat of a lover and the sudden cessation of an adored companionship. To Kilrush the whole world seemed of one dull grey after he had lost Antonia. The town, the company of which he had long been weary, now became actually hateful, and his only desire was to rush to some remote spot of earth where the very fact of distance might help him to forget the woman he loved. A man of a softer nature would have yielded to his charmer's objections, and sacrificed his pride to his love; but with Kilrush, pride—long-cherished pride of race and name—and a certain stubborn power of will prevailed over inclination. He suffered, but was resolute. He told himself that Antonia was cold and calculating, and unworthy of a generous passion like his. She counted, perhaps, on conquering his resolve, and making him marry her; and he took a vindictive pleasure in the thought of her vexation as the days went by without bringing him to her feet.

      "Farewell