Part 12 (2/2)
”I _do_ so want you to do something for me, darling.”
The tone of Susan Hetth's voice and the touch of her hand on the girl's arm were as wheedling as if she were about to ask her to tramp into Ilfracombe on some trifling midnight errand.
Leonie answered quite mechanically.
”What is it, dear!” she said. ”Say the word and I'll do it!”
”Is that a promise?”
”Ra-ther! Anything to please you, Auntiekins!”
Susan Hetth took her fence in a rus.h.!.+
”I want you to get married,” she said abruptly out of pure fright, and wrenched at her bead chain when Leonie leapt to her feet.
The girl stood quite still, outlined in her simple low-cut, short-sleeved dress by the wall, her hands pressed back against it.
There was no sound except the soft gurgle and murmur of the water until she spoke, quietly, but with a world of horror in her low-pitched voice.
”You want me to marry--_you_--when a moment ago you said that you thought I was mad--you want me to marry some honest, unsuspecting man, and bear him children!”
Susan Hetth, shocked to the limit of her Pecksniffian soul, made a nerveless fluttering gesture of protest with her hands.
”Don't speak,” said Leonie quickly, ”please don't speak until I have done. Marriage! I will tell you what I have thought about it while I have been waiting for my mate.”
”Oh!” exploded Susan Hetth vehemently. ”_My dear_! Surely you have not been corresponding with anyone!”
Leonie hesitated.
How was she to make her aunt, this shallow, unbalanced being, understand the joyous expectancy with which she had awaited the moment when she should meet the man born for her?
How was she to take the exquisite longings, the veiled desires, the beautiful virgin thoughts, from her heart and lay them before this woman who had taught her nothing but the twenty-third Psalm without its real interpretation, plus the correct Sunday collect and daily prayers.
How explain that to her the little golden ring would not represent a key opening the door to the so-called freedom from which fifty per cent of women descend, via the shallow flight of steps marked a good time, to the plain of discontent; or that to her the word love was sufficient, in that for her it included those of honour and obey, without any separate declaration in public.
When she spoke she spoke hurriedly, flus.h.i.+ng from chin to brow.
”Auntie--I correspond with no man--but my--my mate is waiting for me somewhere--calling me all the time ever since--oh! ever since I can remember--and--and I should have married him when I had met him if--if----”
In anger at this fresh complication, piled upon her appalling want of tact of a few moments ago, Susan Hetth struck her hands on the arms of her chair.
”I think you absolutely _indecent_, Leonie, to go on like this about someone you have never even seen. Now listen to me, and don't be so theatrical. I have had an offer of marriage for you by someone who knows all about you, and who, after my a.s.surance that there is nothing hereditary in your family on either side to account for the strangeness of your actions at times, is perfectly willing, even anxious, to marry you.”
”To take the risk, you mean,” broke in Leonie. ”Oh!--well, go on.”
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