Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (250 page)

 
‘Yes, my lord.’

 
‘You recollect how you sat in this very room by this fireside, fearful of retiring for the night lest you should awake in another world in the morning. The country was not then as quiet as it is now. You have not forgotten that deep explosion which roared up at midnight and told you that your life and liberty hung on a thread, that the enemy had come suddenly upon Rivaulx, and that we who lay thre to defend the forlon hope were surprised and routed by a night attack. Then madam, perhaps you recollect the warning which I brought you at one o’clock in the morning, to fly instantly, unless you chose the alternative of infamous captivity in the hands of Jordan. I found you here, sitting by a black hearth without fire, and Ernest Fitz-Arthur lay on your knee asleep. You told me you had heard the firing, and that you were waiting for some communication from me, determined not to stir without orders lest a precipitate step on your part should embarass me. I had a carriage already in waiting for you. I put you in, and with the remains of my defeated followers escorted you as far as Zamorna. What followed after that, Miss Laury?’

 
Miss Laury covered her eyes with her hand. She seemed as if she could not answer.

 
‘Well’, continued Hartford. ‘In the midst of darkness and tempest, and while the whole city of Zamorna seemed changed into a hell peopled with fiends and inspired with madness, my lads were hewed down about you, and your carriage was stopped. I very well remember what you did – how frantically you struggled to save Fitz-Arthur, and how you looked at me when he was snatched from you. As to your own preservation – that, I need not repeat – only my arm did it. You acknowledge that, Miss Laury?’

 
‘Hartford, I do, but why do you dwell on that terrible scene?’

 
‘Because I am now approaching the happiest hour of my life. I took you to the house of one of my tenants whom I could depend upon, and just as morning dawned you and I sat together and alone in the little chamber of a farm-house, and you were in my arms, your head upon my shoulder, and weeping out all your anguish on a breast that longed to bleed for you’.

 
Miss Laury agitatedly rose. She approached Hartford.

 
‘My lord, you have been very kind to me and I feel very grateful for that kindness. Perhaps sometime I may be able to repay it. We know not how the chances of fortune may turn. The weak have aided the strong, and I will watch vigilantly for the slightest opportunity to serve you, but d not talk in this way. I scarcely know whither your words tend’.

 
Lord Hartford paused a moment before he replied. Gazing at her with bended brows and folded arms he said:

 
‘Miss Laury, what do you think of me?’

 
‘That you are one of the noblest hearts in the world!’ she replied unhesitatingly. She was standing just before Hartford, looking up at him, her hair in that attitude falling back from her brow, shading with exquisite curls her temples and slender neck; her small, sweet features, with that high seriousness deepening their beauty, lit up by her eyes so large, so dark, so swimming, so full of pleading benignity, of an expression of alarmed regard, as if she at once feared for and pitied the sinful abstraction of a great mind. Hartford couldn’t stand it. He could have borne female anger or terror, but the look of enthusiastic gratitude softened by compassion nearly unmanned him. He turned his head for a moment aside but then passion prevailed. Her beauty when he looked again struck through him – maddening sensation whetted to acuter power by a feeling like despair.

 
‘You shall love me!’ he exclaimed desperately; ‘Do I not adore you? Would I not die for you? And must I in return receive only the cold regard of friendship? I am not a Platonist, Miss Laury – I am not your friend. I am, hear me, madam, your declasred lover! Nay, you shall not leave me; by heaven -–I am stronger than you are’.

 
She had stepped a pace or two back, appalled by his vehemence. He thought she meant to withdraw, and, determined not to be so baulked, he clasped her at once in both his arms and kissed her furiously rather than fondly. Miss Laury did not struggle.

 
‘Hartford’, said she steadying her voice, though it faletered in spite of her effort, ‘ this must be our parting scene. I will never see you again if you do not restrain yourself.’

 
Hartford saw that she turned pale, and he felt her tremble violently. His arms relaxed their hold. He allowed her to leave him.

 
She sat down on a chair opposite and hurriedly wiped her brow which was damp and marble-pale.

 
‘Now,
 
Miss Laury’, said his lordship, ‘no man in the world loves you as I do. Will you accept my title and my coronet? I fling them at your feet’.

 
‘My lord, do you know whose I am?’ she replied in a hollow and very suppressed tone. ‘Do you know with what a sound those proposals fall on my ear – how impious and blasphemous they seem to be? Do you at all conceive how utterly impossible it is that I should ever love you? The scene I have just witnessed has given a strange wrench to all my accustomed habits of thought. I thought you a true-hearted, faithful man: I find that you are a traitor’.

 
‘And do you despise me?’ asked Hartford.

 
‘No, my lord, I do not’.

 
She paused and looked down. The colour rose rapidly into her pale face. She sobbed, not in tears, but in the overmastering approach of an impulse born of a warm and Western heart. Again she looked up. Her eyes had changed, their aspect beaming with a wild, bright inspiration, truly, divinely Irish.

 
‘Hartford’, said she, ‘had I met you long since, before I left Ellibank and forgot St. Cyprian and dishonoured my father, I would have loved you. O my lord, you know not how truly! I would have married you and made it the glory of my life to cheer and brighten your hearth, but I cannot do so now – never. I saw my present master when he had scarcely attained manhood. Do you think, Hartford, I will tell you what feelings I had for him? No tongue could express them; they were so fervid, so glowing in their colour that they effaced everything else. I lost the power of properly appreciating the value of the world’s opinion, of discerning the difference between right and wrong. I have never in my life contradicted Zamorna, never delayed obedience to his commands. I could not. He was something more to me than a human being. He superseded all things
 
- all affections, all interests, all fears or hopes or principles. Unconnected with him my mind would be a blank, cold, dead, susceptible only of a sense of despair. How should I sicken if were torn from him and thrown to you! Ado not ask it; I would die first. No woman that ever loved my master could consent to leave him. There is nothing like him elsewhere. Hartford, if I were to be your wife, if Zamorna only looked at me, I should creep back like a slave to my former service. I should disgrace you as I have long since disgraced all my kindred. Think of that, my lord, and never say you love me again’.

 
‘You do not frighten me’, replied Lord Hartford hardily; ‘I would stand that chance, aye, and every other, if I only might see at the head of my table in that old dining room at Hartford Hall yourself as my wife and lady. I am called proud as it is, but then I would show Angria to what pitch of pride a man might attain, if I could, coming home at night, find Mina Laury waiting to receive me; if I could sit down and look at you with the consciousness that your exquisite beauty was all my own, that cheek, those lips, that lovely hand, might be claimed arbitrarily, and you dare not refuse me, I should then feel happy’.

 
‘Hartford, you would be more likely when you came home to find your house vacant and your hearth deserted. I know the extent of my own infatuation. I should go back to Zamorna and entreat him on my knees to let me be his slave again!’

 
‘Madam’, said Hartford frowning, ‘you dared not if you were my wife; I would guard you!’

 
‘Then I should die under your guardianshp. But the experiment will never be tried!’

 
Hartford came near, sat down by her side, and leaned over her. She did not shirk away.

 
‘Oh!’ he said, ‘I am happy. There was a time when I dared not have come so near you. One summer evening two years ago I was walking in the twilight amongst those trees on the lawn, and at a turn I saw you sitting at the root of one of them by yourself’.

 
‘You were looking up at a starwhich was twinkling above the Sydenhams. You were in white; your hands were folded on your knee, and your hair was resting in still, shining curls on your neck. I stood and watched. The thought struck me: if that image sat now in my own woods, if she were something in which I had an interest, if I could go and press my lips to her brow and expect a smile in answer to the caress, if I could take her in my arms and turn her thought from that sky with its single star, and from the distant country to which it points (for it hung in the west and I know you were thinking about Senegambia), if I could attract those thoughts and centre them all in myself, how like heaven would the world become to me. I heard a window open, and Zamorna’s voice called through the silence, ‘’Mina!’’ The next moment I had the pleasure of seeing you standing on the lawn, close under the very casement where the Duke sat leaning out, and you were allowing his hand to stray through your hair, and his lips -’

 
‘Lord Hartford!’ exclaimed Miss Laury, colouring to the eyes, ‘this is more than I can bear, I have not been angry yet. I thought it folly to rage at you, because you said you loved me, but what you have just said is like touching a nerve; it overpowers all reason; it is like a stinging taunt which I am under no obligation to endure from you. Every one knows what I am, but where is the woman in Africa who would have acted more wisely than I did if under the same circumstances she had been subject to the same temptations?’

 
‘That is’, returned Hartford, whose eye was now glittering with a desperate, reckless expression, ‘where is the woman in Africa who would have said no to young douro when amongst the romantic hills of Ellibank he has pressed his suit on some fine moonlight summer night, and the girl and boy have found themselves alone in a green dell, with here and there a tree to be their shade, far above the stars for their sentinels, and around, the night for their wide curtain’.

 
The wild bounding throb of Miss Laury’s heart was visible through her satin bodice – it was even audible as for a moment Hartford ceased his scoffing to note its effect. He was still close by her, and she did not move from him. She did not speak. The pallid lamp-light shewed her lips white, her cheek bloodless.

 
He continued unrelentingly and bitterly: ‘In after times, doubtless, the woods of Hawkscliffe have witnessed many a tender scene, with the king of Angria has retired from the turmoil of business and the teasing of matrimony to love and leisure with his gentle mistress’.

 
‘Now, Hartford, we must part’, interrupted Miss Laury, ‘I see what opinion of me is, and it is very just, but not one which I willingly hear expressed. You have cut me to the heart. Good bye. I shall try to avoid seeing you for the future.’

 
She rose. Hartford did not attempt to detain her. She went out. As she closed the door, he heard the bursting convulsive gush of feelings which his taunts had brought up to agony.

 
Her absence left a blank. Suddenly a wish to recall, to soothe, to propitiate her rose in his mind. He strode to the door and opened it. There was a little hall or rather a wide passage without in which one large lamp was quietly burning. Nothing appeared here, nor on the staircase of low broad steps in which it terminated. She seemed to have vanished.

 
Lord Hartford’s hat and horseman’s cloak lay on the side slab. There remained no further attraction for him at the Lodge of Rivaulx. The delirious dream of rapture which had intoxicated his sense broke up and disappeared. His passionate, stern nature maddened under disappointment. He strode out into the black and frozen night burning in flames no ice could quench. He ordered and mounted his steed, and, dashing his spurs with harsh cruelty up to the rowels into the flanks of the noble war-horse which had borne him victoriously through the carnage of Westwood and Leyden, he dashed in furious gallop down the road to Rivaulx.