Page:Such Is Life.djvu/242

228 the thing is impending. But you need n't congratulate me yet. Think about yourself."

"That's just what I'm doing. If you tell her about this wager, I'll suicide, or clear."

"Well, upon my word! Do you think I'd condescend to undermine you, you storekeeper? Look out for Martin; never mind me."

"I don't mean her," mumbled the young fool; "I mean Mrs. Beaudesart. You're going to marry her when you get your promotion—ain't you?"

There was such evident sincerity in his tone that I maintained a stern and stony silence, whilst his eyes met mine with a doubtful, deprecating look; then he remarked doggedly,

"Well, that's what she told Mrs. Montgomery, last Sunday; and she said it seriously. Miss King was present at the time; and she told Butler, and Mooney, and me, across the gate of the flower-garden, the same evening. Mrs. Beaudesart takes it for granted, and so does everybody else. She says she accepted you some time ago."

"You lying dog!" I remarked wearily.

"I hope I may never stir alive off this seat if I'm not telling you the exact truth. Ask Mooney or Butler."

"If I do sleep, would all my wealth would wake me," I murmured, half-unconsciously.

"You don't want to marry her, then, after all?"

"How long do you suppose I would last?"

"Well, don't marry her."

"Does it occur to you," I asked, with some bitterness, "that there are some things a person can do, and some things he can't do? If the head of my Department orders me to Nyngan, I can reply by letter, telling him to mind his own business, and not concern himself about me; but if Mrs. Beaudesart assumes—if she merely takes for granted—that I'm going to marry her, I must do it, to keep her in countenance. How, in the fiend's name, can I slink out of it, now that I'm accepted? Can I tell her I've examined my heart, and I find I can only love her as a sister? Now, would n't that sound well? No, no; I'm a done man. Of course, she had no business to accept me unawares; but as she has done so, I must help her to keep up the grisly fraud of feminine reluctance; for, as the abbot sings, so must the sacristan respond. It is kismet. This is how all these unaccountable marriages are brought about; though, to be sure, I have the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the enterprise brings me a good many days' march nearer home."

The expression of heavenly beatitude on Moriarty's face goaded my mind to activity. Sweeping, with one glance, the whole horizon of expediency and possibility, I caught sight of the idea glanced at in a former page, and suggested, you will remember, by my dialogue with Ida.

"By the way, Moriarty," said I; "respecting that trifling debt of honour—there's another condition that I did n't think of. As a sort of payment on account, you must privately and insidiously circulate a very grave scandal for me."