“You are willing to sacrifice all to my son, and what equal sacrifice can he offer to you? He shall bask in your best years, and later on, when he is sated—and satiety will come—what shall happen? If he be worldly, he will spread your past before you and leave you, saying, he does but as others have done. And if he be an honest man, he will marry you, or at least not desert you. And this marriage, or this life, not based on virtue, nor supported by religion, this life, pardonable, perhaps, in a young man, how shall it be named, when age is creeping on? For this man, for my son, what ambition dare he breathe, what path is open to him? What consolation shall this son then be to me—to me, who have watched and tended him for twenty years? Your love for each other—it is a passion, the most earthly and wholly human, it is born of the caprice of one, and the imagination of the other. Your love is a result, not a cause. What shall remain of it when you are both grown old and weary? Who assures you that the first wrinkle on your forehead shall not sweep the veil from his eyes? Who assures you his love shall not pass away with your youth.”
“Oh, the truth, the truth?”
“Then yours would be double age, doubly desolate, and doubly useless. What retrospect would you have, what happiness to look back upon? Ah, Marguerite, there are cruel necessities in this life, against which we must fight, if we would not be dashed to death against them. You and my son have different roads in life; chance has thrown you together for a little while, but reason must separate you. In the life you have entered, you saw not the end, and to your three months’ happiness no more can be added. Keep the remembrance of this time, and let it strengthen you always. I speak harshly, but consider that I plead where I might command. It is a man of the world who speaks to you, a father who implores you. So, Marguerite, courage, and show you love my son truly, by leaving him to the care of those who have a family claim upon his obedience.”
“So—she who falls shall never rise.” (She was speaking lowly to herself.) “Heaven may pardon me, the world never. And truly, what right have I to a place in this honest family? I love! What reason! And what proofs can I give of this love? Who would believe them? What, poor girl—thou to speak of heart, and future—these are new words to thee. Look back on thy past, what man would call thee wife? What child would call thee mother?”
Then turning to her visitor, she said: “Nearly all you have said I have half asked myself—oh, how often, but never, never wholly. You are right, you speak kindly, and you are very merciful. Ah well, I will obey you, and one day you will say to the pure honest girl, your daughter—once there lived a poor erring woman who had but one hope in the world, and at the invocation of thy name, this erring woman renounced that hope, laid her hands heavily upon her breast, and so died; for I shall die, I shall die. You say, ‘poor creature,’ you pity me, sir, and methinks you even weep. Ah well, I tell you I will obey you; command me.”
“Tell him that you love him no more.”
“He would not believe me.”
“Leave this place.”
“He would follow me. You hesitate? Sir, lay your hand upon my head as you would upon your daughter’s head. And now I promise you that in eight days he shall be with you, unhappy perhaps, but wholly cured, and I promise you that he shall know nothing of this visit; oh, fear nothing, he shall HATE me.”
Yet a little and the father was leaving the room. “And,” she murmured, “when all is ended, and I am dead, I pray you tell him how I loved, and proved my love. Good bye; we shall, perhaps, never see each other more. I pray you may be happy.”