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Page 46
"Nor was this enough. He not only robbed me of the woman I loved, but
with a clear insight into the future, I presume, insisted upon my
marrying some one else of respectability and worth before he died.
'Anyone whose appearance will do you credit and whose virtue is beyond
reproach,' said he. 'I don't ask her to be rich or even the offspring
of one of our old families. Let her be good and pure and of no
connection to us, and I will bless her and you with my dying breath.'
"The idea had seized upon him with great force, and I soon saw he was
not to be shaken out of it. To all my objections he returned but the
one word,
"'I don't restrict your choice and I give you a month in which to make
it. If at the end of that time you cannot bring your bride to my
bedside, I must look around for an heir who will not thwart my dying
wishes.'"
"A month! I surveyed the fashionable belles that nightly thronged the
parlors of my friends and felt my heart sink within me. Take one of
them for my wife, loving another woman? Impossible. Women like
these demanded something in return for the honor they conferred upon a
man by marrying him. Wealth? they had it. Position? that was theirs
also. Consideration? ah, what consideration had I to give? I turned
from them with distaste.
"My cousin Evelyn gave me no help. She was a proud woman and loved my
money and my expectations as much as she did me.
"'If you must marry another woman to retain your wealth, marry, said
she, 'but do not marry one of my associates. I will have no rival in
my own empire; your wife must be a plainer and a less aspiring woman
than Evelyn Blake. Yet do not discredit your name, --which is mine,'
she would always add.
"Meanwhile the days flew by. If my own conscience had allowed me to
forget the fact, my father's eagerly inquiring, but sternly
unrelenting gaze as I came each evening to his bedside, would have
kept it sufficiently in my mind. I began to feel like one in the
power of some huge crushing machine whose slowly descending weight he
in vain endeavors to escape.
"How or when the thought of Luttra first crossed my mind I cannot say.
At first I recoiled at the suggestion and put it away from me in
disdain; but it ever recurred and with it so many arguments in her
favor that before long I found myself regarding it as a refuge. To be
sure she was a waif and a stray, but that seemed to be the kind of
wife demanded of me. She was allied to rogues if not villains, I
knew; but then had she not cut all connection with them, dropped away
from them, planted her feet on new ground which they would never
invade? I commenced to cherish the idea. With this friendless,
grateful, unassuming protegee of mine for a wife, I would be as
little bound as might be. She would ask nothing, and I need give
nothing, beyond a home and the common attentions required of a
gentleman and a friend. Then she was not disagreeable, nor was her
beauty of a type to suggest the charms of her I had lost. None of the
graces of the haughty patrician lady whose lightest gesture was a
command, would appear in this humble girl, to mock and constrain me.
No, I should have a fair wife and an obedient one, but no vulgarized
shadow of Evelyn, thank God, or of any of her fashionably dressed
friends.
"Advanced thus far towards the end, I went to see Luttra. I had not
beheld her since the morning we parted at the door of that little
cottage in Vermont, and her presence caused me a shock. This, the
humble waif with the appealing grateful eyes I had expected to
encounter? this tall and slender creature with an aureola of golden
hair about a face that it was an education to behold! I felt a half
movement of anger as I surveyed her. I had been cheated; I had
planted a grape seed and a palm tree had sprung up in its place. I
was so taken aback, my salute lost something of the benevolent
condescension I had intended to infuse into it. She seemed to feel my
embarassment and a half smile fluttered to her lips. That smile
decided me. It was sweet but above all else it was appealing.
"How I won that woman to marry me in ten days time I care not to
state. Not by holding up my wealth and position before her.
Something restrained me from that. I was resolved, and perhaps it was
the only point of light in my conduct at that time, not to buy this
young girl. I never spoke of my expectations, I never alluded to my
present advantages yet I won her.
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