Part 12 (2/2)
Nothing! nothing! Let Maurice marry as he will.”
_”As he will!”_ Lady Rylton repeats her words, and, rising, comes towards her. ”Why don't you answer?” says she. ”We want your answer.
Give it!”
”I have no answer,” says Mrs. Bethune slowly. ”Why should he not marry Miss Bolton?--and again, why should he? Marriage, as we have been told all our lives, is but a lottery--they should have said a mockery,” with a little bitter smile. ”One could have understood that.”
”Then you advise Maurice to marry this girl?” asks Lady Rylton eagerly.
”Oh, no, no! I advise nothing,” says Marian, with a little wave of her arms.
”But why?” demands Lady Rylton angrily.
She had depended upon Marian to support her against Margaret.
”Simply because I won't,” says Mrs. Bethune, her strange eyes beginning to blaze.
”Because you daren't?” questions Lady Rylton, with a sneer.
”I don't understand you,” says Marian coldly.
”Don't you?” Lady Rylton's soft, little, fair face grows diabolical.
”Then let me explain.” Margaret makes a movement towards her, but she waves her back. ”Pray let me explain, Margaret. Our dear Marian is so intensely dull that she wants a word in season. We all know why she objects to a marriage of any sort. She made a fiasco of her own first marriage, and now hopes----”
She would have continued her cruel speech but that Mrs. Bethune, who has risen, breaks into it. She comes forward in a wild, tempestuous fas.h.i.+on, her eyes afire, her nostrils dilated! Her beautiful red hair seems alight as she descends upon Lady Rylton.
”And that marriage!” says she, in a suffocating tone. ”Who made it?
_Who?”_ She looks like a fury. There is hatred, an almost murderous hatred, in the glance she casts at the little, languid, pretty woman before her, who looks back at her with uplifted shoulders, and an all-round air of surprise and disapprobation. _”You_ to taunt me!”
says she, in a low, condensed tone. _”You_, who hurried, who _forced_ me into a marriage with a man I detested! You, who gave me to understand, when I resisted, that I had no place on this big earth except a pauper's place--a place in a workhouse!”
She stands tall, grave, magnificent, in her fury before Lady Rylton, who, in spite of the courage born of want of feeling, now shrinks from her as if affrighted.
”If you persist in going on like this,” says she, pressing her smelling-bottle to her nose, ”I must ask you to go away--to go at once. I hate scenes. You _must_ go!”
”I went away once,” says Mrs. Bethune, standing pale and cold before her, ”at your command--I went to the home of the man you selected for me. What devil's life I led with him you may guess at. _You_ knew him, I did not. I was seventeen then.” She pauses; the breath she draws seems to rive her body in twain. ”I came back----” she says presently.
”A widow?”
”A widow--_thank G.o.d!”_
A silence follows; something of tragedy seems to have fallen into the air--with that young lovely creature standing there, upright, pa.s.sionate, her arms clasped behind her head, as the heroine of it.
The sunlight from the dying day lights up the red, rich beauty of her hair, the deadly pallor of her skin. Through it all the sound of the tennis-b.a.l.l.s from below, as they hurry to and fro through the hair, can be heard. Perhaps it reaches her. She flings herself suddenly into a chair, and bursts out laughing.
”Let us come back to common-sense,” cries she. ”What were we talking of? The marriage of Maurice to this little plebeian--this little female Croesus. Well, what of the argument--what?”
Her manner is a little excited.
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