It is hard for any man to deny merits attributed to him, especially if he has been ascribing to himself the opposite demerits. But Colville summoned his dispersed forces to protest against this.
“Oh, no, no,” he cried. “Anything but that. My conduct has been selfish and shameful. If you could understand all—”
“I think I do understand all—at least far more, I regret to say, than my daughter has been willing to tell me. And I am more than satisfied with you. I thank you and honour you.”
“Oh no; don’t say that,” pleaded Colville. “I really can’t stand it.”
“And when I came here it was with the full intention of approving and confirming Imogene’s decision. But I was met at once by a painful and surprising state of things. You are aware that you have been very sick?”
“Dimly,” said Colville.
“I found you very sick, and I found my daughter frantic at the error which she had discovered in herself—discovered too late, as she felt.” Mrs. Graham hesitated, and then added abruptly, “She had found out that she did not love you.”
“Didn’t love me?” repeated Colville feebly.
“She had been conscious of the truth before, but she had stifled her misgivings insanely, and, as I feel, almost wickedly, pushing on, and saying to herself that when you were married, then there would be no escape, and she must love you.”
“Poor girl! poor child! I see, I see.”
“But the accident that was almost your death saved her from that miserable folly and iniquity. Yes,” she continued, in answer to the protest in his face, “folly and iniquity. I found her half crazed at your bedside. She was fully aware of your danger, but while she was feeling all the remorse that she ought to feel—that anyone could feel—she was more and more convinced that she never had loved you and never should. I can give you no idea of her state of mind.”
“Oh, you needn’t! you needn’t! Poor, poor child!”
“Yes, a child indeed. If it had not been for the pity I felt for her—But no matter about that. She saw at last that if your heroic devotion to her”—Colville did his best to hang his pillowed head for shame—“if your present danger did not awaken her to some such feeling for you as she had once imagined she had; if they both only increased her despair and self-abhorrence, then the case was indeed hopeless. She was simply distracted. I had to tear her away almost by force. She has had a narrow escape from brain-fever. And now I have come to implore, to demand”—Mrs. Graham, with all her poise and calm, was rising to the hysterical key—“her release from a fate that would be worse than death for such a girl. I mean marrying without the love of her whole soul. She esteems you, she respects you, she admires you, she likes you; but—” Mrs. Graham pressed her lips together, and her eyes shone.
“She is free,” said Colville, and with the words a mighty load rolled from his heart. “There is no need to demand anything.”
“I know.”
“There hasn’t been an hour, an instant, during—since I—we—spoke together that I wouldn’t have released her if I could have known what you tell me now.”
“Of course!—of course!”
“I have had my fears—my doubts; but whenever I approached the point I found no avenue by which we could reach a clearer understanding. I could not say much without seeming to seek for myself the release I was offering her.”
“Naturally. And what added to her wretchedness was the suspicion at the bottom of all that she had somehow forced herself upon you—misunderstood you, and made you say and do things to spare her that you would not have done voluntarily.” This was advanced tentatively. In the midst of his sophistications Colville had, as most of his sex have, a native, fatal, helpless truthfulness, which betrayed him at the most unexpected moments, and this must now have appeared in his countenance. The lady rose haughtily. She had apparently been considering him, but, after all, she must have been really considering her daughter. “If anything of the kind was the case,” she said, “I will ask you to spare her the killing knowledge. It’s quite enough for me to know it. And allow me to say, Mr. Colville, that it would have been far kinder in you—”
“Ah, think, my dear madam!” he exclaimed. “How could I?”
She did think, evidently, and when she spoke it was with a generous emotion, in which there was no trace of pique.
“You couldn’t. You have done right; I feel that, and I will trust you to say anything you will to my daughter.”
“To your daughter? Shall I see her?”
“She came with me. She wished to beg your forgiveness.”
Colville lay silent. “There is no forgiveness to be asked or granted,” he said, at length. “Why should she suffer the pain of seeing me?—for it would be nothing else. What do
