Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/385

 to conciliate and coax. He revived the image of that wild Caroline Lyndsay, to whom HE had never refused a favour; whose earliest sums he had assisted to cast up--to whose young idea he had communicated the elementary principles of the musical gamut--to whom he had played on his flute, winter eve and summer noon, by the hour together; that Caroline Lyndsay, who when a mere child, had led Guy Darrell where she willed, as by a thread of silk. Ah, how Fairthorn had leapt for joy when, eighteen years ago, he had thought that Caroline Lyndsay was to be the sunshine and delight of the house to which she had lived to bring the cloud and the grief! And by all these memories, Fairthorn conjured her either to break off the marriage she had evidently helped to bring about, or, failing that, to convince Guy Darrell that he was not the object of her remorseful and affectionate compassion.

Caroline was almost beside herself at the receipt of this letter. The picture of Guy Darrell effacing his very life from his native land, and destroying the last memorials of his birthright and his home--the conviction of the influence she still retained over his bleak and solitary existence--the experience she had already acquired that the influence failed where she had so fondly hoped it might begin to repair and to bless, all overpowered her with emotions of yearning tenderness and unmitigated despair. What could she do? She could not offer herself, again to be rejected. She could not write again, to force her penitence upon the man who, while acknowledging his love to be unconquered, had so resolutely refused to see, in the woman who had once deceived his trust--the Caroline of old! Alas, if he were but under the delusion that her pity was the substitute and not the companion of love, how could she undeceive him? How say--how write--"Accept me, for I love you." Caroline Montfort had no pride of rank, but she had pride of sex; that pride had been called forth, encouraged, strengthened, throughout all the years of her wedded life. For Guy Darrell's sake, and to him alone, that pride she had cast away--trampled upon; such humility was due to him. But when the humility had been once in vain, could it be repeated--would it not be debasement? In the first experiment she had but to bow to his reproach--in a second experiment she might have but to endure his contempt. Yet how, with her sweet,