The Squire's Daughter Part 73

"Oh, I fell in love with my sister long before he did."

"Your own sister doesn't count."

"She does with William--counts too much, I'm afraid. He's no eyes for anything else."

"Oh, go along!"

"Not till I've had my tea. Remember, I'm hungry."

Then a knock came to the door, and William entered. He was still thin and pale, but there was a light in his eyes and a glow on his cheeks such as no one ever saw in the old days.

On the following afternoon Ralph made his way up the slant again in the direction of Treliskey Plantation. It was a glorious afternoon. The hot suns.h.i.+ne was tempered by a cool, Atlantic breeze. The hills and dales were looking their best, the hedges were full of flowers, the woods and plantations were great banks of delicious green. At the stile he paused for several minutes and surveyed the landscape, but his thoughts all the time were somewhere else. Hope had sprung up afresh in his heart, and a determined purpose was throbbing through all his veins.

After awhile he left the stile and pa.s.sed through the plantation gate.

He was a trespa.s.ser, he knew, but that was a matter of little account.

No one would molest him now. He was a man of too much importance in the neighbourhood. He hardly realised yet what a power he had become, and how anxious people were to be on good terms with him. In himself he was conscious of no change. So far, at any rate, money had not spoiled him.

Every Sunday as he pa.s.sed through the little graveyard at Veryan he was reminded of the fact that his mother had died in the workhouse. If he was ever tempted to put on airs--which he was not--that fact would have kept him humble.

The true secret of his influence, however, was not that he was prosperous, but that he was just. There was not a toiler in Great St.

Goram Mine who did not know that. In the past strength had been the synonym for tyranny. Those who possessed a giant's strength had used it like a giant. But Ralph had changed the tradition. The strong man was a just man and a generous, and it was for that reason his influence had grown with every pa.s.sing day.

Yet he was quite unconscious of the measure of his influence. In his own eyes he was only David Penlogan's son, though that fact meant a great deal to him. David Penlogan was an honest man--a man who, in a very real sense, walked with G.o.d--and it was Ralph's supreme desire to prove worthy of his father.

But it was of none of these things he thought as he walked slowly along between high banks of trees. The road was gra.s.s-grown from end to end, and was so constructed that the pedestrian appeared to be constantly turning corners.

"I think she will walk out to-day," he kept saying to himself. "This beautiful weather will surely tempt her out."

He had made up his mind what to do and say in case they did meet. For good or ill, he was determined to know his fate. It might be an act of presumption, or a simple act of folly--that was an aspect of the question that scarcely occurred to him.

The supreme factor in the case, as far as he was concerned, was, he loved her. On that point there was no room for doubt. The mere social aspect of the question he was const.i.tutionally incapable of seeing. A man was a man, and if he were of good character, and able to maintain the woman he loved, what mattered anything else?

He came face to face with Dorothy at a bend in the road. She was walking slowly, with her eyes on the ground. She did not hear his footsteps on the gra.s.s-grown road, and when she looked up he was close upon her.

There was no time to debate the situation even with herself, so she followed the impulse of her heart and held out her hand to him.

"I thought I should meet you to-day," he said. "I am sorry you have been ill."

"I was rather run down when I came," she answered, glancing at him with a questioning look, "and I think I caught cold on the journey."

"But you are better now?"

"Oh yes, I am quite well again."

"I feared you had returned to London. I have been on the look-out for you for weeks."

She looked shyly up into his face, but did not reply.

"I wanted to know my fate," he went on. "You know that I love you. You must have guessed it long before I told you."

"But--but----" she began, with averted eyes.

"Please hear me out first," he interrupted. "I would not have spoken again had not circ.u.mstances changed. When I saw you in London I was poor and without hope. I believed that I should have to leave the country in order to earn a living. To have offered marriage to anyone would have been an insult. And yet if I had never seen you again I should have loved you to the end."

"But have you considered----" she began again, with eyes still turned from his face.

"I have considered everything," he interrupted eagerly, almost pa.s.sionately. "But there is only one thing that matters, and that is love. If you do not love me--cannot love me--my dream is at an end, and I will endure as best I am able. But if your heart responds to my appeal, then the thing is settled. You are mine."

"But you are forgetting my--my--position," she stammered.

"I am forgetting nothing of importance," he went on resolutely. "There are only two people in the world really concerned in this matter, you and I, and the decision rests with you. It is not my fault that I love you. I cannot help it. You did not mean to steal my heart, perhaps, but you did it. It seems a curious irony of fate, for I detested your father; but Providence threw me across your path. In strange and inexplicable ways your life has become linked with mine. You are all the world to me. Cannot you give me some hope?"

"But my father still----" she began.

"You are of age," he interrupted. "No, no! Questions of parentage or birth or position do not count. Why should they? Let us get back to the one thing that matters. If you cannot love me, say the word, and I will go my way and never molest you again. But if you do love me, be it ever so little, you must give me hope."

"My father would never consent," she said quickly.

"That is nothing," he answered, almost impatiently. "I will wait till he does give his consent. Oh, Dorothy, the only thing I want to know is do you love me? If you can give me that a.s.surance, nothing else in the world matters. Just say the little word. G.o.d surely meant us for each other, or I could not love you as I do."

She dropped her eyes to the ground and remained motionless.

He came a step nearer and took her hand in his. She did not resist, nor did she raise her eyes, but he felt that she was trembling from head to foot.

"You are not angry with me?" he questioned, almost in a whisper.

"No, no; I am not angry," she said, almost with a sob. "How could I be?

You are a good man, and such love as yours humbles me."

"Then you care for me just a little?" he said eagerly.

"I cannot tell how much I care," she answered, and the tears came into her eyes and filled them to the brim. "But what does it matter? It must all end here and now."

"Why end, Dorothy?"

"Because my father would die before he gave me to you. You do not know him. You do not know how proud he is. Name and lineage are nothing to you, but they are everything to him."

"But he would have married you to Lord Probus, a--a bloated brewer!" He spoke angrily and scornfully.

"But he had been made a peer."

"What does that matter if Nature made him a clown?"

"Which Nature had not done. No, no; give him his due. He was commonplace, and not very well educated----"

"And do these empty social distinctions count with you?" he questioned.

"I sometimes hate them," she answered. "But what can I do? There is no escape. The laws of society are as inflexible as the laws of the Medes and Persians."

"And you will fling love away as an offering to the prejudices of your father?"