# Elizabeth's Pretenders/Part 1/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V.
The portrait was finished. Elizabeth still scowled at it, but confessed she could do no more. Of its defects few could be more conscious than she. The uncritical visitors to the studio, however, one and all, declared that "there never was such a likeness!" This was not complimentary to the colonel, and it made the artist, by what seemed to be strange perversity, really angry. He was much handsomer than she had represented him, and the expression which had insisted on appearing on the canvas was not one she wished to see, and which, in point of fact, she rarely did see. How it came about that she had perpetuated it, she could not tell. She had been slow to believe in him; but now he had succeeded in blinding her, as a less clever, but more vigilant worldly-minded girl would not have been blinded. She had defended her outworks bravely, but she felt them yielding. The citadel was being undermined further day by day. And yet she had seen and reproduced that cruel, merciless look which flashed now and again from his stone-blue eye! But the man had begun to exercise a fascination over her, against which instinct and reason were alike powerless. That gratified vanity had more to say to this than she recognized, is probable. Had she valued money more—had she thought ​about it at all, indeed—the danger of her position would have been apparent to her. She had been told, with tolerable distinctness, that Lord Robert Elton sought her because she was rich. Therefore she believed it. But to suspect the man who had declared that he ought to have lived three hundred years ago—the brave lion-hunter, the object of assiduous pursuit on the part of so many women—to suspect this paladin of sordidness, never crossed Elizabeth's mind. It is humiliating to have to show that my heroine was a fool: let her youth and her ignorance of the world plead in extenuation of her folly.
June was more than half over, but there was no great heat as yet. The fields were literally "a cloth of gold" with buttercups, through which lovers could still wander at midday, unafeared of the sun's power. The long soft days, indeed, sometimes melted into rain, and the air which was heavy with the scent of roses, always became damp at twilight. The nightingales had ceased singing; but the thrushes and blackbirds still called to each other from the thickets and fruit-trees at sunrise, so that they often woke Elizabeth through her open window. If she was not feeling sleepy, she sometimes arose, and stepped upon the balcony to watch the dewy mists of dawn drunk up in the growing glory of the apricot-coloured sky; and as the evening twilight gathered over the garden, it was here that in those days she often communed with her heart. Outside it, what counsel had she? None.
One day Uncle William, impelled thereto by his wife, began—
"Your aunt says Wybrowe is mightily smitten with you my dear. What are you going to say to him, if ​he asks you—eh? With your fortune, you mustn't be throwing yourself away. Still, he's a fine-looking fellow, and thought a deal of. And there's his future title. He'll be Sir Rupert when his uncle dies. That's something, I suppose. You might do worse."
"To marry a man because he will some day have a title, and is six foot two, uncle, would not be wise," said Elizabeth, with a smile; "but I like Colonel Wybrowe—yes, I confess I like him better than any one I have ever seen. I don't know why. He is not very clever, and I am afraid he is not very good; but he is very brave, and very handsome; and though it is foolish, I suppose, to care about looks, I do care. I confess he attracts me, but I can't believe that he cares the least about me. If I did—if I could feel sure that this was not a passing fancy, perhaps—I think—yes, I—I think I would marry him."
"Well, Bessie," returned her uncle, staring with a puzzled look into vacancy, "as to not being good, young men will be young men. They're all of 'em much alike. You won't get a saint, my dear, not if you waited till—till you were fifty. I dare say he is no worse than the rest of 'em, and 'll settle down all right by-and-by. He has run through most of his fortune, I believe; but you'll have enough for both—and Twisden 'd see that it was strictly tied up—settled on yourself. He couldn't make ducks and drakes of the principal."
A little later in the same day Mrs. Shaw found occasion to say to her niece—
"He is in despair. He says he is afraid you don't care for him, and talks of emigrating. He won't marry this Miss Krupp, the American heiress with half a million, ​who has almost offered herself to him (it is too extraordinary what women will do!). He says he would rather do anything than sell himself. He is so high-minded!"
"Don't you think he is mistaken, aunt, in fancying that he cares about me? That is the thing."
"He does nothing but talk about you, my dear. It is quite fatiguing."
Elizabeth shook her head. "I should be wretched, if I married him, to find, by-and-by, that he had been mistaken; to see him attracted by other women, and to know that my influence over him was gone. I should be jealously hungry for my husband's love. No divided empire would satisfy me."
"All of which means that you are already a little bit in love, Bessie;" and Mrs. Shaw laughed lightly, though she avoided her niece's searching eyes.
"I don't know. Perhaps it does. Sometimes I think it does. I have seen so little of men that I scarcely know if what I feel at present for Colonel Wybrowe is love or not. But I believe I could grow to care for him—really to care, I mean—if I felt sure about him—quite sure."
"He cannot hang on here for ever," said Mrs. Shaw, with a little sharpness of tone. "It is not fair to him, and it would be still more unfair to you. It would naturally keep other men away. Lord Robert would have proposed if he had not been called away; but you know very well what that means. I am very glad he came, that you might contrast the two. Such a dried-up piece of humanity! Those two girls were just dying of envy of you for capturing Colonel Wybrowe; that is ​why they were so ill-natured. But they have gone away, and spread the report abroad that you are to be married to Colonel Wybrowe; so if you have made up your mind not to have him, he had much better go, and not waste his time and make himself miserable for nothing."
"I have not made up my mind."
"Well, will you do so, Bessie, by the end of the week?"
There was a long pause before she replied, "I will."
It was growing dark when Mrs. Shaw left her and tripped into the smoking-room. She looked round; Colonel Wybrowe was alone.
She came up close to where he sat, in an armchair near the window, a cigar in his mouth, reading the Sporting Gazette. He dropped it, and looked up inquiringly into her face. Her hand played with his fair beard for a moment.
"It will be all right," she whispered, as she stooped over him, and pressed her lips to his.
Then she turned and ran lightly out of the room. The first gong for dinner had just sounded.
Mrs. Shaw, with a fine instinct for the best conditions of love-making, had some of the neighbours every day to dinner. How could Wybrowe and the object of his pursuit enjoy a tête-à-tête with no one present but Uncle William and herself? A little party of eight or ten enabled the society to break up into couples, and wander about the garden and shrubberies by the clear starlight which shone upon Farley all that week. On the night in question, the rector, with his wife and two other ​neighbours, dined there. Elizabeth had a cordial regard for the old pastor, but he did not combine the wisdom of the serpent with the innocency of the dove; he was not a man to whom to appeal for advice in any emergency which demanded worldly perspicacity and knowledge of character. Still, when he said to her, "Is it true that we are soon to lose you? Am I premature in offering you my congratulations?" she replied gravely, "Yes, Mr. Newton; you are premature. Ought a woman to marry a man who asks her, if she likes him, without—without any other considerations?"
"If there is nothing against him, my dear Miss Shaw, what other consideration should weigh? Love is such a purifier, such a strength against trouble and temptation! A good woman may prove such a safeguard to her husband! The man who wishes to win you, I am told, is distinguished for his strength and bravery. He may become a soldier of Christ by-and-by, under good influence."
"I am afraid I am not good enough."
"Ah! my dear, pray for guidance, and love will do the rest. Love is so potent. If this strong man loves you, do not be afraid."
The rector's premises being built on sand, the structure he erected was dangerous, and liable to crush whomsoever trusted to it. Nor can it be said that Elizabeth did so wholly. Yet his words weighed with her. Looking back afterwards to the indecision of that night, she felt that she had been influenced, more than she had known at the time, by the faith of the guileless old man. He was the very embodiment of charity, that "thinketh no evil." ​He was as unsuspicious of sordid motives, after seventy years' contact with the world, as Elizabeth herself. But his world had been a narrow one; a sleepy hollow, a round of dozy virtues, and small fretful sins. Of the great iniquity so near at hand, his knowledge of life had given him no premonition.
An hour later, that same evening, under the jasmine bower at the end of the garden, but faintly lifted from darkness by the stream of lamplight out of the open drawing-room window, Colonel Wybrowe definitely asked Elizabeth to be his wife.
"Are you sure you are not mistaken?" she said, in a low, hesitating voice. "I have heard that men so often are. If you had met me in London—if you could compare me with many other girls—girls in society, who know all the things of which I am so ignorant—perhaps you would change your mind. You might see me then with different eyes."
"I shall never see you otherwise than as I do now, Elizabeth"—he, too, dropped his voice to almost a whisper. "You are awfully sweet and clever, and there is no girl in London, I am sure, to compare with you; no other girl I have ever seen that I would marry. You're not narrow-minded, and all that. You understand me, and will make allowances; you won't expect to find me a model of all the virtues—will you?"
"No; I do not expect to find you that."
His strong arm encircled her; he stooped and kissed her brow. She did not free herself; she did not resist. She looked up into the handsome, dimly lit face that bent over her. She continued, after a pause—
​"But I have a strange secret fear that you are deceiving yourself about me. I am of a jealous, passionate nature. If I gave you my whole heart, and you deserted me, I should not take it as, I believe, some wives do. I should be desperate. I should be capable of committing a crime. I know I could never sit down with folded hands, and submit. Think well before you take me, and be very sure."
"I am very sure," he murmured, and sealed his asseveration with another kiss. Perhaps it was well for him that the light was so dim: she might have detected that look in his eyes which so rarely revealed the soul within him, and which might have ratified her dread.
She had no doubt, at that moment, but that she really loved him. Many another woman, as clever as Elizabeth, has been thus self-deceived. The man's physical attraction was great; and leaning there against him, with his strong arm round her, she believed in him as she had never believed in him before.
It was some minutes before she spoke. Then, in a very low voice, she said—
"It has been so difficult to think this possible. What can you, who have known so many, see in me? But I know you are the soul of honour and manliness, whatever faults you may have. Brave men are always true. You would not say all you have said to me if you were not sure—would you?"
"Certainly not, dear. Why should I? You are the first woman to whom I have ever proposed—the first for whom I have felt ready to sacrifice my independence. Of course I have been a loose fish, and have got debts, ​and so on. You know that. I don't want to make myself out better than I am. But when we are married, I mean to turn over a new leaf. You'll help me."
Which was true in a more literal sense than he wished her to understand.
They wandered away from the light, through the shadowy garden, where the roses, touched with dew, seemed to breathe their benisons on her as she slowly passed, his arm around her, his golden beard pressed against her dark hair when he bent over her. King Charles's Wain was riven as with bolts of gold into the blue heaven above them; a little nearer the horizon of the hills a great planet had arisen; the sky was light, though there was no moon. How happy she was—or fancied that she was—during that short half-hour! She had put away doubt; she had forgotten everything till the stable clock struck eleven, and the sound of wheels upon the carriage drive told that the first guests had departed.
"I had no idea it was so late!" cried Elizabeth, aghast. "We must go in, or they will all be gone to bed."
But the rector was still there, when they entered the drawing-room, and greeted her with his benevolent smile. The blood suffused her cheek; she looked beautiful in her happiness at that moment. With the simple directness which characterized her, she went up to him and placed her hand in his. It was needless for her to speak: he understood her.
"Good night to you, my dear young lady," he said in a low voice. "May this prove to be a good night to you in your life! And may the peace of God be yours!"