It seemed to him as if he had been wakened abruptly
from some bright bewildering dream; but the sharp pang of mercenary
desires disappointed, of sordid hopes suddenly reft, was not for him.
Beyond this sense of uncertainty, which had made the Haygarthian fortune
seem at best such "stuff as dreams are made of," there had been ever
present in his mind of late the dismal association connected with this
money. For this, and to get power over this through the rights of his
weak wife, had Philip Sheldon plotted against the life of that sweet girl
who was but newly rescued from the jaws of the grave. The bitter memory
of those days and nights of suspense could never have been quite
dissociated from the money that had been the primary cause of all this
slow torture.
"Do you think I shall love my wife any less because she has no claim to
the Haygarth estate?" he exclaimed presently, looking with
half-contemptuous indignation upon the broken-down Bohemer. "I loved her
long before I knew the name of Haygarth; I should have loved her if I had
found her a beggar in the London streets, a peasant-girl weeding for
sixpence a day in some dismal swamp of agricultural poverty and
ignorance. I am not going to say that this money would not have brought
us pleasure; pictures and gardens, and bright rooms, and books without
number, and intercourse with congenial acquaintance and delightful
journeyings to all the fairest places upon the earth, and the power to do
some good in our generation, and a sense of security for our future, and
by-and-by, perhaps, for the future of dear children, for whose prosperity
we should be more anxious than for our own.
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