Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/494

484[April 24, 1869] merely bowed and opened the letter. As she read it, the flush which had died away returned more brightly than before, her eyes could not be seen under their downcast lids, but the brows were knit, the nostrils trembled, and the mouth grew hard and rigid. She read the letter through, twice, then she looked up, and her voice shook as she said, "That is a wicked and base letter, very heartless and very base!"

"Lady Caroline!" interrupted Joyce, appealingly.

"What! do you seek to defend it?—no, not to defend it, for in your own heart you must know I am right in my condemnation of it, but to plead for it. You don't like to hear me speak harshly of it—that's so like a man! I tell you that it is a heartless and an unwomanly letter! 'Deepens the pain with which she writes,' indeed! Deepens the pain! and what about yours? 'It is her nature to love money, and comforts and luxuries, and to shrink from privations!' Her nature! What was she bred to, this duchess?"

In his misery at hearing Marian thus spoken of, since the blow had fallen upon him he had never been so miserable as then, when she was attacked, and he saw the impossibility of defending her. Joyce could not help remarking that he had never noticed Lady Caroline's beauty so much as at that moment, when her eyes were flashing and her ripe lips curling with contempt. But he was silent, and she proceeded:

"She says you are better without her, and, though of course you doubt it, I am mightily disposed to agree with her! I—Mr. Joyce!" said her ladyship, suddenly softening her tone, "believe me, I feel earnestly and deeply for you under this blow! I fear it is none the less severe because you don't show how much you suffer. This—this young lady's decision will, of course, materially affect the future which you had plotted out for yourself, and of which we spoke the last time we were here together?"

"Oh yes, of course,—now I shall—by the way, Lady Caroline, I recollect now—it scarcely impressed me then—that during that conversation you seemed to have some doubts as to what Marian—as to what might be the reply to the letter which I told you I had written?"

"I certainly had."

"And you endeavoured to wean me from the miserable self-conceit under which I was labouring, and failed. I recollect your hints now! Tell me, Lady Caroline, why was I so blind? What made you suspect?"

"My dear Mr. Joyce, you were blind because you were in love! I suspected, because being merely a looker-on, an interested one, I acknowledge, for I had a great interest in your welfare, but still merely a looker-on, and therefore, according to the old proverb, seeing most of the game, I could not help noticing that the peculiar position of affairs, and the length of time you remained without any news of your fiancée, afforded grave grounds of suspicion."

"Yes!" said poor Walter—"as you say! I am blind! I never noticed that."

"Now, Mr. Joyce," said Lady Caroline, "the question is not with the past, but with the future. What do you intend doing?"

"I have scarcely thought! It matters very little!"

"Pardon my saying that it matters very much! Do you think of taking up this appointment for the newspaper that you spoke of?—this correspondentship in Berlin?"

"No! I think not! I really don't know! I thought of remaining as I am!"

"What! pass the rest of your life in writing Lord Hetherington's letters, and cramming him for speeches which he will never deliver?"

"It is an honest and an easy way of earning a living, at all events."

"Of earning a living! And are you going to content yourself with 'earning your living,' Mr. Joyce?"

"Oh, Lady Caroline, why should I do anything else? The desire for making money has gone from me altogether with the receipt and perusal of that letter! She was the spur that urged me on; my dreams of fame and wealth and position were for her, not for myself, and now"

"And now you are going to abandon it all, do you mean to tell me that? That you, a young man possessing intellect, and energy, and industry, with a career before you, are about to abandon that career, and to condemn yourself to vegetation—sheer and simple vegetation, mind, not life—merely because you have been grossly deceived by a woman, who, your common sense ought to have told you, has been playing you false for months, and who, as she herself confesses, has all her life rated the worthiness of people as to what they were worth in money? You are clearly not in your right mind, Mr. Joyce. I am surprised at you!"