"I think it quite enough, considering where it was found," shortly said Kate.
"In the studio! What about it: was it not in the studio I gave it to her?"
"That is all very well, but I should like to know how it has got stained with the very same ochre that was used to daub the face of poor Medora."
"Even that is nothing, Kate; you know well enough that everything Daisy wears bears traces of the place where she spends her days."
Miriam had remained indifferent and calm, whilst all this was going on in her presence; she had not changed her att.i.tude, scarcely had she raised her eyes, or cast a look around her. She now stretched forth her hand, took up the bracelet from the table where it lay, looked at it, laid it down again, and said very quietly--
"It is mine."
"Yours!" cried Cornelius.
"Yes, I know it by the clasp. I put it on this morning, and dropped it, I suppose, in the studio."
"There, Kate," triumphantly exclaimed Cornelius, "so much for circ.u.mstantial evidence!"
Kate looked utterly confounded.
"Yours," she said to Miriam, "yours? are you quite sure it is really yours?"
"Quite sure," was the composed reply.
Miss O"Reilly turned to me, and asked shortly--
"Why did you not say it was not yours?"
"I did not know it was not mine, Kate. I knew I had left mine in the studio."
"Then it is really yours!" said Kate, again turning to Miriam, who replied with an impatient "Yes," and an ill-suppressed yawn of mingled indifference.
"Truth is strong," rather sadly said Kate; "the bracelet which you put on this morning, Miss Russell, was picked op by me last night at the door of the studio."
Miriam gave a sudden spring on her chair; if a look could have struck Kate to the heart, her look would have done it then. But Kate only shook her handsome head, and smiled, fearless and disdainful.
"Yes," she said again, "I picked it up there last night, thought it was Daisy"s, and, to give her a lesson of carefulness, I said nothing about it. This morning I suppressed it from another motive. Do you claim it still, Miss Russell?"
Everything like emotion had already pa.s.sed from the face of Miriam. She had sunk hack on her seat; her look had again become indifferent and abstracted; her countenance again wore the expression of fatigue and _ennui_ it had worn the whole evening. As Kate addressed her, she looked up, and very calmly said--
"Why not?"
I looked at Cornelius; his brow, his cheek, his lip, had the pallor of marble or of death: he did not speak, he did not move; he looked like one whose very last stronghold the enemy has reached, and who beholds his own ruin with more of silent stupor than of grief. At length he put me away; he rose; he went up to the table which divided him from Miriam; he laid both his hands upon it, and looking at her across, he bent slightly forward, and said, in a voice that seemed to come from the depths of his heart--
"Miriam, tell me you did not do it; Miriam!"
She did not reply.
"Tell me you did not do it--I will believe you."
Miriam looked at him; as she saw the doubt and misery painted on his face, something like pity pa.s.sed on hers.
"Would you?" she said, with some surprise. "No, Cornelius, you could not, and even if you could, I would not prolong this. I might deny or give some explanation at which you would grasp eagerly; but where is the use?--I am weary." She pa.s.sed her hand across her brow, as if to put by someheavy sense of fatigue, and looked round at us with an expression of dreary languor in her gaze which I have never forgotten. "I am weary,"
she said again; "for days and weeks this sense of fatigue has been creeping over me. The struggle to win that I never should have prized when won, is ended. I regret it not--still less should you."
"Miriam," pa.s.sionately said Cornelius, "it is false, and you must, you shall deny it."
"I will not," Miriam replied firmly, and not without a certain cool dignity which she preserved to the last. "I tell you I am weary, and that if this did not part us, something else should."
A chair stood near Cornelius; he sat down, and gave Miriam a long, searching glance, that seemed to ask, in its dismay and indignant grief-- "Are you the woman whom I have loved?"
"You never understood me," she said, impatiently. "You might have guessed that I had, from youth upwards, lived in the fever of pa.s.sion inspired or felt; you might have known that I should master or be mastered. I warned you that though I could promise nothing, I should exact much, and you defied me to exact too much. Yet when it came to the test--what did you give me? a feeling weak as water, cold as ice! Why, you would not so much as have given up what you call Art for my sake!"
"Nor for that of mortal woman," indignantly replied Cornelius. "Give up painting! Do you forget I told you I would love you as a man should love?"
"That is, I suppose, a little more than Daisy, and something less than your pictures. I have been accustomed to other love."
Cornelius reddened.
"An unworthy pa.s.sion," he said, "stops at nothing to secure its gratification; a n.o.ble one is bound by honour."
"I leave you to such pa.s.sions," calmly answered Miriam; "to painting, which you love so much; to the domestic affections in which you weakly thought to include me. I have tried to make you feel what I call pa.s.sion, I have failed; it is well that we should part; let us do so quietly, and without recrimination."
Cornelius looked at her like one confounded. She spoke composedly, as if she neither cared for nor felt that, on her own confession, she was guilty. Of excuse or justification she evidently thought not.
"You think of Daisy," she continued; "think of my conduct to her what you choose. I will only say this, though she, poor child, has hated me, as she loved you, with her whole heart, you have been, are still, and will remain, her greatest enemy."
"I!" indignantly exclaimed Cornelius.
"Yes: and you must be blind not to see that, by seeking to sever from you a child whom a few years will make a woman, I was her best friend; and so she will know some day, when you break her heart, and tell her you never meant it."
"May G.o.d forsake me when I place not her happiness before mine!" replied Cornelius, in a low tone, and giving me a troubled look.
"You are generous," answered Miriam, with an ironical, but not unmusical laugh, and looking at me over her shoulder with all the scorn of conscious beauty; "you think so now; but I know, and have always known, better. And yet, spite of that knowledge, and though with foolish insolence she ever placed herself in my way, I have felt sorry for her at times. Of course you will not believe this: with the exaggeration of your character, you will at once set me down as one delighting in evil; whereas what you call evil is to me only a different form of good, justifiable according to the end in view. If I had succeeded in inspiring you with an exclusive, all-engrossing pa.s.sion--even though the cost had been a few pictures less, and the loss of Daisy"s heart--know that I would have conferred on you the greatest blessing one human being can bestow on another."
Her eyes shone with inward fire; her cheeks glowed; her parted lips trembled. I do not think we had ever seen her half so beautiful.
Cornelius looked at her, and smiled bitterly.
"I pity you," she said, with some scorn; "I pity you, to deride a feeling you cannot feel: know that I at least speak not without the knowledge."
"Oh, I know it," he exclaimed, involuntarily.
"You know it?"
"Yes," he replied, more slowly, "and I have known it long. One, whose pride you had stung, found means to procure letters written by you some years ago, and which proved to rue how ardently you had been attached to another--now dead, it is true. For a whole day I thought to give you up; but I was weak, I burned the letters, and said nothing. I loved you well enough to forgive you the tacit deceit; too well to think of humbling you by confessing that I knew it, and too jealously perhaps not to be glad to annihilate every token of a previous affection."
"Humbling me!" said Miriam, rising; "know that it is my pride. I felt not like you, Cornelius; I would have made myself the slave of him whom I loved, had he wished it."
She folded her hands on her bosom, like one who gloried in her subjection, and continued--