ELEANOR’S VICTORY.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “AURORA FLOYD,” “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” &c.
CHAPTER XXV. ACCEPTED.
When a man sets his happiness in the balance, he is apt to be contented with a very slight turning of the scale. He is not likely to be critical as to the wording of the verdict which gives him the prize he has asked for.
Mr. Gilbert Monckton had no contemptible opinion of his own judgment and deliberation, his perceptive faculties and powers of reasoning; but as blindly as Macbeth accepted the promises of the oracular voices in the witches’ cave, so did this grave and eminent lawyer receive those few cold words in which Eleanor Vane consented to be his wife.
Not that he refrained from reflecting upon the girl’s manner of accepting his offer. He did reflect upon it; and proved to himself, by unerring logic, that she could scarcely have spoken in any other way. There were a thousand reasons why she should have employed those very words, and pronounced them in that very tone. Maidenly modesty, innocent surprise, inexperience, girlish timidity:—he ran over a whole catalogue of causes, naming every possible cause, save one, and that one was the thing he had most dreaded—indifference, or even repugnance to himself. He looked into her face. His professional career had given him the faculty of putting together the evidences of smiles and frowns, involuntary contractions of the eyebrows, scarcely perceptible compressions of the lips, every tone and semi-tone in the facial diapason. He looked at Eleanor Vane’s face, and said to himself:
“This girl cannot be mercenary. She is as pure as an angel; as unselfish as Jephtha’s daughter; as brave as Judith, or Joan of Arc. She cannot be anything but a good wife. The man who wins her has reason to thank God for His bounty.”
It was with such thoughts as these that the lawyer received the feminine decision which was to influence his future life. He bent over the girl’s fair head—tall as she was, her face was only on a level with Gilbert Monckton’s shoulder—and pressed his lips to her forehead, solemnly, almost as if setting a seal upon his own.
“My darling,” he said, in a low voice, “my darling, you have made me very happy; I dare not tell you how much I love you. I struggled against my love, Eleanor. I once meant to have kept the secret till I went down to my grave. I think I could have kept silence so long as you remained within my reach, protected and sheltered by people whom I could trust, happy in the bright years of your innocent girlhood. But when you left Hazlewood, when you went out into the world, my courage failed. I wanted to give you my love as a shield and a defence. Better that I should be deceived, I thought; better that I should be miserable, than that she should be undefended.”
Eleanor Vane listened to the lawyer’s happy talk. He could have talked to her for ever, now that the ice was broken, and the important step—so long considered, so long avoided—actually taken. It seemed as if his youth came back to him, bestowed by some miraculous power; invisible, but most palpably present in that shabby Bloomsbury dwelling. His youth came back: the intellectual cobwebs of twenty years were swept away by one stroke of some benevolent witch’s broomstick. Cherished prejudices, fondly nursed doubts and suspicions, were blotted out of his mind, leaving the tablet fair and bright as it had been before the coming of that shadow which had darkened so much of this man’s life. Sudden almost as the conversion of Saul, was this transformation of the misanthropical solicitor under the master influence of a true and pure affection.
For twenty years he had sneered at women, and at men’s belief in them; and now, at the end of twenty years, he believed; and, escaping out of the prison which he had made for himself, he spread his recovered wings and was free.
A sigh escaped from Eleanor’s lips as she listened to her lover. The time in which she could have hoped to pay him back all this great debt which he was heaping upon her, was past and gone. She felt a sense of oppression beneath the load of this obligation. She began to perceive—as yet only dimly, so intense was the egotism engendered out of the single purpose of her life—that she was binding herself to something that she might not be able to perform; she was taking upon herself a debt that she could scarcely hope to pay. For a moment she thought this, and was ready, under this new impulse, to draw back and say, “I cannot become your wife; I am too much tied and bound by the obligations of the past, to be able to fulfil the duties of the present. I am set apart from other women, and must stand alone until the task I have set myself is accomplished, or the hope of its fulfilment abandoned.”
She thought this, and the words trembled on her lips; but in the next moment the image of her father arose angry and reproachful, as if to say to her, “Have you so little memory of my wrongs and my sorrows that you can shrink from any means of avenging me?”
This idea banished every other consideration.
“I will keep my promise first, and do my duty to Gilbert Monckton afterwards,” thought Eleanor. “It will be easy to be a good wife to him. I used to like him very much.”
She recalled the old days in which she had sat a little way apart from the lawyer and his ward, envying Laura Mason her apparent influence over Mr. Monckton; and for a moment a faint thrill of pleasure and triumph vibrated through her veins as she remembered that henceforth her claim upon him would be higher than that of any other living creature. He would be her own—her lover, her husband—adviser, friend, instructor; everything in the wide world to her.
“Oh, let me avenge my father’s cruel death,” she thought, “and then I may be a good and happy wife.”
