Mabel was mute, her eyes downcast.
"I agree with him there, at any rate. You are nineteen years of age;
he twenty-five. Your property is unincumbered, and can be
transferred to your keeping at very short notice. Mr. Chiiton
represents that his income from his patrimonial estate, eked out by
professional gains, is sufficient to warrant him in marrying
forthwith. I shall see that no time is lost in making the inquiries
upon which depends the progress of the negotiation. Business calls
me North in a week or ten days. I shall stop a day in Philadelphia,
and settle your affair."
The frightfully business-like manner of disposing of her happiness
appalled the listener into silence. The loss of Frederic; the
destruction of her love-dream; the weary years of lonely
wretchedness that would follow the bereavement, were to him only
unimportant incidentals to her "affair;" weighed in the scale of his
impartial judgment no more than would unconsidered dust. For the
first time in the life to which he had been the guiding-star, she
ventured to wonder if the unswerving rectitude that had elevated him
above the level of other men, in her esteem and affection, were so
glorious a thing after all; if a tempering, not of human frailty,
but of charity for the shortcomings, sympathy for the needs, of
ordinary mortals, would not subdue the effulgence of his talents and
virtues into mild lustre, more tolerable to the optics of fallible
beholders Unsuspicious, with all his astuteness, of her sacrilegious doubts,
Winston proceeded: "In the event of your marriage, you would desire, no doubt, that
Mrs. Sutton should take up her abode with you? You would find her
useful in many ways, and she would get on amicably with her
husband's godson."
"I do not think she expects to go with me," answered Mabel,
staggered by his coolly confident air. "I certainly have never
entertained the idea. I imagined that she would remain with you,
while you needed her services."
"That will not be long. I shall be married on the 10th of October."
"Married! brother!" starting up in amazement. "You are not in
earnest!"
"I should not jest upon such a theme," replied Winston, in grave
rebuke. "My plans are definitely laid. It is not my purpose to keep
them secret a day longer. I meant to communicate them to yourself
and Mrs. Sutton this afternoon, but yours claimed precedence."
Mabel sat down again, totally confounded, and struggling hard with
her tears. The thought of her brother's marriage was not in itself
disagreeable. She had often lamented his insensibility to the
attractions of such women as she fancied would add to his happiness,
and grace the high place to which his wife would be exalted. She
never liked to hear him called invulnerable; repelled the hypothesis
of his incurable bachelorhood as derogatory to his heart and head.
This unlooked-for intelligence, had it reached her in a different
way, would have delighted as much as it astonished her. The fear
lest her consent to wed Frederic and leave Ridgeley might be the
occasion of discomfort and sadness to her forsaken brother had
shadowed all her visions of future bliss. She ought to have hailed
with unmixed satisfaction the certainty that he would not miss her
sisterly ministrations, or feel the need of her companionship in
that of one nearer and dearer than was his child-ward. She had
striven not to resent even in her own mind, his cavalier treatment
of her lover; had hearkened respectfully and without demur to his
unsympathizing calculations of what was possible and what feasible
in the project of her union with the man of her choice. For how
could he know anything of the palpitations, the anxieties, the
raptures of love, when he was a stranger to the touch of a kindred
emotion? He meant well; he had her welfare in view; unfortunate as
was his style of discussing the means for insuring this--for he
loved her dearly, dearly!