She gently extricated herself, as though she had done so that she might better turn round and look into his face. 'Oh, my own one, who can say of himself that it would be so? How could it be so, when you would have all the world against you? You would be still what you are,--with a clog round your leg while at home. In Parliament, among your friends, at your clubs, you would be just what you are. You would be that Lord Silverbridge who had all the good things at his disposal,--except that he had been unfortunate in his marriage! But what should I be?' Though she paused he could not answer her,--not yet. There was a solemnity in her speech which made it necessary that he should hear her to the end. 'I, too, have my friends in my own country. It is not disgrace to me there that my grandfather worked on the quays. No one holds her head higher than I do, or is more sure of being able to hold it. I have there that assurance of esteem and honour which you have here. I would lose it all to do you a good. But I will not lose it all to do you an injury.'
'I don't know about injuries,' he said, getting up and walking about the room. 'But I am sure of this. You will have to be my wife.'
'If your father will take me by the hand and say that I shall be his daughter, I will risk the rest. Even then it might not be wise; but we love each other too well not run some peril. Do you think I want anything better than to preside in your home, to soften you cares, to welcome your joys, to be mother perhaps of your children, and to know that you are proud that I should be so?
No, my darling. I can see a Paradise;--only, only, I may not be fit to enter it. I must use some judgement better that my own, sounder, dear, than yours. Tell the Duke what I say;--tell him that with what language a son may use to his father. And remember that all you ask for yourself you will ask doubly for me.'
'I will ask him so that he cannot refuse me.'
'If you do I shall be contented. And now go. I have said ever so much, and I am tired.'
'Isabel! Oh, my love.'
'Yes; Isabel;--your love! I am that at any rate for the present,--and proud to be so as a queen. Well, if it must be, this once,--as I have been so hard to you.' Then she gave him her cheek to kiss, but of course he took much more than she gave.
When he got into the street it was dark, and there was sill standing the faithful cab. But he felt that at the present moment it would be impossible to sit still, and he dismissed the equipage. He walked rapidly along Brook Street into Park Lane, and from thence to the park, hardly knowing whither he went in the enthusiasm of the moment. He walked back to the Marble Arch, and thence round by the drive to the Guard House and the bridge over the Serpentine, by the Knightsbridge Barracks to Hyde Park Corner.
Though he should give up everything and go and live in her own country with her, he would marry her. His politics, his hunting, this address to the Queen, his horses, his guns, his father's wealth, and his own rank,--what were they all to Isabel Boncassen?
In meeting her he had net the one human being in all the world who could really be anything to him either in friendship or in love. When she had told him what she would do for him to make his home happy, it had seemed to him that all other delights must fade away from him for ever. How odious were Tifto and his racehorses, how unmeaning the noise of his club, how terrible the tedium of those parliamentary benches! He could not tell his love as she had told hers! He acknowledged to himself that his words could not be as her words,--nor his intellect as hers. But his heart could be as true. She had spoken to him of his name, his rank, and all his outside world around him. He would make her understand at last that there were nothing to him in comparison with her. When he had got round to Hyde Park Corner, he felt that he was almost compelled to go back again to Brook Street. In no other place could there be anything to interest him;--nowhere else could there be light, or warmth, or joy! But what would she think of him? To go back hot, and soiled with mud, in order that he might say one more adieu,--that possibly he might ravish one more kiss,--would hardly be manly. He must postpone all that for the morrow. On the morrow of course he would be there.
But his word was before him! That prayer had to be made to his father, or rather some wonderful effort of eloquence must be made by which his father might be convinced that this girl was so infinitely superior to anything of feminine creation that had ever hitherto been seen or heard of, that all ideas as to birth, country, rank, or name ought in this instance to count for nothing. He did believe himself that he had found such a pearl, that no question of seeing need be taken into consideration. If the Duke would not see it the fault would be in the Duke's eyes, or perhaps in his own words,--but certainly not in the pearl.
Then he compared her to poor Lady Mabel, and in doing so did arrive at something near the truth in his inward delineation of the two characters. Lady Mabel with all her grace, with all her beauty, with all her talent, was a creature of efforts, or, as it might be called, a manufactured article. She strove to be graceful, to be lovely, to be agreeable and clever. Isabel was all this and infinitely more without any struggle. When he was most fond of Mabel, most anxious to make her his wife, there had always been present to him a feeling that she was old. Though he knew her age to a day,--and knew her to be younger than himself, yet she was old. Something had gone of her native bloom, something had been scratched and chipped from the first fair surface, and this had been repaired by varnish and veneering. Though he had love her he had never been altogether satisfied with her. But Isabel was as young as Hebe. He knew nothing of her actual years, but he did know that to have seemed younger, or to have seemed older,--to have seemed in any way different from what she was,--would have been to be less perfect.