‘That Moore is the brother of my son’s tutor. Would you let the Usher call you Sister?’
Bright and broad shone Shirley’s eye as she fixed it on her questioner now.
‘No, no! Not for a province of possession—not for a century of life!’
‘You cannot separate the husband from his family.’
‘What then?’
‘Mr. Louis Moore’s sister you will be.’
‘Mr. Sympson … I am sick at heart with all this weak trash; I will bear no more. Your thoughts are not my thoughts, your aims are not my aims, your gods are not my gods. We do not view things in the same light; we do not measure them by the same standard; we hardly speak in the same tongue. Let us part.
‘It is not,’ she resumed, much excited—‘it is not that I hate you—you are a good sort of a man; perhaps you mean well in your way; but we cannot suit; we are ever at variance. You annoy me with small meddling, with petty tyranny; you exasperate my temper, and make and keep me passionate. As to your small maxims, your narrow rules, your little prejudices, aversions, dogmas, bundle them off. Mr. Sympson— go, offer them a sacrifice to the deity you worship; I’II none of them; I wash my hands of the lot. I walk by another creed, light, faith, and hope than you.’
‘Another creed! I believe she is an infidel.’
‘An infidel to your religion; an atheist to your god.’
‘An—atheist!!!’
‘Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship; in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fishtailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best— making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred—secret hatred; there is disgust —unspoken disgust; there is treachery—family treachery; there is vice—deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions children grow unloving between parents who have never loved; infants are nursed on deception from their very birth; they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies. Your god rules at the bridal of kings—look at your royal dynasties! your deity is the deity of foreign aristocracies—analyze the blue blood of Spain! Your god is the Hymen of France—what is French domestic life? All that surrounds him hastens to decay; all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death!’
‘This language is terrible! My daughters and you must associate no longer, Miss Keeldar; there is danger in such companionship. Had I known you a little earlier—but, extraordinary as I thought you, I could not have believed—’
‘Now, sir, do you begin to be aware that it is useless to scheme for me? That, in doing so, you but sow the wind to reap the whirlwind? I sweep your cobweb projects from my path, that I may pass on unsullied. I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience, shall dispose of my hand—they only. Know this at last.’
Mr. Sympson was becoming a little bewildered.
‘Never heard such language!’ he muttered again and again. ‘Never was so addressed in my life—never was so used.’