Something Beautiful
Chapter - 14
The butler opened a pair of carved wooden doors and stepped aside so they could enter the room decorated with rows of oak-framed paintings. Holding back the urge to bend her legs saluting the butler who stood upright, Lisa walked forward, anxiously waiting for the moment she had to face her new friend and see her tears filled with hatred.
The estimate is not wrong. The man sitting behind the carved table was very unlike the gentle and laughing man who met him two days ago. Today, the man was like a haughty, cold stranger who looked at Lisa's family as if they were insects crawling on her beautiful platform. The man did not even bother to show a polite demeanor by standing up or introducing them to the two people who were also present in the room. Instead the man nodded stiffly at Uncle Monty and his mother, signalling that they could sit in the chair in front of his desk.
However, when her gaze finally turned to Lisa, her hard face softened and her eyes turned warm, as if understanding how embarrassed Lisa felt. While walking around the table, the man pulled an extra chair for Lisa. "Does your bruise hurt, little girl?" she asked, noticing the bluish stain on Lisa's cheek.
Flattered by the man's manners and attention, Lisa shook her head. "It's okay, it doesn't hurt at all" he replied, feeling unusually relieved to see the man not resenting him for having stormed his house in this kind of disrespectful manner. Lisa, clumsy for wearing her mother's greatness, sat on the edge of the chair. When she tried to move slowly to the back, her dress skirt got stuck and her neck pressed against her throat and she inevitably had to lift her chin up. Trapped like a rabbit, Lisa looked into Mingyu's full-grey eyes. "Are you comfortable?" asked the man with a serious expression.
"Quite comfortable, thank you," Lisa lied, very sure the man knew his discomfort and tried hard to refrain from laughing.
"Maybe you'd better stand up and sit down again?"
"I'm comfortable enough with my position now,"
The amused lightning she had glimpsed earlier in Mingyu's eyes instantly disappeared as soon as the man returned to sit behind the table. Mingyu looked at his mother and Uncle Monty, then unceremoniously said, "You guys really don't need to embarrass yourself by making this useless visit. I really intend to give a token of gratitude to Lisa in the form of a check of 1,000 Pounds Sterling, which will be sent to you next week."
Lisa's brain immediately turned around hearing that enormous amount of money. 1,000 pounds of Sterling can support his family quite luxuriously for at least two years. He could scatter firewood, if he wanted to, but of course he wouldn't.
"That's not enough" said Uncle Monty, and Lisa's head turned.
Mingyu's tone of voice instantly chilled as ice. "How much do you want?" he asked, his piercing gaze directed at poor Uncle Monty so that the man sat motionless in his chair.
"We want justice" said Uncle Monty and cleared his throat, "Our son, Lisa has saved your life."
Uncle Monty trembled under the ice-cold gaze directed at him, but even so he did not give up. "Our son Lisa saved your life, and in return, you've tainted her."
The nobleman seemed ready to explode. "I did what?" angry angry.
"You brought a woman from a good family to a public inn and then you were in one room with her."
"I took a little girl to a public inn" Mingyu said, "A little girl who is unconscious and needs the help of a doctor!"
"Look, Mr. Kim," refuted Uncle Monty in a surprisingly loud tone of voice, "You brought a young woman into the inn. You took him into the bedroom under the gaze of half the villagers, and then you took him out thirty minutes later, conscious, his clothes disheveled, and without calling a doctor. The villagers have moral standards, just like everyone, and you blatantly broke those standards. Well, for them it was a big scandal."
"If the moral inhabitants of your boring little hamlet consider bringing a child into the inn a big scandal, their brains must be washed! Now, we don't have to talk about trivial things, how much you...."
'Things are trivial!" Mrs Bruschweiler choked furiously, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the table so hard that her knuckles turned white. "You, you you disgusting basket-eyed guy! Lisa's seventeen and you've tainted her. Her fiance's parents were in my living room when you brought her into our house, and they're not marrying her to Lisa. You should be hanged! Hanging's too good for you, too,"
Mingyu did not seem to hear the last sentence, his head turned sharply towards Lisa then looked at the girl's face as if he had never seen her. "How old are you?" her insistence as if Lisa's mother's explanation is not enough.
Somehow Lisa managed to let out her voice despite her chest tight from embarrassment. It's worse, far worse, than he imagined. "Seventeen. L'm... I'll have my eighteenth birthday next week" he said in a faint voice full of regret, then his face flushed when he saw Mingyu's eyes staring at the tip of the hair down to *********** the small one, seemed to be in disbelief behind the dress was the body of an adult woman. Intending to apologize for her boy-like appearance, Lisa sadly added, "said Grandpa all the girls in my family are slow to develop, and I am," Realizing that what she said sounded very disrespectful, also unrelated, Lisa did not finish her sentence, her cheeks blushing red, she said, and he glanced desperately at the two unknown people who were also in the room, hoping they could understand or forgive his circumstances. But he saw none. The man looked at her with a mixture of surprise and amusement. The woman looked as if she had been carved from marble.
Lisa's eyes quickly turned back to Mingyu, and she saw the man's expression was completely wrathful. "By assuming I've made a mistake" she told Lisa's mother, "What do you want from me?"
"Since no good man would marry Lisa after what you did to her, we hope you marry her. He's a very good descendant and we still have relationships with noble families as well. You can't question his worthiness."