“Shall I name eleven tomorrow?” she said, as she handed the Squire’s note to Mrs. Fenwick. Mrs. Fenwick and the Vicar both assented, and then she went in and wrote her answer.
I will be at home at the vicarage at eleven.—M. L.
She would have given much to escape what was coming, but she had not expected to escape it.
The next morning after breakfast Fenwick himself went away. “I’ve had more than enough of it,” he said, to his wife, “and I won’t be near them.”
Mrs. Fenwick was with her friend up to the moment at which the bell was heard at the front door. There was no coming up across the lawn now.
“Dear Janet,” Mary said, when they were alone, “how I wish that I had never come to trouble you here at the vicarage!”
Mrs. Fenwick was not without a feeling that much of all this unhappiness had come from her own persistency on behalf of her husband’s friend, and thought that some expression was due from her to Mary to that effect. “You are not to suppose that we are angry with you,” she said, putting her arm round Mary’s waist.
“Pray—pray do not be angry with me.”
“The fault has been too much ours for that. We should have left this alone, and not have pressed it. We have meant it for the best, dear.”
“And I have meant to do right;—but, Janet, it is so hard to do right.”
When the ring at the door was heard, Mrs. Fenwick met Harry Gilmore in the hall, and told him that he would find Mary in the drawing-room. She pressed his hand warmly as she looked into his face, but he spoke no word as he passed on to the room which she had just left. Mary was standing in the middle of the floor, halfway between the window and the door, to receive him. When she heard the doorbell she put her hand to her heart, and there she held it till he was approaching; but then she dropped it and stood without support, with her face upraised to meet him. He came up to her very quickly and took her by the hand. “Mary,” he said, “I am not to believe this message that has been sent to me. I do not believe it. I will not believe it. I will not accept it. It is out of the question;—quite out of the question. It shall be withdrawn, and nothing more shall be said about it.”
“That cannot be, Mr. Gilmore.”
“What cannot be? I say that it must be. You cannot deny, Mary, that you are betrothed to me as my wife. Are such betrothals to be nothing? Are promises to go for nothing because there has been no ceremony? You might as well come and tell me that you would leave me even though you were my wife.”
“But I am not your wife.”
“What does it mean? Have I not been patient with you? Have I been hard to you, or cruel? Have you heard anything of me that is to my discredit?” She shook her head, eagerly. “Then what does it mean? Are you aware that you are proposing to yourself to make an utter wreck of me—to send me adrift upon the world without a purpose or a hope? What have I done to deserve such treatment?”
He pleaded his cause very well—better than she had ever heard him plead a cause before. He held her still by the hand, not with a grasp of love, but with a retention which implied his will that she should not pass away from out of his power. He looked her full in the face, and she did not quail before his eyes. Nevertheless she would have given the world to have been elsewhere, and to have been free from the necessity of answering him. She had been fortifying herself throughout the morning with self-expressed protests that on no account would she yield, whether she had been right before or wrong;—of this she was convinced, that she must be right now to save herself from a marriage that was so distasteful to her.
“You have deserved nothing but good at my hands,” she said.
“And is this good that you are doing to me?”
“Yes—certainly. It is the best that I know how to do now.”
“Why is it to be done now? What is it that has changed you?”
She withdrew her hand from him, and waited a while before she answered. It was necessary that she should tell him all the tidings that had been conveyed to her in the letter which she had received from her cousin Walter; but in order that he should perfectly understand them and be made to know their force upon herself she must remind him of the stipulation which she had made when she consented to her engagement. But how could she speak words which would seem to him to be spoken only to remind him of the abjectness of his submission to her?
“I was brokenhearted when I came here,” she said.
“And therefore you would leave me brokenhearted now.”
“You should spare me, Mr. Gilmore. You remember what I told you. I loved my cousin Walter entirely. I did not hide it from you. I begged you to leave me because it was so. I told you that my heart would not change. When I said so, I thought that you would—desist.”
“I am to be punished, then, for having been too true to you?”
“I will not
