"Go upstairs and ask my maid for my work," she said, sharply. Even the man was taken by surprise: it was her habit to speak to the servants with a gentleness and consideration which had long since won all their hearts. "Do you hear me?" she asked, impatiently. The servant bowed, and went out on his errand. She turned to Horace with flashing eyes and fevered cheeks.
"What a comfort it is," she said, "to belong to the upper classes! A poor woman has no maid to dress her, and no footman to send upstairs. Is life worth having, Horace, on less than five thousand a year?"
The servant returned with a strip of embroidery. She took it with an insolent grace, and told him to bring her a footstool. The man obeyed. She tossed the embroidery away from her on the sofa. "On second thoughts, I don't care about my work," she said. "Take it upstairs again." The perfectly trained servant, marveling privately, obeyed once more. Horace, in silent astonishment, advanced to the sofa to observe her more nearly. "How grave you look!" she exclaimed, with an air of flippant unconcern. "You don't approve of my sitting idle, perhaps? Anything to please you! I haven't got to go up and downstairs. Ring the bell again."
"My dear Grace," Horace remonstrated, gravely, "you are quite mistaken. I never even thought of your work."
"Never mind; it's inconsistent to send for my work, and then send it away again. Ring the bell."
Horace looked at her without moving. "Grace," he said, "what has come to you?"
"How should I know?" she retorted, carelessly. "Didn't you tell me to rally my spirits? Will you ring the bell, or must I?"
Horace submitted. He frowned as he walked back to the bell. He was one of the many people who instinctively resent anything that is new to them. This strange outbreak was quite new to him. For the first time in his life he felt sympathy for a servant, when the much-enduring man appeared once more.
"Bring my work back; I have changed my mind." With that brief explanation she reclined luxuriously on the soft sofa-cushions, swinging one of her balls of wool to and fro above her head, and looking at it lazily as she lay back. "I have a remark to make, Horace," she went on, when the door had closed on her messenger. "It is only people in our rank of life who get good servants. Did you notice? Nothing upsets that man's temper. A servant in a poor family should have been impudent; a maid-of-all-work would have wondered when I was going to know my own mind." The man returned with the embroidery. This time she received him graciously; she dismissed him with her thanks. "Have you seen your mother lately, Horace?" she asked, suddenly sitting up and busying herself with her work.
"I saw her yesterday," Horace answered.
"She understands, I hope, that I am not well enough to call on her? She is not offended with me?"
Horace recovered his serenity. The deference to his mother implied in Mercy's questions gently flattered his self-esteem. He resumed his place on the sofa.
"Offended with you!" he answered, smiling. "My dear Grace, she sends you her love. And, more than that, she has a wedding present for you."
Mercy became absorbed in her work; she stooped close over the embroidery—so close that Horace could not see her face. "Do you know what the present is?" she asked, in lowered tones, speaking absently.
"No. I only know it is waiting for you. Shall I go and get it to-day?"
She neither accepted nor refused the proposal—she went on with her work more industriously than ever.
"There is plenty of time," Horace persisted. "I can go before dinner."
Still she took no notice: still she never looked up. "Your mother is very kind to me," she said, abruptly. "I was afraid, at one time, that she would think me hardly good enough to be your wife."
Horace laughed indulgently: his self-esteem was more gently flattered than ever.
"Absurd!" he exclaimed. "My darling, you are connected with Lady Janet Roy. Your family is almost as good as ours."
"Almost?" she repeated. "Only almost?"
The momentary levity of expression vanished from Horace's face. The family question was far too serious a question to be lightly treated A becoming shadow of solemnity stole over his manner. He looked as if it was Sunday, and he was just stepping into church.
"In OUR family," he said, "we trace back—by my father, to the Saxons; by my mother, to the Normans. Lady Janet's family is an old family—on her side only."
Mercy dropped her embroidery, and looked Horace full in the face. She, too, attached no common importance to what she had next to say.
"If I had not been connected with Lady Janet," she began, "would you ever have thought of marrying me?"
"My love! what is the use of asking? You are connected with Lady Janet."
She refused to let him escape answering her in that way.
"Suppose I had not been connected with Lady Janet?" she persisted. "Suppose I had only been a good girl, with nothing but my own merits to speak for me. What would your mother have said then?"
Horace still parried the question—only to find the point of it pressed home on him once more.
"Why do you ask?" he said.
"I ask to be answered," she rejoined. "Would your mother have liked you to marry a poor girl, of no family—with nothing but her own virtues to speak for her?"
Horace was fairly pressed back to the wall.
"If you must know," he replied, "my mother would have refused to sanction such a marriage as that."
"No matter how good the girl might have been?"
There was something defiant—almost threatening—in her tone. Horace was annoyed—and he showed it when he spoke.
"My mother would have respected the girl, without ceasing to respect herself," he said. "My mother would have remembered what was due to the family name."
"And she would have said, No?"
"She would have said, No."
"Ah!"
There was an undertone of angry contempt in the exclamation which made Horace start. "What is the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing," she answered, and took up her embroidery again. There he sat at her side, anxiously looking at her—his hope in the future centered in his marriage! In a week more, if she chose, she might enter that ancient family of which he had spoken so proudly, as his wife. "Oh!" she thought, "if I didn't love him! if I had only his merciless mother to think of!"
Uneasily conscious of some estrangement between them, Horace spoke again. "Surely I have not offended you?" he said.
She turned toward him once more. The work dropped unheeded on her lap. Her grand eyes softened into tenderness. A smile trembled sadly on her delicate lips. She laid one hand caressingly on his shoulder. All the beauty of her voice lent its charm to the next words that she said to him. The woman's heart hungered in its misery for the comfort that could only come from his lips.
"You would have loved me, Horace—without stopping to think of the family name?"
The family name again! How strangely she persisted in coming back to that! Horace looked at her without answering, trying vainly to fathom what was passing in her mind.
She took his hand, and wrung it hard—as if she would wring the answer out of him in that way.
"You would have loved me?" she repeated.
The double spell of her voice and her touch was on him. He answered, warmly, "Under any circumstances! under any name!"
She put one arm round his neck, and fixed her eyes on his. "Is that true?" she asked.
"True as t he heaven above us!"
She drank in those few commonplace words with a greedy delight. She forced him to repeat them in a new form.
"No matter who I might have been? For myself alone?"
"For yourself alone."
She threw both arms round him, and laid her head passionately on his breast. "I love you! I love you!! I love you!!!" Her voice rose with hysterical vehemence at each repetition of the words—then suddenly sank to a low hoarse cry of rage and despair. The sense of her true position toward him revealed itself in all its horror as the confession of her love escaped her lips. Her arms dropped from him; she flung herself back on the sofa-cushions, hiding her face in her hands. "Oh, leave me!" she moaned, faintly. "Go! go!"