“That is, you will not hear anything more?”
“Well--if you like to put it so--I prefer not to hear any more.”
“Not if Bee’s happiness should be involved?”
“My daughter’s happiness, I hope, does not depend upon a man whom she has known only for a month. She may think so now. But she will soon know better. That is a question into which I decline to enter with you.”
“Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” said Aubrey, with a coarse laugh. He turned as if to go away. “But you do not mean that this is final, Colonel Kingsward---- not final? Not for ever? Never to be revised or reconsidered---- even if I were as bad as you think me?”
“How needless is all this! I have told you your character does not concern me--and I do not say that you are bad--or think so. I am sorry for you. You have got into a rather dreadful position, Mr. Leigh, for a young man of your age.”
“And yet at my age you think I should be cut off for ever from every hope of salvation!”
“Not so; this is all extravagant--ridiculous! And if you will excuse me, I am particularly busy this morning, with a hundred things to do.”
Poor Aubrey would have killed with pleasure, knocked down and trampled upon, the immovable man of the world who thus dismissed him; but to be humble, even abject, was his only hope. “I will try, then, to find some moment of leisure another time.”
“It is unnecessary, Mr. Leigh. I shall not change my mind; surely you must see that it is better for all parties to give it up at once.”
“Pooh! one nail drives out another. You don’t seem to have been a miracle of constancy in your previous relationships. Good morning. I trust to hear soon that you have made as satisfactory a settlement of other claims.”
Other claims! What other claims? Aubrey Leigh went out of the office in Pall Mall with these words circling through his mind. They seemed to have nothing to do with that which occupied him, which filled every thought. His dazed memory and imagination caught them up as he went forth in the fury of suppressed anger, and the dizzy, stifled sensation of complete failure. He had felt sure, even when he felt least sure, that when it was possible to tell his tale fully, miserable story as it was, the man to whom he humbled himself thus, not being a recluse or a mere formalist--a man of the world--would at least, to some degree, understand and perceive how little real guilt there might be even in such a fault as he had committed. It was not a story which could be repeated in a woman’s ears; but a man, who knew more or less what was in man--the momentary lapses, the sudden impulses, the aberrations of intolerable trouble, sorrow, and despair----. Aubrey did not take into account the fact that there are some men to whom such a condition as that into which he himself had fallen in the desolation of his silent house--when death came a second time within the sad year, and his young soul felt in the first sensation of despair that he could not bear it; that he was a man signalled out by fate, to whom it was vain to struggle, to whom life was a waste and heaven a mockery--was inconceivable. Colonel Kingsward was certainly not a man like that. He would have said to himself that the mother being gone it was only a blessing and advantage that the child should go too, and he would have withdrawn himself decorously to his London lodgings and his club, and his friends would all have said that it was on the whole a good thing for him, and that he was young, and his life still before him. So, indeed, they had said of Aubrey, and so poor Aubrey had proved for himself. Had there not been that terrible moment behind him, that intolerable blackness and midnight of despair, in which any hand that gripped his could lead him till the light of morning burst upon him, and showed him whither in his misery he had been led!