Chapter XX: To Tie or Not to Tie the Knot?

“Take care, Lady Bell!” exclaimed Harry, in rising agitation, “lest I’m only delivered from one temptation to be plunged into another.”

“Ah! temptations have no power for you,” proclaimed Lady Bell, with a mixture of pride and sorrow; “you are as firm as a rock, and as unyielding when you think you are in the right.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Captain Fane, and she saw that he could be nervous with all his firmness. “I have let you say how you will want me, because it has been marrow to my bones and joy to my heart, Bell, when God knows I am anxious and sad enough. But at least you do not resign me to the importunities of any rival, unless it be to the image of Britannia herself,” he suggested, with an effort at a jest and a smile, “flourishing, as our general figurehead, and to the death which she may bear in her hand. Think what I must feel to leave you, exposed to the cunning wiles of all the beaux and bucks and great matches who hunt women as men hunt game. These men play with women, and have no remorse—for not believing in a God in heaven, they do not believe in a man or woman on earth. They seek to buy women, and sooner than be foiled in the base barter which they propose, and be forced to confess their titles, rent-rolls, money-bags, even their pretty persons, disparaged, they will try to get the better of women by cruel arts. Such men betray women infernally.”

He had worked himself up till he was pouring forth a torrent of rage, hatred, and apprehension. Cold as the morning was, he had to wipe his forehead.

“Why, Harry!” remonstrated Lady Bell, startled, but not altogether offended by his jealous fury, not unwilling to be roused from the dejection into which she was sinking, and to be diverted for a moment from the gloomy prospect before her.

There was no question of the gloom near at hand, and to last for many a day. Come what liked in the future, Harry Fane was going, would go to join his ship in the first place, and the war in the second. He might be subjected to work, weariness, and privation, but he had action and change for his portion. As for her, she must abide in her place forlorn, with the brightness passed from the sky, and the zest gone out of the feast. The “Lubin” of the song was indeed on the eve of departure, of long uncertain tarrying, perhaps till his love’s bloom was faded, her heart withered and dry. Lady Bell had asked once in very idleness and restlessness, that movement, passion, even, in its pangs, might ruffle the still waters of her heart. They were ruffled with a vengeance, lashed into a piteous storm, to heave and swell for many a day, ere they settled down again in peace.

Knowing what was hanging over her, Lady Bell was fain to forget the knowledge for a moment, in the rousing consideration that Captain Fane, in spite of her frank confession, was half beside himself with jealousy.

She did not altogether disapprove of this state of matters, for was it not evidence of how well the self-controlled sailor loved her?

She was a little frightened at the strength of his passion, nevertheless. Extravagantly as she herself had loved him, she did not know him fully and closely, after all. One of the charms of her love was its mystery.

But Lady Bell thought Harry Fane too severe in his strictures, and certainly needing to be pulled up and taken to task. Aching as her heart was, she tried to make believe for a brief space that the ache was not there, and to do her part in enlightening her lover.

She began to pout with her white face and her tearful eyes.

“Would I forget you in your absence, Harry? Could you ever believe that? What effect would all the wicked stratagems of the finest gentlemen have on me?”

“How can I tell?” he answered gloomily. “I found a whole hornet’s nest buzzing round you when I met you first, and again at the masquerade, and you did not seem able to put them down.”

“Why should I put them down? They are entitled to live as well as the rest of us, even though a busy fellow of a bee looks down upon them as drones or butterflies; indeed they are rather that than hornets. They have never done me harm, and they have squired and amused me many a day; you ought to be more generous to them, sir, and to learn to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“We have no time for quarrelling,” cried Harry, “you may teach me better manners one day, if we are spared and restored to each other, and you are still willing to undertake the office. But I could not profit by the best of lessons, and I submit that it would be taking me altogether at a disadvantage to begin when I am just about to bid you farewell.”

“Not yet! not yet!” besought Lady Bell, dislodged from her poor little temporary cranny of arch resistance and coquettish teasing, and stretched anew, like another Andromeda, on a sheer precipice, over a sea of misery, until she fell back into her lamentation. “If we had but understood each other faster, and been married within these few weeks—sailors and soldiers must woo and wed in haste—before these terrible sailing orders arrived! Then I could have sailed with you; I should not have been frighted, though we had encountered the enemy. I could have kept quiet below, with you on deck to run to when the guns ceased firing. I might have proved how little I cared for any other man by following you all over the world.”

“You can prove it, dear,” declared Harry Fane, hoarse with eagerness, taking her at her word, giving the reins to his passion, and smothering and trampling down every doubt and scruple. “Let us be married before I go, and although I cannot take you with me, I may send for you to my station. Some one of my old messmates and friends will be glad to do as he would be done by, and bring you out to me in his ship.”

Lady Bell was astounded; she had been utterly unprepared for this catching up of her speech, heartfelt though it was.

Harry Fane rushed on, overwhelming her with his special pleading.

“That and that alone would reassure my mind, which is on the rack for you, exposed on a pinnacle as you are. Don’t be vexed with me when I say it, but you are a beautiful woman of rank, very young, greatly admired, as you well may be, moving in gay worldly circles, which unsettle even a man’s head, and throw dust in his eyes. You have not a near relation whose right it would be to control and guide you, only such thoughtless, irresponsible guardians as even my good cousin! Oh! my love, how shall I leave you thus? for God knows how long,” he groaned in anguish, “these six—twelve years. This horrid war has long been hanging over us. Our American brethren are brave and resolute as we are; the strife may last while mother country and colony hold out. How can I trust your constancy exposed to such a test, assailed as it will be when I am gone, and you a young woman, and therefore weak, without blame or shame to you?”

“I understand,” acknowledged Lady Bell piteously. “I am not angry with you for distrusting me—how can I be, when I remember how weak I was once before? How wrong as well as weak, I know by my love for you. I was unfair to myself and to another. Do I not shrink from looking you and every one in the face when I think of my marriage? Do I not blush for the name I bear, because of the reason for bearing it?—that I let myself be sold as a chattel or a slave, rather than die free—and I was not a loyal slave, Harry, never think it; I revolted and fled, like many another slave.”

He was hardly listening to her, he was so dead set on over-persuading her and himself that he might make her his, and that by doing so, he would save her.

“Then do not risk danger again, you are not so much older—only a tender girl of eighteen—widow though you are. I may not even be able to reach you with the poor stay of letters when all your friends will be against me. I cannot wonder and complain, but I must think of myself and my love, and of you and yours, for you love me, and me only, Lady Bell, your lips have sworn it now, over and over.”

“Ay, and I swear it again,” averred Lady Bell, with fond pride.

“No other man will ever be to you what I can be. I will say more, cross-grained sinner as I am, I honestly believe that I shall raise you, Bell, by your love, as you will raise me by mine. Are not true lovers made for helpmeets as well as mates? And, although I have no cause for boasting, less at this moment perhaps than at any other, still, do you not love me, darling, because you think me honest, though plain, earnest if harsh, a little wiser in my blundering, a little more bent on truth and righteousness in my faultiness, than the ruck of those heartless triflers and blasphemous renouncers of all obligations around you?”

“Have I not called you the best of men?” boasted Lady Bell, with an immensity of faith which might have staggered him and opened his eyes. But he only shut them harder, while he modestly declined the innocent hyperbole.

“Oh, no, a prodigiously erring fellow, and nearly mad at this moment, I suspect. But we should walk through life hand in hand, love, and ask to rise to the best that nature and grace could make us. For that end we should seek to be reverent and dutiful, and to turn our backs on vanities, follies, and worse. It is not wrong to make this end so sure, that if we live it cannot be baulked, and that no one can ever more come between us to beguile us of our faith in God and each other.”

“If I could only claim you as my wife,” he argued unweariedly, “I should have no fear to leave you thus solemnly bound to me—thus able by uttering one word to dismiss all suitors, or to consign them to the tender mercies of a man whom you could then call from the ends of the earth—too happy to come, as I came to you at the masquerade—to give you protection. My name alone, when you choose to take it, and replace by it the name which you tell me, hanging your head (I cannot bear to have my love hang her head), it is no pleasure or pride for you to wear, would protect you.”

“Ah! Harry, shall I ever wear your dear name?”

“If you will, Lady Bell; and I venture to affirm that it will shelter you as the name of the husband of your own free choice. In the mean time I shall be doing my best to make my name honourable for you. But ah, Bell, grant me my reward now, during the few short hours which we are yet to spend together—while it is in your power to grant it, since it is doubtful whether I shall ever return to claim it.”

“Come back quick, Harry, and you may blame me as you will, I shall be too happy to be blamed by you, and to do whatever you desire,” promised Lady Bell.

“Heaven forgive my conceit, it was my very wonder and delight, which caused me to find fault or fret at every small mote in my sun. But I shall not contradict or plague you more, very likely you will soon have seen the last of a lumpish, captious fellow, whose greatest merit that I can see is, that he no sooner knew you than he cast his quips and cranks, as a misanthropic sailor, to the winds, and loved you with his whole heart and soul.”

“Oh, heavens! seen the last, contradict—plague! Harry, while you profess to love me, how can you speak so unkind?”