A Manifest Destiny. Julia Magruder
you. I am ready to do for you whatever you may ask. Let me, however, put a few questions before I hear your request. You are wearing mourning. Is it, perhaps, for your husband?”
“For my mother,” said Bettina, with a sudden trembling of the lip and suffusion of the eyes which gave her a new charm, in revealing the fact that this young goddess had a human heart which could be quickly stirred to emotion.
“Forgive me,” said Lord Hurdly, with great courtesy. “Forget that I have roughly touched a spot so sore, and tell me this, if you will: are you married or unmarried?”
“I am unmarried,” said Bettina, beginning to tremble as she found the important moment upon her; “but I am about to be married. I have made this visit to London beforehand only to see you. The man I am going to marry is your cousin and heir, Horace Spotswood.”
Lord Hurdly’s guarded face betrayed a certain agitation, but the signs of this were quickly controlled.
He looked straight into her eyes for a few seconds without speaking. Then he crossed the room and touched an electric button, saying, as he did so:
“I will get rid of an engagement that I had, so that I may be quite at leisure to talk with you.”
Neither spoke again until the servant had come, taken his instructions, and gone away, closing the door behind him. There was a certain determination in Lord Hurdly’s manner and expression which did not escape Bettina. She was sure that her revelation of her identity had prompted some decisive course of action in his mind, but what it was she could not guess from that inscrutable face.
“I am now quite free for the morning,” her companion said. “Naturally there is much for us to say to each other. Will you not lay aside your bonnet and wrap? The day is warm, and that heavy mourning must distress you.”
Certainly his manner was kind. Bettina began to like him and to hope for success in her object in coming here. Quickly unbuttoning her black gloves, she unsheathed her lovely hands, which were bare of rings. Then with a few deft motions she removed her outer wrap and her bonnet with its long, thick veil.
In so doing she revealed the fact that she had an exquisite head, with delicious masses of brown hair which looked almost reddish in its contrast to the dense black of her gown, the smooth severity of which accentuated every lovely curve of her figure, as it would have done every defect, had there been defect. This gown was fitted to her so absolutely that one had the satisfying sense that one looked at the woman instead of at her clothes. There were fine old portraits on the wall, of noble ladies who had once done the honors of this great establishment, but the fairest of them paled before the glowing loveliness of this girl. For she looked a girl, despite her sombre garments, and there was a certain timidity in her manner which strengthened this impression.
Lord Hurdly offered her a seat, and then took another, facing her.
“In engaging yourself to marry Horace Spotswood,” he began, deliberately, “you have made the supreme, if not the irreparable, mistake of your life.”
Bettina’s white skin showed the sudden ebb of the blood in her veins as he said these words.
“Why?” she asked, concisely.
“Because he is no match for you, and because your marrying him would not only place you on a lower plane than where you belong, but it would also so seriously injure his position in life that there would be no possible chance for him to retrieve it until my death. I am comparatively a young man, and likely to live a long time. Apart from that, I may marry. I had no expectation or intention of doing so, but his recent defiance of me has made me sometimes feel inclined to the idea. I have so far changed in my feeling on this subject that if I could meet and win a woman to my mind, I would marry at once. What then would become of Horace? He has a mere pittance besides his pay, which is a ridiculous sum for a man to marry on. He has wronged you in putting you in such a position, and you have equally wronged him.”
Bettina had turned very white as he spoke. The picture he drew was bad enough in itself, but to have it sketched before her in her present surroundings made it infinitely worse.
“If we have wronged each other, we have done it ignorantly,” she said. “He assured me that you were determined never to marry, and he counted on your past kindness and your attachment to him—”
She broke off, her voice shaken.
“On the same ground I counted on him,” said Lord Hurdly. “He was in no position to marry against my will, and in engaging to do so he defied me. Let him take the consequences.”
“Then you are determined not to relent?” Bettina faltered. “You will not forgive him for the offence of proposing to make me his wife?”
“I did not say that,” returned Lord Hurdly, with a subtle change of tone. “I certainly should not forgive him for marrying you, but for proposing to do so I am ready enough to forgive him, provided he comes to his senses at that point and goes no further. In that event I am ready not only to continue the handsome income that I have allowed him, but to give him outright the principal of it.”
Bettina had never pretended that she was deeply in love with Horace Spotswood. Indeed, she had quite decided within herself that she was incapable of such a state of feeling, and it was her belief that the fervor and intensity of love which she had given to her mother had taken the place of what some women give to their husbands. Still, she looked upon her prospective marriage to him as one of the fixed facts of the universe, and Lord Hurdly’s words bewildered her.
Keener than this surprise, however, was her sense of humiliation at the implacable offence which Lord Hurdly had taken at his heir’s proposed marriage with herself. That he had wished Horace to marry she knew; it was therefore the woman whom he had chosen that Lord Hurdly resented.
She rose to her feet, feeling herself giddy, and knowing that she was white with agitation. Her one idea was to get away—to escape the scrutiny of the intense gaze which was fixed upon her.
“I must go. I beg your pardon for coming,” she said, with a proud coldness, reaching for her wrap.
“You must not go. I owe you endless thanks for coming, and I will show you that you have to congratulate yourself also on this interview. If you went now, you would defeat all the good that may come of it. Sit down, I beg of you, and hear me out.”
His manner was not only urgent, it was also kind, and nothing could have been more respectful than his every look and tone.
Bettina sat down again and waited.
“What is it that has shocked you?” he said. “Is it because of your great love for Horace—or is it his for you which you are thinking of most?”
“I do not see that I am bound to answer you that question,” said Bettina, proudly. “My reasons are sufficient for myself.”
“You are in no way bound, my dear young lady, but you would be wise to answer me. I have every disposition to act as your friend in this matter, and you would be making a mistake to turn away from me without hearing what I have to say. If you are imagining that the young fellow with whom you have an engagement of marriage would be rendered inconsolable by the loss of you, when it would be made up to him by the possession of a fortune, perhaps you overestimate things.”
“What things?” she said, still cold and withheld in her manner, her pale face very set.
“The unselfishness of man’s love in general, and of this man’s in particular,” he said; “and, for another thing, yourself. It seems a brutal thing to say, but if you believe that that hotheaded, undisciplined boy is capable of a sustained affection against such odds of fortune as this case presents, then I disagree with you, and I know him better than you do.”
Bettina’s face flushed.
“He does love me—he does!” she cried, in some agitation. “I have been cold and careless toward him, and have told him that my heart was buried in my mother’s