Merrick Leonard
The Quaint Companions
David found the afternoon the most irksome that he had spent at Regent's Park. Though he told himself that his misgiving was fantastic, it continued to disturb him, and while he sipped weak tea, and made perfunctory responses, he was trying to define Hilda's feeling for him, questioning whether it was in woman's nature for Hilda to write to him as he believed she wrote, and yet to be susceptible to the courtship of another man. Vivian was handsome, debonair, "so popular wherever he went." Yes, Vivian had always been popular, he remembered bitterly. Might not the passion of a lover at her side prove a stronger force than the worship of a correspondent which had never been confessed? Could she not say – might she not be happy to say – that by never a word had her letters to himself been more than the letters of a friend? Then Vivian would take her from him. Vivian, who it seemed to him in a burst of fear and jealousy had always taken everything, would rob him of her too!.. But, again, the coincidence was so improbable. Besides, his mother might be wrong; she might be exaggerating the idlest fancy; perhaps Vivian had no desire to marry anyone!
He was relieved when the clock gave him an excuse to rise.
"Well, good-bye, mother." He avoided her complexion and dropped a kiss on her dyed fringe.
"Must you go?" she said. "Er – David, if you're really sure you can spare a few pounds, I'd be very glad of the money to get a new dress with. I haven't got a decent thing to put on for dinner. This blouse is so shabby I'm ashamed to sit at the table in it."
He promised to send what she wanted, and took up his hat. When his hand was on the door-knob, she asked him if he would stay to supper; but he declined the invitation. As he made his way home, he repeated more than once that his tremor was ridiculous, and assured himself that he was much amused at his folly. He smiled stiffly, to prove his amusement… Still he wished that the week were past and Vivian had come to town. He would feel easier when he had seen Vivian.
CHAPTER XXII
Ownie's conjectures were not misleading her; the business manager's views of life had been deranged. To dress well and have a "good time" now appeared to him less dazzling a prospect than to clothe Hilda and have a home. Confronted by temptation he had been no stronger than the multitude; he was prepared to travel the course handicapped, and like every other young man at the inevitable crisis, persuaded himself that a pair of arms round his neck would accelerate the pace. Hilda, too, was in love. Moreover, she was in love with the idea of being married. She had, passed the stage at which the Beauty of every family looks forward to wedding a millionaire, and although she had gathered something of Vivian's position by now, she meant to accept him when he asked her. One of the greatest sacrifices for love that a girl in the provinces can make is to marry and remove to local lodgings. There were perfervid moments when Hilda felt equal even to this, but in moods less head-long it was her intention to remain engaged to him until he secured a similar appointment in another town. Meanwhile Vivian wondered whether she would be startled if he confessed his feelings thus early.
Fearful that he might "lose it all," he resolved to be discreet; so he confided to her facts of which she was unaware, and withheld the one that she knew. It was a vast relief to him to settle the matter of the opera between them. Of late the opera had seemed to darken his future; and when he had intimated nervously that her father overestimated his influence with Mr. Jordan, he thanked Heaven to see that she did not find the news an overwhelming shock.
One afternoon – it was on the Friday after Ownie unbosomed herself to David – Hilda exclaimed —
"What do you think, Bee? The man who wrote A Celibate's Love Songs is Mr. Harris's half-brother. He has just gone."
The colour left Bee's face; her heart thudded.
"Who?" she faltered. "David Lee?"
"No, Mr. Harris. He dropped in just now to return a book. Isn't it strange? His mother married twice; she married Elisha Lee, the black tenor – I don't know how she could have done it. The poet is their son – a mulatto. Fancy!"
The woman stood stone-still… She moved by a blind instinct to a chair. It seemed to her a long time before she could reach chair.
"A mulatto?" she said faintly.
"Yes – almost a nigger, Mr. Harris says. He's ashamed – I could tell, though he tried to sound casual. Of course it isn't nice for him to have a half-brother like that, is it? And then his mother doing such a thing! I was awfully sorry for him, poor fellow – he did look so uncomfortable while he was talking. Of course he hung on to his brother's cleverness and all that, but – Well, he can't be very proud, can he?"
Bee made no answer; she did not hear. "A mulatto – almost a nigger." For an instant her mind was dwarfed by it. She could not think beyond it, could see no further than the monstrous personality that seemed to close upon her. "Almost a nigger." The instant was heavy, affrighting with his presence. In the next, her thoughts flashed to the mulatto who had gone to Godstone – and she knew that he was the man.
"He must look rather like that Mr. Tremlett, I suppose," Hilda was saying.
She nodded. "Yes."
"Fancy a nigger writing poetry! You don't seem very interested? I thought you'd gasp when I told you – you liked his book so much."
"Did you? Oh, I am interested. Yes, fancy his writing poetry.'"
She felt sick, stupefied; she could not talk. David Lee was a mulatto; was the poor young man with the swarthy skin and the negro features whom she had pitied condescendingly, whom she had passed, and repassed, and addressed with no emotion. She sat struggling with the thing. She did not doubt it, she never questioned it for a moment; it was so obvious now that she even wondered that she had not suspected it then; but anomalously David seemed for the first time strange to her, remote. The association dazed her, and before the physical impression all the sense of familiarity receded.
"Tremlett" was David Lee. He had been to seek her. As the cloud of her confusion lifted, she saw the reason of his long delay, saw why, at last, he had assumed a name. Light was shed upon his work; its sorrow was illumined, she understood the secret of its intimate appeal. Like herself, he suffered and was despised.
He had been to seek her, afraid to tell her who he was. Her? No, not her —Hilda! She stared across the room at her sister blankly: Hilda had renounced the effort at conversation, and was in a love-reverie over a novelette. It was Hilda he had been to seek, attracted by her photograph! He had gone at last not to find the writer of the letters, but the girl whose likeness he had seen. Only when the likeness reached him had he cared to go! And he had followed Hilda about the garden, looked at her with his heart in his eyes – he was fond of her. Yes, it was to Hilda that his letters were really written now – and Hilda would probably marry his half-brother!
Her misery and shame were profound; she did not define the vague, pained stir of another feeling in her breast. She was engulfed by the knowledge that she had brought a new grief into his life, had given him still more to bear. She hated herself, and she felt that when he learned the truth he too would hate her – that he must; that he would curse the misshapen fool who had cheated him into loving the girl who would be his brother's wife.
When hours had passed, she untied the letters that had come to her since her return from Surrey, and read them in her bedroom slowly by the light of recognition. The sore stir of the subtle feeling within her was stronger as she read them, realising that they were meant for Hilda. But compassion for him swept her like a flood. The spirit of the man spoke to her again; she found herself again sensitive to his spirit – less dominated by his face.
They were meant for Hilda! Always her mind reverted to this. It became her ascendant thought. She locked the letters in their drawer, and tried to consider the one that she must write; and now she shuddered before confession, not so much in dread of the throes that she would suffer, as of the blow that she would deal. His confidences were meant for Hilda, and he must be told that Hilda had never heard from him, had never responded by a line. She perceived dismayed that the words explaining it would sound to him the words of a stranger – of a little woman with a crooked back, claiming her sister's qualities. Yes, the very qualities that had first pleased him he attributed to Hilda now! And in herself, when he understood, they would fall to nothingness. Her sympathies were abstractions, shadows; the realities were Hilda's lips and eyes, and lithe, straight form. While she sat there, Hilda came to the room with a message; Bee did not look at her as she answered. She tried to think it was because she had been crying; but there was another reason which she would not see, which she shunned because the inborn prejudices of a white woman feared to own it – in her heart there was a jealousy of Hilda.
Sunday came before she had written to David. He went to Regent's Park uneasily. Vivian and his mother were in the little room, half-parlour, half-office, in which she made out the bills, and received applicants for "board residence." It was clear that he had interrupted an altercation. Vivian's smile of greeting was an obvious effort, and Ownie was frankly discomposed. For two or three minutes, while the young men exchanged remarks, she kept silent, breathing quickly, her nostrils dilated, her mouth compressed. Then she broke out —
"Why don't you tell David your news? Your brother's going to be married, David. Don't you congratulate him on his luck?"
"Is that so?" said David, turning to him.
"So the mater says," muttered Vivian. "I didn't know it myself – I'm not engaged yet."
She sniggered: "Oh, it doesn't take long to get engaged; you can soon do that if you want to!"
"Well, I do want to, and I mean to marry her if she'll have me!" he exclaimed. "And now you've got it, so we needn't say any more."
"How pretty," she said between a sneer and a sob. "She has a beautiful influence over you, I must say – to make you rude to your mother."
"Oh, of course," he returned, "it's all her fault that you take it badly, isn't it? It's all her fault that you quarrel with me when I confide in you? That's rich! It strikes me I've behaved about as well as a fellow could, in telling you how things stand; I needn't have said anything till it was settled. I think you might pretend to be glad even if you aren't."
"'Glad'?"
"Yes, glad. What's to prevent your being glad? One would imagine I was doing you some infernal injury by the way you talk."
"I'm talking for your own good; you're too young to get married. Before you've been – "
"Oh, I know all about that!" he cried; "I should always be too young, according to you. I tell you what it is: you're not thinking of my good at all – you're thinking of yourself. You don't like the idea of my marrying; you've got it in your head that you'll 'lose' me if I marry – you said so at the beginning – and so you call me names, and run her down – a girl you've never seen – and try to persuade yourself it's holy affection for me. But it isn't, it isn't anything of the kind. It's just selfishness; and as you've used such very plain English, I'll use some too and tell you so. It's sheer selfishness, to want me to spoil my life to please you. What have you ever done for me, that you should expect me to sacrifice myself for you? I think it's disgusting."
His handsome face was flushed, his manner insolent. The girl to whom his attachment presented him at his best would scarcely have recognised her lover here at his worst. He stirred in Ownie memories of his father, memories of scenes in the Liverpool villa when the fur business had become involved. She did not speak; her lips twitched. Although her objections appeared to David unreasonable, he felt sorry for her. Whatever her faults towards others, she had always been fond of Vivian – it jarred that Vivian reproached her for selfishness.
After a little pause she said wistfully: "If that's the way you feel, I'm afraid I can't expect to see much of you in future whether you marry or not?"
"You don't see much of me now; I don't live here."
"But you belong to me still," she pleaded.
He looked towards David with an air of triumph. "You see what I say is quite true: it isn't for my sake that she's against my marrying, but for her own – I'm to sacrifice myself because she's jealous."
David lit a cigarette, without replying. All this time his pulses were impatient for the sound of the girl's name.
Ownie's humility deserted her; her temper flamed, though there were still tears in her voice.
"'Sacrifice'?" she retorted. "It's a fine sacrifice, to keep your comfort! The sacrifice'll come in if you throw yourself away for the first pretty face you meet. I thought you had more sense – you talk like a sentimental boy. 'Sacrifice yourself'? In a year's time you'd have forgotten you ever wanted her, and she'd be engaged to somebody else! Any young man can get spoony on any girl if he sees enough of her. Why don't you pick up a girl of a different sort? You must have plenty of opportunities. If you want to play the fool, choose a girl who doesn't aim at getting married!"
Vivian rose with fury in his veins. He made a desperate effort to disguise it, to answer her with dignity.
"I must decline to discuss the matter. If you can compare the love of my life with – with that kind of thing, there's no more to be said."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, exasperated, "what an idiot you are! Marry her then, and drag uphill with a wife and a family on your back, and see how you like it. Make haste before the bargain has gone; I daresay she'll jump at any man who asks her."
"Ah, it isn't every woman who'll jump at any man who asks her," he said savagely. "You're not a fair judge on that point, you know!"
The blood swept up to her forehead, and then she blanched, and the rouge stains looked grotesque. She trembled as if the blow had been struck with his fists. Her dyed head went down in her hands, and she began to sob – unrestrainedly, hysterically, in an abandonment of wretchedness.
He watched her, discomfited. His anger dwindled in view of her defeat, and already he repented his taunt. He decided, ashamed, to pretend that he did not understand what she was crying about.
David went over to her, murmuring encouragement.
"Let me alone," she quavered. "Go away, both of you; I don't want anyone."
"I don't know what has upset you," Vivian stammered. "I didn't mean anything particular."
"You did," she gasped; "you insulted me – you tried to! You said I was too low to judge her – your mother was too low to judge her! I'll never talk about your marriage again as long as I live. I don't want to hear about it." She dabbed her eyes and cheeks impetuously, and moved to the door. "I hope you'll be happy … that's all. I'm going; I've nothing more to say."
The door closed, and there was a moment's pause. Her sons looked at each other.
"Damned nonsense!" said Vivian, scowling.
"I didn't mean any harm. I wish I hadn't come."
"She has gone up to her bedroom," said David constrainedly. "You'd better run up after her."
"What for – to have another scene? No, thank you; I've had enough… Well, I suppose we may as well go."
"I think I'll just say a word to her first. Will you wait for me? I won't be long. You will wait, won't you? I want to talk to you."
Vivian nodded. "All right; but don't tell her that I want to come up, because I don't. It's beastly, this sort of thing. Good Lord! one would think I was dependent on her; one would think she was making me an allowance… Give me a cigarette."
David found a servant to point "Madam's" room out to him, and tapped timidly. Ownie had thrown herself on the bed, and at his entrance she turned, in the hope that it was his brother's.
"Oh, it's you," she said. "Has he gone?"
"No, he's downstairs. He – I'm sure he's sorry he hurt you, mother."
"He's hard," she faltered, "hard as nails. He doesn't care; he doesn't care for me a bit. You heard how he talked to me. 'What have I ever done for him?' he asked. What have I ever done for him? You know, you know very well how good I've always been to Vivian. When he was a child I never refused him anything – I studied him in every way – he was always first to me. And this is how he treats me. He talks to me as if I were a stranger. It wouldn't trouble him for a minute if he never saw me again."
"Oh, you shouldn't say that," he murmured; "it isn't true. He's got a rough tongue, but his heart is good. He doesn't show what he feels. He's just as unhappy now as you are, but he – it isn't easy for him to find the right words. You understand that really, only you're too sore to remember it yet."
"He only thinks of that girl," she sobbed. "'Jealous,' he called me. If I am jealous, what of it? He's all I've got, and she's taking him away from me. I'm not young any more, I haven't the interests that I used to have; I don't want to be left alone. He doesn't care a snap of his fingers for me now. He never cared much, but I wouldn't see it, and now he cares nothing. Nobody cares for me; there's not a soul to mind whether I live or die. Oh, it was nice of you to come up – it's more than he did – but you're not fond of me, David; you never were. I'm not blaming you – I'm not unjust – it's my own fault, that. But it isn't my fault with him, God knows it isn't! If I deserve anything I deserve to be loved by Vivie. I don't ask for much, I don't expect miracles; but I did expect to be treated well by Vivie when I was old, when I was lonely, and I had nobody else to turn to."
The tears had streaked the rouge on her quivering face; her yellow hair, disordered by the pillow, showed the lines of age that it was trained to hide. Timeworn and desolate, she lay huddled on the bed, making her moan while he sought pityingly to comfort her; and it pained him that he could not speak of his own affection for her – that she could not believe him if he did.
When she was more tranquil he left her. She had not asked for her elder son to be sent to her, nor did he inquire whether he was wanted.
"You've been long enough!" he said. "Well, is she better?"
"Yes," David answered coldly, "she is better. Have you anything to do? What time do you go back?"
Vivian explained that he was not returning to Beckenhampton till the morrow: "I've business here; that's why I came up. No, I've nothing to do till eight o'clock – then I've got to see a man at the Eccentric." They descended the steps, and, after a furtive glance at his half-brother, he added deprecatingly: "It has been going on for an hour pretty nearly – you only heard the fag-end of it. I can tell you that what I've had to listen to would have tried the patience of a saint!" It embarrassed him to walk in the streets with David, and he signed to a passing hansom. "Where shall I tell him to drive? I'll come to your place with you if you like."
His contrition by no means abated his sense of being ill-used, nor did his indifference to his companion extend to his companion's disapproval. That David should be presuming to censure him was a situation not the less annoying because it seemed to him anomalous, and they were no sooner in the cab than he began vehemently to expatiate upon his grievance. David waited with rising eagerness for an opportunity to frame the question that again engrossed him.
"If I had guessed how she'd take the news, there'd have been none of this confounded row at all – I'd have left her in the dark. It's an encouraging thing, upon my soul it is, to be bullied when you make a confidant of your mother! What's it to do with her, anyhow? It won't cost her anything. How does it affect her if I marry? It's not as if I had to keep her – she's in no need of my assistance; I've never given her a pound in my life." He seemed to regard this as conclusive, and repeated it. "On my honour, I've never given her a pound in my life; she'd be every bit as well off if I were married, as she is now I'm single! There isn't a grain of logic in her objection; it isn't even as if I were living at home. Hang it, I scarcely ever see her! It's a regular dog-in-the-manger attitude she adopts – she hasn't got me herself, and she grudges me to anybody else."
"That isn't the way she looks at it," said David; "while you're single she feels she has still got you. Who is the girl?"
"She's beautiful – she's absolutely the most beautiful girl I ever met. She – she's the top stair of the highest flight of an artist's imagination. You should see the people turn round after her wherever she goes. And she's as clever as she's good-looking. I never believed I should meet a woman who'd understand me as she does. 'Jump at the first man who asks her'? Ha, ha! You can take your oath she's had proposals enough, young as she is… I didn't come up with the intention of talking about it at all; it was the mater pumped me. I thought she was entering into it at the start – she was smiling, she seemed interested; I gave myself away before I dreamt she was going to make a fuss. Then it began. A bit of a sneer, a little ridicule, pretending it was all too silly to talk seriously about – after she'd led me on, after she'd made me think she was sympathising! Then when she saw that didn't work, she got nasty; she began to show her claws – I was a 'fool' in every other sentence. A man is the best judge of his own life; I know what I want, without anybody telling me. I'd have proposed long ago if I were sure it would be all right. I haven't much to offer, unfortunately. 'Throwing myself away'? I'm no catch for a girl like that. And then, of course … I don't know; I think she does, but … I can't swear she cares for me. Perhaps when it came to the point – she may only like me as a friend."
"What's her name?" said David. "How did you meet her?"
"I met her father first, and then he asked me up to the house. I'd seen her already then, or I daresay I shouldn't have gone. I might have missed everything if she hadn't been with him that afternoon. Funny, eh? Did it ever strike you how a fellow's life is often altered by things that don't seem anything at the time? I mean how the biggest things turn up from things that you'd think don't matter. There's a new idea for your poetry – you go in for original fancies like that, don't you? I read somewhere that your book's full of 'em. Her father is very amiable to me, but – he's not very wide awake – I don't think he sees how the land lies. He mayn't be keen on giving his daughter to me when I spring it on him, even if she accepts me. I wish she hadn't got a father. If she were on her own in the profession, the running would be easier for me; they marry in the profession on nothing – some of them – live in lodgings, and carry the babies down to the station on Sunday mornings. It's different with a girl like her. And the town is full of Johnnies who are in their governors' businesses and could offer her a decent home – a villa on the Hunby Road, and a couple of servants. It makes one a bit shaky about one's chances, you know."
The cab stopped before David could obtain the answer that he sought, and he opened the door with his latchkey, and led the way upstairs. His restlessness under the flood of discourse loosed upon him had heightened his misgiving. There had been nothing to justify his fear except enthusiasm – no word to suggest that it was Hilda who was referred to; he kept telling himself so. But, fluttering in his senses, there was a nervous, inexplicable conviction that it was Hilda. Reason could not still it. He even dreaded to repeat his question, feeling that with insistence the bolt would fall.
He took the whisky and a syphon out of the miniature sideboard, and called on the landing for tumblers. Vivian dropped into the armchair on the hearth.
"Yes, it doesn't make a fellow sanguine, to remember how much better she might do," he went on. "I don't mean that she's mercenary – nothing of the sort – but I daresay her family will be against it. Not that they're particularly well off themselves, as far as that goes – rather the reverse. Still, they have got a house. It's not being able to take a house that makes a fellow look so hard up. It doesn't show while he's single – I might have a thousand a year now, for all anybody can tell – but if I stop in diggings after I'm married, it'll be a different pair of shoes. There's no doubt that when a fellow marries, he advertises his position for all the world to see. I'm sick of diggings."
"So am I," said David.
The drudge had burst in with the glasses. Vivian got up, and lounged about the room. "Is that where you write?" he asked. He wandered to the smaller table in a corner, on which some manuscript lay, and swung round with an ejaculation:
"Good heavens! How did you get this?" He held up Hilda's photograph.
The answer to David's question had come. It reverberated as if he had been unprepared. Almost he felt that he had been unprepared. He stared at his brother mutely.
"This is her likeness… Isn't this Hilda Sorrenford? How did you get it?"
"She sent it to me," replied David, dragging out his voice.
"Sent it to you? … Sent it to you? Why, she doesn't know you!"
"Oh yes, she knows me. That is, she writes to me."
"Writes to you?"
"Yes."
"What about?"
"I must explain to you. It's difficult to say. We have written to each other for a long time. She wrote first about my work – she liked it – and then somehow we began to correspond regularly… She doesn't know that we're related; I haven't spoken of you – I didn't know she had ever seen you."
"I don't understand. I've spoken of you: she didn't say she knew you. Why did she make a secret of it?"
"I can't think why."
"Have you ever met her?"
"Yes."
"It's the most extraordinary – Where?"
"She was in the country this summer with her sister."
"Bee?"
"Yes, 'Bee.' I went down there. That was after she sent me the likeness. I wanted to see her. I had rooms in the same house for a few days."
"Upon my soul!.. And she let me think – why, she seemed astonished to hear you were a – She knew nothing about you except your name!"
There was silence for an instant.
"Do you mean she was astonished to hear I was a mulatto?" asked David. "You told her?"
"Yes."
"How long ago?"
"The other day."
"When? … Last week? This week?"
"This week."
David turned aside. It was a week since he had received Bee's last letter. "What did she say?" he faltered.
"She was astonished."
"Horrified?"
"N – no, she wasn't so interested as all that. But I don't understand!" he exclaimed again; "you said just now that you had met her?"
"She doesn't know I've met her – she doesn't know it was I. I took another name; I called myself 'Tremlett.'"
"You called, yourself 'Tremlett'? Why? What the devil is all this about – what did you take another name for?"
"I didn't want her to discover I – I wasn't a white man; not then, not so soon. I was afraid."
"'Afraid'?"
"Afraid she might stop writing to me if she knew."
"So help me God! it sounds as if you're telling me you are in love with her?"
"Yes," said David quietly, "that is what I have to tell you. I am in love with her."
They stood looking into each other's eyes for several seconds, neither of them moving.
"Is this a joke?" asked Vivian harshly.
"Oh no, it's true, it's perfectly true. I'm sorry, very sorry, to hear you're fond of her; but I loved her before I heard it – you mustn't forget that. It oughtn't to make bad blood between us, whatever happens. I've told you as soon as I could; I've been quite open with you."
"I – I'm hanged if I'm quite sure now what you're driving at," said Vivian after another pause. "You're 'sorry' – 'whatever happens'?.. What is it you're doing – warning me? Do you mean – You don't mean to say you think she'll marry you?"
"I hope and pray she will. If she cares more for you, of course she won't."
"What?" He forced a laugh. "Are you out of your mind? Why, the thing's preposterous! It's an insult to her to imagine it… Look here, I don't want a row with you. You must see very well that it's no good. We don't make ourselves, it's not your fault that you're not the same as other fellows, it's your misfortune – but you can't expect a decent girl to marry a coloured man; it's against nature."
"Our mother did," said David.
"I've had quite enough about that!.. Besides, we all know she was wretched. And I've told you Hilda belongs to me. Don't come interfering; it has gone too far already, with the correspondence and the likeness. I can't make it out."
"She doesn't belong to you; if she belonged to you, I'd say nothing. She belongs to neither of us – she can choose the one she likes best. Well, let her choose! If my love is preposterous, if it's an insult to her, why are you frightened for me to go and plead?"
"Frightened?" Vivian blazed; "do you think I'm jealous of you? You know better. You're frightened yourself – you said so. When you went to her, it was like a coward; by your own showing, you've hung about her under a false name. I suppose that was 'open,' was it? You've been trying to get round her by your poetry, haven't you? trying to sneak her fancy before she knew what you were like! Go and plead – and be damned to you – and hear what she'll say, now she knows what you are!"
He waited for an answer, affected another laugh, and then turned to the table and picked up his hat. David drew close to him, shaking.
"You make the quarrel," he panted, "do you? You complain?.. By what right? She was dear to me before you had ever seen her, before you had ever heard of her, before you'd set foot in the town she lives in. You complain? It's for me to resent, not you. All our lives since we were children, you've had everything I was denied because you were good-looking and I was hideous; when we were boys your good looks made things harder for me; as men, all the pleasure of life has been for you, while I've had nothing but contempt. And at last when a girl has come to care for me – to care for what I am, my work, my thoughts, my feelings, the things that are myself —you must blunder in the way, and want to take her from me too. You taunt me with my colour? It ought to remind you of what I've had to bear; it ought to shame you for asking me to give up to you the only chance of happiness I've ever had! If I've been a coward, I was what the intolerance of minds like yours has made me. Show your own courage – take your appeals to the girl you love, don't beg me to stand aside for you! You taunt me with my colour? Wait till she does! Talk to her as best you can – and so will I. For once I'm not afraid of your good looks – she has seen deeper than my skin. Tell her that you love her, and find which has more power to move her heart – your face, or the words in me!"