“Why! why! why!” he exclaimed. “My temper is very much upset to-day. Your aunt is most trying.”
“We have disagreed about settlements,” said the nephew.
“Damn settlements. That is rubbish. What else?”
“There is,” said his nephew slowly, “only one insurmountable barrier and she knows it.”
“Married? What a fool! You mean that you have had an establishment which you will give up now, of course, and she will not forgive this. She will naturally in time. Things will come right, do not be alarmed.”
“No, this will never come right for I am really married.”
“Yet you love Launa, and you meant to marry her and to live with her as your wife?”
“To commit bigamy—in spite of the insurmountable barrier?”
His uncle stared at him aghast. Admiration, blended with contempt, showed in his countenance—admiration for the audacity of the plan, contempt for its failure.
“I thought, when I did think,” said the nephew, “that if we were once married, if she were only bound to me by indissoluble ties, she could not leave me, and if at any time she heard rumours, well, she would have kept quiet about it. The other woman does not know my name.”
“It is dreadful,” said Lord Wainbridge. “Now there is no heir and your aunt—” he sighed. “I wish you had not told me. I should have preferred your being reticent with me. It is most unfortunate. I wish I did not know it.”
“How old you are,” thought his nephew, who was more than sorry; but he did not groan—that was of no avail.
“You are a greater fool than I thought you. What will you tell your aunt?”
“Nothing—or the settlement story? which you prefer.”
He regretted being found out. His god had been the fear of discovery; he worshipped it, and to it he had made many sacrifices. But it was all over.
“He is quiet, and bears it well,” thought Lord Wainbridge; but then we should always bear the result of our own wrong-doing with philosophy. No one—Lord Wainbridge least of all—would have pitied him had he not endured it with patience. Inwardly Hugh Wainbridge was raging—raging with a wild longing to possess Launa—to have held her in his arms alone, while she was his—to have kissed the life and breath out of her. It was intolerable to think that it was over, that she was not his, and never would be. All through his own stupidity, which he cursed, he felt a mad wild beast, just an animal longing to kill anyone in his way, and to possess the one object of his passion. How he wished he had not told his uncle. Lord Wainbridge was so disappointed.