Frank spread the necklace on the table, and stood up to look at it, while Miss Macnulty came and gazed at the jewels over his shoulder. “And that is worth ten thousand pounds,” said he.
“So people say.”
“And your husband gave it you just as another man gives a trinket that costs ten shillings!”
“Just as Lucy Morris gave you that ring.”
He smiled, but took no other notice of the accusation. “I am so poor a man,” said he, “that this string of stones, which you throw about the room like a child’s toy, would be the making of me.”
“Take it and be made,” said Lizzie.
“It seems an awful thing to me to have so much value in my hands,” said Miss Macnulty, who had lifted the necklace off the table. “It would buy an estate; wouldn’t it?”
“It would buy the honourable estate of matrimony if it belonged to many women,” said Lizzie—“but it hasn’t had just that effect with me;—has it, Frank?”
“You haven’t used it with that view yet.”
“Will you have it, Frank?” she said. “Take it with all its encumbrances and weight of cares. Take it with all the burden of Messrs. Camperdown’s lawsuits upon it. You shall be as welcome to it as flowers were ever welcomed in May.”
“The encumbrances are too heavy,” said Frank.
“You prefer a little ring.”
“Very much.”
“I don’t doubt but you’re right,” said Lizzie. “Who fears to rise will hardly get a fall. But there they are for you to look at, and there they shall remain for the rest of the evening.” So saying, she clasped the string round Miss Macnulty’s throat. “How do you feel, Julia, with an estate upon your neck? Five hundred acres at twenty pounds an acre. Let us call it five hundred pounds a year. That’s about it.” Miss Macnulty looked as though she did not like it, but she stood for a time bearing the precious burden, while Frank explained to his cousin that she could hardly buy land to pay her five percent. They were then taken off and left lying on the table till Lady Eustace took them with her as she went to bed. “I do feel so like some naughty person in the Arabian Nights,” she said, “who has got some great treasure that always brings him into trouble; but he can’t get rid of it, because some spirit has given it to him. At last some morning it turns into slate stones, and then he has to be a water-carrier, and is happy ever afterwards, and marries the king’s daughter. What sort of a king’s son will there be for me when this turns into slate stones? Good night, Frank.” Then she went off with her diamonds and her bed-candle.
On the following day Frank suggested that there should be a business conversation. “That means that I am to sit silent and obedient while you lecture me,” she said. But she submitted, and they went together into the little sitting-room which looked out over the sea—the room where she kept her Shelley and her Byron, and practised her music and did watercolours, and sat, sometimes, dreaming of a Corsair. “And now, my gravest of Mentors, what must a poor ignorant female Telemachus do, so that the world may not trample on her too heavily?” He began by telling her what had happened between himself and Lord Fawn, and recommended her to write to that unhappy nobleman, returning any present that she might have received from him, and expressing, with some mild but intelligible sarcasm, her regret that their paths should have crossed each other. “I’ve worse in store for his lordship than that,” said Lizzie.
“Do you mean by any personal interview?”
“Certainly.”
“I think you are wrong, Lizzie.”
“Of course you do. Men have become so soft themselves, that they no longer dare to think even of punishing those who behave badly, and they expect women to be softer and more fainéant than themselves. I have been ill-used.”
“Certainly you have.”
“And I will be revenged. Look here, Frank; if your view of these things is altogether different from mine, let us drop the subject. Of all living human beings you are the one that is most to me now. Perhaps you are more than any other ever was. But, even for you, I cannot alter my nature. Even for you I would not alter it if I could. That man has injured me, and all the world knows it. I will have my revenge, and all the world shall know that. I did wrong;—I am sensible enough of that.”
“What wrong do you mean?”
“I told a man whom I never loved that I would marry him. God knows that I have been punished.”
“Perhaps, Lizzie, it is better as it is.”
“A great deal better. I will tell you now that I could never induce myself to go into church with that man as his bride. With a man I didn’t love I might have done so, but not with a man I despised.”
“You have been saved, then, from a greater evil.”
“Yes;—but not the less is his injury to me. It is not because he despises me that he rejects me;—nor is it because he thought that I had taken property that was not my own.”
“Why
