She assured him sparklingly that she was well. She was ready to accompany him to the garden and stroll over the park.
'Headache it is not,' she added.
But she had to pay the fee for inviting a solicitous accepted gentleman's proximity.
This time she blamed herself and him, and the world he abused, and destiny into the bargain. And she cared less about the probation; but she craved for liberty. With a frigidity that astonished her, she marvelled at the act of kissing, and at the obligation it forced upon an inanimate person to be an accomplice. Why was she not free? By what strange right was it that she was treated as a possession?
'I will try to walk off the heaviness,' she said.
'My own girl must not fatigue herself.'
'Oh, no; I shall not.'
'Sit with me. Your Willoughby is your devoted attendant.'
'I have a desire for the air.'
'Then we will walk out.'
She was horrified to think how far she had drawn away from him, and now placed her hand on his arm to appease her self-accusations and propitiate duty. He spoke as she had wished, his manner was what she had wished; she was his bride, almost his wife; her conduct was a kind of madness; she could not understand it.
Good sense and duty counselled her to control her wayward spirit.
He fondled her hand, and to that she grew accustomed; her hand was at a distance. And what is a hand? Leaving it where it was, she treated it as a link between herself and dutiful goodness. Two months hence she was a bondwoman for life! She regretted that she had not gone to her room to strengthen herself with a review of her situation, and meet him thoroughly resigned to her fate. She fancied she would have come down to him amicably. It was his present respectfulness and easy conversation that tricked her burning nerves with the fancy. Five weeks of perfect liberty in the mountains, she thought, would have prepared her for the days of bells. All that she required was a separation offering new scenes, where she might reflect undisturbed, feel clear again.
He led her about the flower-beds; too much as if he were giving a convalescent an airing. She chafed at it, and pricked herself with remorse. In contrition she expatiated on the beauty of the garden.
'All is yours, my Clara.'
An oppressive load it seemed to her! She passively yielded to the man in his form of attentive courtier; his mansion, estate, and wealth overwhelmed her. They suggested the price to be paid. Yet she recollected that on her last departure through the park she had been proud of the rolling green and spreading trees. Poison of some sort must be operating in her. She had not come to him to-day with this feeling of sullen antagonism; she had caught it here.
'You have been well, my Clara?'
'Quite.'
'Not a hint of illness?'
'None.'
'My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the kingdom die for it! My darling!'
'And tell me: the dogs?'
'Dogs and horses are in very good condition.'
'I am glad. Do you know, I love those ancient French chateaux and farms in one, where salon windows look on poultry-yard and stalls. I like that homeliness with beasts and peasants.'
He bowed indulgently.
'I am afraid we can't do it for you in England, my Clara.'
'No.'
'And I like the farm,' said he. 'But I think our drawing-rooms have a better atmosphere off the garden. As to our peasantry, we cannot, I apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of disintegrating the social structure.'
'Perhaps. I proposed nothing.'
'My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced that I could obey.'
'You are very good.'
'I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction.'
Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness of other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and of their isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that she beat about in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the specific injury he had committed. Sweeping from sensation to sensation, the young, whom sensations impel and distract, can rarely date their disturbance from a particular one; unless it be some great villain injury that has been done; and Clara had not felt an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex was but a passing protest, that left no stamp. So she conceived she had been behaving cruelly, and said, «Willoughby»; because she was aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.
His whole attention was given to her.
She had to invent the sequel. 'I was going to beg you, Willoughby, do not seek to spoil me. You compliment me. Compliments are not suited to me. You think too highly of me. It is nearly as bad as to be slighted. I am… I am a…' But she could not follow his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness. How could she display what she was?
'Do I not know you?' he said.
The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point, signified as well as the words that no answer was the right answer. She could not dissent without turning his music to discord, his complacency to amazement. She held her tongue, knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep cleft.
He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own. The bridesmaids were mentioned.
'Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the plea of indifferent health. She is rather a morbid person, with all her really estimable qualities. It will do no harm to have none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds: though one blowing flower among them… However, she has decided. My principal annoyance has been Vernon's refusal to act as my best man.'
'Mr. Whitford refuses?'
'He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His pretext is a dislike to the ceremony.'
'I share it with him.'
'I sympathize with you. If we might say the words and pass from sight! There is a way of cutting off the world: I have it at times completely: I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one had to utter. But with you! You give it me for good. It will be for ever, eternally, my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us; we are one another's. Let the world fight it out; we have nothing to do with it.'
'If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing?'
'So entirely one, that there never can be question of external influences. I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt: I see you awaiting me: I read your heart as though you were beside me. And I know that I am coming to the one who reads mine! You have me, you have me like an open book, you, and only you!'
'I am to be always at home?' Clara said, unheeded, and relieved by his not hearing.
'Have you realized it? — that we are invulnerable! The world cannot hurt us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is ours, and we are impervious in the enjoyment of it. Something divine! surely something divine on earth? Clara! — being to one another that between which the world can never interpose! What I do is right: what you do is right. Perfect to one another! Each new day we rise to study and delight in new secrets. Away with the crowd! We have not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere where the world cannot breathe.'
'Oh, the world!' Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk deep.
Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of scorn.
'My letters?' he said, incitingly.
'I read them.'
'Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum — I have done so! — still felt the benefit of the gradual initiation. It is not good for women to be surprised by a
