The way, however, was too long to be completed without further speech. Fanny, as she walked, was struggling to find some words by which she might still hold her ground, but the words were not forthcoming. It seemed to herself that she was being carried away by this man, because she had suddenly lost her remembrance of all negatives. The more she struggled the more she failed, and at last gave it up in despair. Let Mr. Saul say what he would, it was impossible that they should be married. All his arguments about duty were nonsense. It could not be her duty to marry a man who would have to starve in his attempt to keep her. She wished she had told him at first that she did not love him, but that seemed to be too late now. The moment that she was in the house she would go to her mother and tell her everything.
“Miss Clavering,” said he, “I shall see your father tomorrow.”
“No, no,” she ejaculated.
“I shall certainly do so in any event. I shall either tell him that I must leave the parish—explaining to him why I must go; or I shall ask him to let me remain here in the hope that I may become his son-in-law. You will not now tell me that I am to go?” Fanny was again silent, her memory failing her as to either negative or affirmative that would be of service. “To stay here hopeless would be impossible to me. Now I am not hopeless. Now I am full of hope. I think I could be happy, though I had to wait as Jacob waited.”
“And perhaps have Jacob’s consolation,” said Fanny. She was lost by the joke and he knew it. A grim smile of satisfaction crossed his thin face as he heard it, and there was a feeling of triumph at his heart. “I am hardly fitted to be a patriarch, as the patriarchs were of old,” he said. “Though the seven years should be prolonged to fourteen I do not think I should seek any Leah.”
They were soon at the gate, and his work for that evening was done. He would go home to his solitary room at a neighbouring farmhouse, and sit in triumph as he eat his morsel of cold mutton by himself. He, without any advantage of a person to back him, poor, friendless, hitherto conscious that he was unfitted to mix even in ordinary social life—he had won the heart of the fairest woman he had ever seen. “You will give me your hand at parting,” he said, whereupon she tendered it to him with her eyes fixed upon the ground. “I hope we understand each other,” he continued. “You may at any rate understand this, that I love you with all my heart and all my strength. If things prosper with me, all my prosperity shall be for you. If there be no prosperity for me, you shall be my only consolation in this world. You are my Alpha and my Omega, my first and last, my beginning and end—my everything, my all.” Then he turned away and left her, and there had come no negative from her lips. As far as her lips were concerned no negative was any longer possible to her.
She went into the house knowing that she must at once seek her mother; but she allowed herself first to remain for some half-hour in her own bedroom, preparing the words that she would use. The interview she knew would be difficult—much more difficult than it would have been before her last walk with Mr. Saul; and the worst of it was that she could not quite make up her mind as to what it was that she wished to say. She waited till she should hear her mother’s step on the stairs. At last Mrs. Clavering came up to dress, and then Fanny, following her quickly into her bedroom, abruptly began.
“Mamma,” she said, “I want to speak to you very much.”
“Well, my dear?”
“But you mustn’t be in a hurry, mamma.” Mrs. Clavering looked at her watch, and declaring that it still wanted three-quarters of an hour to dinner, promised that she would not be very much in a hurry.
“Mamma, Mr. Saul has been speaking to me again.”
“Has he, my dear? You cannot, of course, help it if he chooses to speak to you, but he ought to know that it is very foolish. It must end in his having to leave us.”
“That is what he says, mamma. He says he must go away unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless I will consent that he shall remain here as—”
“As your accepted lover. Is that it, Fanny?”
“Yes, mamma.”
“Then he must go, I suppose. What else can any of us say? I shall be sorry both for his sake and for your papa’s.” Mrs. Clavering as she said this looked at her daughter, and saw at once that this edict on her part did not settle the difficulty. There was that in Fanny’s face which showed trouble and the necessity of further explanation. “Is not that what you think yourself,
