“Lucilla,” said Tom, and there was decision in his eye, “somebody came downstairs as I came in. I want to know whether it is to be him or me!”
“Him—or you!” said Lucilla, in dismay. Blunderer as he was, he had gone direct to the very heart of the question, and it was impossible not to tremble a little in the presence of such straightforward clear-sightedness. Miss Marjoribanks had risen up to make her escape as soon as it should be possible, but she was so much struck by Tom’s unlooked-for perspicuity, that she sat down again in her consternation. “I think you are going out of your mind,” she said. “What do you know about the gentleman who went downstairs? I am not such a wonderful beauty, nor such a witch, that everybody who sees me should want to—to marry me. Don’t talk any more nonsense, but let me go and get you something to eat.”
“They would if they were of my way of thinking,” said the persistent Tom. “Lucilla, you shan’t go. This is what I have come home for. You may as well know at once, and then there can be no mistake about it. My poor uncle is gone, and you can’t be left by yourself in the world. Will you have him or me?”
“I am not going to be tyrannised over like this,” said Lucilla, with indignation, again rising, though he still held her hands. “You talk as if you had just come for a call, and had everything to say in a moment. When a man comes off a long journey it is his breakfast he wants, and not a—not anything else that I know of. Go up to your mother, and let me go.”
“Will you have him or me?” repeated Tom. It was not wisdom, is was instinct, that made him thus hold fast by his text; and as for Lucilla, nothing but the softened state in which she was, nothing but the fact that it was Tom Marjoribanks who had been ten years away, and was always ridiculous, could have kept her from putting down at once such an attempt to coerce her. But the truth was, that Miss Marjoribanks did not feel her own mistress at that moment, and perhaps that was why he had the audacity to repeat, “Will you have him or me?”
Then Lucilla found herself fairly driven to bay. “Tom!” she said, with a solemnity that overwhelmed him for the moment, for he thought at first, with natural panic, that it was himself who was being rejected, “I would not have him if he were to go down on his knees. I know he is very nice and very agreeable, and the best man—And I am sure I ought to do it,” said Miss Marjoribanks, with a mournful sense of her own weakness; “and everybody will expect it of me; but I am not going to have him, and I never meant it, whatever you or anybody may say.”
When Lucilla had made this decisive utterance she turned away with a certain melancholy majesty to go and see after lunch—for he had loosed her hand and fallen back in consternation, thinking for the moment that it was all over. Miss Marjoribanks sighed, and turned round, not thinking of Tom, who was safe enough, but with a natural regret for the member for Carlingford, who now, poor man, was as much out of the question as if he had been dead and buried. But before she reached the door Tom had recovered himself. He went up to her in his ridiculous way without the slightest regard either for the repast she was so anxious to prepare for him, or for his mother’s feelings, or indeed for anything else in the world, except the one thing which had brought him, as he said, home.
“Then, Lucilla, after all, it is to be me,” he said, taking her to him, and arresting her progress as if she had been a baby; and though he had such a beard, and was twice as big and strong as he used to be, there were big tears in the great fellow’s eyes. “It is to be me after all,” said Tom, looking at her in a way that startled Lucilla. “Say it is to be me!”
Miss Marjoribanks had come through many a social crisis with dignity and composure. She had never yet been known to fail in an emergency. She had managed Mr. Cavendish, and, up to the last moment, Mr. Ashburton, and all the intervening candidates for her favour, with perfect self-control and command of the situation. Perhaps it was because, as she had herself said, her feelings had never been engaged. But now, when it was only Tom—he whom, once upon a time, she had dismissed with affectionate composure, and given such excellent advice to, and regarded in so motherly a way—all Lucilla’s powers seemed to fail her. It is hard to have to wind up with such a confession after having so long entertained a confidence in Lucilla which nothing seemed likely to impair. She broke down just at the moment when she had most need to have all her wits about her. Perhaps it was her past agitation which had been too much for her. Perhaps it was the tears in Tom Marjoribanks’s eyes. But the fact was that Lucilla relinquished her superior position for the time being, and suffered him to make any assertion he pleased, and was so weak as to cry, for the second time, too—which, of all things in the world, was surely the last thing to have been expected of Miss Marjoribanks at the moment which decided her fate.
Lucilla cried, and acquiesced, and thought of her father and of the Member for Carlingford, and gave to each a tear and a regret; and she did not even take the trouble to answer any
