And so by degrees the blow had come full home to him. He had been twice refused. Then rumours had reached him—not at first that he had a rival, but that there was a man who might possibly become so. And now this rivalry, and its success, were declared to him plainly. He told himself from this moment that he had not a chance. Looking forward he could see it all. He understood the girl’s character sufficiently to be sure that she would not be wafted about, from one lover to another, by change of scene. Taking her to Dresden—or to New Zealand—would only confirm in her passion such a girl as Emily Wharton. Nothing could shake her but the ascertained unworthiness of the man—and not that unless it were ascertained beneath her own eyes. And then years must pass by before she would yield to another lover. There was a further question, too, which he did not fail to ask himself. Was the man necessarily unworthy because his name was Lopez, and because he had not come of English blood?
As he strove to think of this, if not coolly yet rationally, he sat himself down on the river’s side and began to pitch stones off the path in among the rocks, among which at that spot the water made its way rapidly. There had been moments in which he had been almost ashamed of his love—and now he did not know whether to be most ashamed or most proud of it. But he recognised the fact that it was crucifying him, and that it would continue to crucify him. He knew himself in London to be a popular man—one of those for whom, according to general opinion, girls should sigh, rather than one who should break his heart sighing for a girl. He had often told himself that it was beneath his manliness to be despondent; that he should let such a trouble run from him like water from a duck’s back, consoling himself with the reflection that if the girl had such bad taste she could hardly be worthy of him. He had almost tried to belong to that school which throws the heart away and rules by the head alone. He knew that others—perhaps not those who knew him best, but who nevertheless were the companions of many of his hours—gave him the credit for such power. Why should a man afflict himself by the inward burden of an unsatisfied craving, and allow his heart to sink into his very feet because a girl would not smile when he wooed her? “If she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be!” He had repeated the lines to himself a score of times, and had been ashamed of himself because he could not make them come true to himself.
They had not come true in the least. There he was, Arthur Fletcher, whom all the world courted, with his heart in his very boots! There was a miserable load within him, absolutely palpable to his outward feeling—a very physical pain—which he could not shake off. As he threw the stones into the water he told himself that it must be so with him always. Though the world did pet him, though he was liked at his club, and courted in the hunting-field, and loved at balls and archery meetings, and reputed by old men to be a rising star, he told himself that he was so maimed and mutilated as to be only half a man. He could not reason about it. Nature had afflicted him with a certain weakness. One man has a hump;—another can hardly see out of his imperfect eyes;—a third can barely utter a few disjointed words. It was his fate to be constructed with some weak arrangement of the blood-vessels which left him in this plight. “The whole damned thing is nothing to me,” he said bursting out into absolute tears, after vainly trying to reassure himself by a recollection of the good things which the world still had in store for him.
Then he strove to console himself by thinking that he might take a pride in his love even though it were so intolerable a burden to him. Was it not something to be able to love as he loved? Was it not something at any rate that she to whom he had condescended to stoop was worthy of
