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Updated: June 10, 2025
Marchmont, quietly, but at the same time fixing an observant eye on the young lady; "I never gaw Mr. Harcourt so moved before." Conscious of Mrs. Marchmont's object, Alice mastered herself at once, and with equal quietness answered: "It would be strange if it were otherwise. We have been acquainted from childhood."
"If the young gentleman will go, I will go with him," said a voice from the darkness beyond the piazza, which they recognized as that of Mrs. Marchmont's coachman. "I've been to sea in my day, and am not afraid of a little water, salt or fresh." "Good for you, my fine fellow. I'll be with you at once," cried Hemstead.
On that morning Johnson came to me from Streatham, and after drinking chocolate, at General Paoli's, in South-Audley-street, we proceeded to Lord Marchmont's in Curzon-street.
Marchmont's nephew was particularly unfriendly, I remember, as he had believed himself heir to his uncle's estate until your adoption. Some three years ago I chanced to be in the seaport town where you were born, and I made quiet inquiries about your mother. I learned that she had recently died, leaving a husband and three children.
Flirtation for flirtation and this conversation was becoming one there could be no comparison between Marchmont's and Quisanté's; the one was delightful, the other odious; the one combined charm with dignity; the other was a mixture of cringing and presumption.
I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains. Fate would not so be pacified; nor would Providence sanction this shrinking sloth and cowardly indolence. One February night I remember it well there came a voice near Miss Marchmont's house, heard by every inmate, but translated, perhaps, only by one.
Dead for her they were at that moment; she could see nothing but her husband's baseness and a baseness bred by it in herself; her bond to him was an obligation to dishonour and a chain of treachery. She abandoned to Marchmont's eyes all the hidden secrets of her misery; in this she seemed also to display before him the dead body of her hopes, her interest, her ambitions.
"What I thought of was this; I find I can get leave for two months this summer. Now suppose I was to take him to Marchmont's grouse shooting place in Scotland, and about among the Highlands and Islands. Perhaps the pleasure of that excursion would make up for the being carried off by an awful guardian, and those scrambles might bring him to the old footing with me."
But ye know, miss, how he couldn't do that, and soon he gives it up and falls to gnawin' his nails like one beside himself, an' a-mutterin' how he must either'save her or drown with her. Then he dashed up the bank ag'in, and he and his black hoss was off like a whirlwind. If the Naughty Tillus, or any other thing as would float was here, ye'd had no need of Mrs. Marchmont's coachman.
"Give him way, men! He's a friend of mine." Marchmont's horse bounded. "Lieutenant McNeill," said the rider. "I profess that in all this dust and smoke I did not at first recognize you. I am your obedient servant. If my foe, sir, then I dub you my dearest foe! To our next meeting!" He backed the furious horse, wheeled and was gone like a bolt from a catapult toward his broken and retiring troop.
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