Lady of the Ice by James De Mille Read Free Book Online

heard some impossible proposal.
    â€œCertainly; why not?”
    â€œWill you be kind enough to inform me what thing short of death could ever deliver me out of her hands?” asked Jack, midly.
    â€œElope, as you proposed.”
    â€œThat’s the very thing I thought of; but the trouble is, in that case she would devote the rest of her life to vengeance. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman wronged,’ you know. She’d move heaven and earth, and never end, till I was drummed out of the regiment. No, my boy. To do that would be to walk with open eyes to disgrace, and shame, and infamy, with a whole community, a whole regiment, and the Horse-Guards at the back of them, all banded together to crush me. Such a fate as this would hardly be the proper thing to give to a wife that a fellow loves.”
    â€œCan’t you manage to make the widow disgusted with you?”
    â€œNo, I can’t,” said Jack, peevishly. “What do you mean?”
    â€œWhy, make it appear as though you only wanted to marry her for her money.”
    â€œOh, hang it, man! how could I do that? I can’t play a part, under any circumstances, and that particular part would be so infernally mean, that it would be impossible. I’m such an ass that, if she were even to hint at that, I’d resent it furiously.”
    â€œCan’t you make her afraid about your numerous gallantries?”
    â€œAfraid? why she glories in them. So many feathers in her cap, and all that, you know.”
    â€œCan’t you frighten her about your debts and general extravagance — hint that you’re a gambler, and so on?”
    â€œAnd then she’d inform me, very affectionately, that she intends to be my guardian angel, and save me from evil for all the rest of my life.”
    â€œCan’t you tell her all about your solemn engagement to Miss Phillips?”
    â€œMy engagement to Miss Phillips? Why, man alive, she knows that as well as you do.”
    â€œKnows it! How did she find it out?”
    â€œHow? Why I told her myself.”
    â€œThe deuce you did!”
    Jack was silent.
    â€œWell, then,” said I, after some further thought, “why not tell her every thing?”
    â€œTell her every thing?”
    â€œYes — exactly what you’ve been telling me. Make a clean breast of it.”
    Jack looked at me for some time with a curious expression.
    â€œMy dear boy,” said he, at length, “do you mean to say that you are really in earnest in making that proposition?”
    â€œMost solemnly in earnest,” said I.
    â€œWell,” said Jack, “it shows how mistaken I was in leaving any thing to your imagination. You do not seem to understand,” he continued, dolefully, “or you will not understand that, when a fellow has committed himself to a lady as I did, and squeezed her hand with such peculiar ardor, in his efforts to save himself and do what’s right, he often overdoes it. You don’t seem to suspect that I might have overdone it with the widow. Now, unfortunately, that is the very thing that I did. I did happen to overdo it most confoundedly. And so the melancholy fact remains that, if I were to repeat to her, verbatim, all that I’ve been telling you, she would find an extraordinary discrepancy between such statements and those abominably tender confessions in which I indulged on that other occasion, Nothing would ever convince her that I was not sincere at that time; and how can I go to her now and confess that I am a humbug and an idiot? I don’t see it. Come, now, old fellow, what do you think of that? Don’t you call it rather a tough situation? Do you think a man can see his way out of it? Own up, now. Don’t you think it’s about the worst scrape you ever heard of? Come, now, no humbug.”
    The fellow seemed actually to begin to feel a dismal kind of pride in the very hopelessness of his situation, and looked at me with