She seemed to listen in a profoundly respectful attitude to the reply of the vision, and then said as though in answer to it: "Your Royal Highness, I am imprisoned in this ship by a man who is the son of a sailor and was himself a sailor until he was expelled from the Service of which your Royal Highness is one of the most brilliant lights, by a shameful and a barbarous act unworthy of an officer and a gentleman. He hopes to marry me, sir, by stealing me from my father, who was a captain in the Royal Navy, and who trusted him. I entreat your Royal Highness's influence to procure my immediate liberation from this wicked man that I may return to my father who will be breaking his heart over my disappearance and loss.",
"I may trust, at all events," continued the money-lender, "now that you are in receipt of money—and if the terms have been correctly named to me they speak very highly in favour of Captain Acton's generosity—that you will give my debt your immediate attention, and that if you cannot pay all, you will pay as much as I have a right to expect from the amount you receive.",
If he doubted her insanity at all his suspicion had no stiffer ground than the shallow sand on which reposed his hope[Pg 327] that she was acting. Throughout this passage he did not think to consider her as the child of a great actress. To him she had always been a gentle, sweet, undemonstrative girl, ingenuous in speech, kind, charitable, beloved by the poor, one whose pursuits were amiable and pure. She was nimble and poetical with her pencil. She sang pretty songs prettily. Her beauty informed with a colour of its own the melodies her fingers evoked from the keys or strings of the instruments she touched. He could not think of her as having the talents of an actress, or even the tastes of one. He had never heard of her taking a part in a performance above a charade. Nothing, therefore, but madness or an extraordinary dramatic genius which it was impossible for him to think of her as possessing, could create those parts which she had enacted before him in a manner so immoderately life-like, so absolutely in unison with what he himself could conceive of the behaviour of madness, that deep in his soul might be found the conviction that she had lost her reason, and that his passionate, unprincipled love was the cause of it..
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