CHAPTER XIX
THE AFTERNOON WAS ALREADY growing dark when the two other wayfarers, Mary and Ralph Denham, came out on the high road beyond the outskirts of Lincoln. The high road, as they both felt, was better suited to this return journey than the open country, and for the first mile or so of the way they spoke little. In his own mind Ralph was following the passage of the Otway carriage over the heath; he then went back to the five or ten minutes that he had spent with Katharine, and examined each word with the care that a scholar displays upon the irregularities of an ancient text. He was determined that the glow, the romance, the atmosphere of this meeting should not paint what he must in future regard as sober facts. On her side Mary was silent, not because her thoughts took much handling, but because her mind seemed empty of thought as her heart of feeling. Only Ralph’s presence, as she knew, preserved this numbness, for she could foresee a time of loneliness when many varieties of pain would beset her. At the present moment her effort was to preserve what she could of the wreck of her self-respect, for such she deemed that momentary glimpse of her love so involuntarily revealed to Ralph. In the light of reason it did not much matter, perhaps, but it was her instinct to be careful of that vision of herself which keeps pace so evenly beside every one of us, and had been damaged by her confession. The grey night coming down over the country was kind to her; and she thought that one of these days she would find comfort in sitting upon the earth, alone, beneath a tree. Looking through the darkness, she marked the swelling ground and the tree. Ralph made her start by saying abruptly:
‘What I was going to say when we were interrupted at lunch was that if you go to America I shall come too. It can’t be harder to earn a living there than it is here. However, that’s not the point. The point is, Mary, that I want to marry you. Well, what do you say?’ He spoke firmly, waited for no answer, and took her arm in his. ‘You know me by this time, the good and the bad,’ he went on. ‘You know my tempers. I’ve tried to let you know my faults. Well, what do you say, Mary?’
She said nothing, but this did not seem to strike him.
‘In most ways, at least in the important ways, as you said, we know each other and we think alike. I believe you are the only person in the world I could live with happily. And if you feel the same about me—as you do, don’t you, Mary?—we should make each other happy.’ Here he paused, and seemed to be in no hurry for an answer; he seemed, indeed, to be continuing his own thoughts.
‘Yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do it,’ Mary said at last. The casual and rather hurried way in which she spoke, together with the fact that she was saying the exact opposite of what he expected her to say, baffled him so much that he instinctively loosened his clasp upon her arm and she withdrew it quietly.
‘You couldn’t do it?’ he asked.
‘No, I couldn’t marry you,’ she replied.
‘You don’t care for me?’
She made no answer.
‘Well, Mary,’ he said, with a curious laugh, ‘I must be an arrant fool, for I thought you did.’ They walked for a minute or two in silence, and suddenly he turned to her, looked at her, and exclaimed: ‘I don’t believe you, Mary. You’re not telling me the truth.’
‘I’m too tired to argue, Ralph,’ she replied, turning her head away from him. ‘I ask you to believe what I say. I can’t marry you; I don’t want to marry you.’
The voice in which she stated this was so evidently the voice of one in some extremity of anguish that Ralph had no course but to obey her. And as soon as the tone of her voice had died out, and the surprise faded from his mind, he found himself believing that she had spoken the truth, for he had but little vanity, and soon her refusal seemed a natural thing to him. He slipped through all the grades of despondency until he reached a bottom of absolute gloom. Failure seemed to mark the whole of his life; he had failed with Katharine, and now he had failed with Mary. Up at once sprang the thought of Katharine, and with it a sense of exulting freedom, but this he checked instantly. No good had ever come to him from Katharine; his whole relationship with her had been made up of dreams; and as he thought of the little substance there had been in his dreams he began to lay the blame of the present catastrophe upon his dreams.
‘Haven’t I always been thinking of Katharine while I was with Mary? I might have loved Mary if it hadn’t been for that idiocy of mine. She cared for me once, I’m certain of that, but I tormented her so with my humours that I let my chances slip, and now she won’t risk marrying me. And this is what I’ve made of my life—nothing, nothing, nothing.’
The tramp of their boots upon the dry road seemed to asseverate nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary thought that this silence was the silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had seen Katharine, and parted from her, leaving her in the company of William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him—that seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past—so much made up of Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and other than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had made to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for luncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than she could remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see the truth is our great chance in this world.
‘If you don’t want to marry me,’ Ralph now began again, without abruptness, with diffidence rather, ‘there is no need why we should cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should keep apart for the present?’
‘Keep apart? I don’t know—I must think about it.’
‘Tell me one thing, Mary,’ he resumed; ‘have I done anything to make you change your mind about me?’
She was immensely tempted to give way to her natural trust in him, revived by the deep and now melancholy tones of his voice, and to tell him of her love, and of what had changed it. But although it seemed likely that she would soon control her anger with him, the certainty that he did not love her, confirmed by every word of his proposal, forbade any freedom of speech. To hear him speak and to feel herself unable to reply, or constrained in her replies, was so painful that she longed for the time when she should be alone. A more pliant woman would have taken this chance of an explanation, whatever risks attached to it; but to one of Mary’s firm and resolute temperament there was degradation in the idea of self-abandonment; let the waves of emotion rise ever so high, she could not shut her eyes to what she conceived to be the truth. Her silence puzzled Ralph. He searched his memory for words or deeds that might have made her think badly of him. In his present mood instances came but too quickly, and on top of them this culminating proof of his baseness—that he had asked her to marry him when his reasons for such a proposal were selfish and half-hearted.
