“Try again, Alice. It is a damned spirit, and belongs neither to heaven nor to earth. Do not say to me the words that you were about to say till you have wrestled with it manfully. I think I know what those words were to be. If you love me, those words should not be spoken. If you do not—”
“If I do not love you, I love no one upon earth.”
“I believe it. I believe it as I believe in my own love for you. I trust your love implicitly, Alice. I know that you love me. I think I can read your mind. Tell me that I may return to Cambridgeshire, and again plead my cause for an early marriage from thence. I will not take such speech from you to mean more than it says!”
She sat quiet, looking at him—looking full into his face. She had in nowise changed her mind, but after such words from him, she did not know how to declare to him her resolution. There was something in his manner that awed her—and something also that softened her.
“Tell me,” said he, “that I may see you again tomorrow morning in our usual quiet, loving way, and that I may return home tomorrow evening. Pronounce a yea to that speech from me, and I will ask for nothing further.”
“No; I cannot do so,” she said. And the tone of her voice, as she spoke, was different to any tone that he had heard before from her mouth.
“Is that melancholy fiend too strong for you?” He smiled as he said this, and as he smiled, he took her hand. She did not attempt to withdraw it, but sat by him in a strange calmness, looking straight before her into the middle of the room. “You have not struggled with it. You know, as I do, that it is a bad fiend and a wicked one—a fiend that is prompting you to the worst cruelty in the world. Alice! Alice! Alice! Try to think of all this as though some other person were concerned. If it were your friend, what advice would you give her?”
“I would bid her tell the man who had loved her—that is, if he were noble, good, and great—that she found herself to be unfit to be his wife; and then I would bid her ask his pardon humbly on her knees.” As she said this, she sank before him on to the floor, and looked up into his face with an expression of sad contrition which almost drew him from his purposed firmness.
He had purposed to be firm—to yield to her in nothing, resolving to treat all that she might say as the hallucination of a sickened imagination—as the effect of absolute want of health, for which some change in her mode of life would be the best cure. She might bid him begone in what language she would. He knew well that such was her intention. But he would not allow a word coming from her in such a way to disturb arrangements made for the happiness of their joint lives. As a loving husband would treat a wife, who, in some exceptionable moment of a melancholy malady, should declare herself unable to remain longer in her home, so would he treat her. As for accepting what she might say as his dismissal, he would as soon think of taking the fruit-trees from the southern wall because the sun sometimes shines from the north. He could not treat either his interests or hers so lightly as that.
“But what if he granted no such pardon, Alice? I will grant none such. You are my wife, my own, my dearest, my chosen one. You are all that I value in the world, my treasure and my comfort, my earthly happiness and my gleam of something better that is to come hereafter. Do you think that I shall let you go from me in that way? No, love. If you are ill I will wait till your illness is gone by; and, if you will let me, I will be your nurse.”
“I am not ill.”
“Not ill with any defined sickness. You do not shake with ague, nor does your head rack you with aching; but yet you may be ill. Think of what has passed between us. Must you not be ill when you seek to put an end to all that without any cause assigned.”
“You will not hear my reasons,”—she was still kneeling before him and looking up into his face.
“I will hear them if you will tell me that they refer to any supposed faults of my own.”
“No, no, no!”
“Then I will not hear them. It is for me to find out your faults, and when I have found out any that require complaint, I will come and make it. Dear Alice, I wish you knew how I long for you.” Then he put his hand upon her hair, as though he would caress her.
But this she would not suffer, so she rose slowly, and stood with her hand upon the table in the middle of the room. “Mr. Grey—” she said.
“If you will call me so, I shall think it only a part of your malady.”
“Mr. Grey,” she continued, “I can only hope that you will take me at my word.”
“Oh, but I will not; certainly I will not, if that would be adverse to my own interests.”
“I am thinking of your interests; I am, indeed;—at any rate as much as of my own. I feel quite sure that I should not make you happy as your wife—quite sure; and feeling that, I think that I am right, even after all that has passed, to ask your forgiveness, and to beg that our engagement may be over.”
“No, Alice, no; never with my consent. I cannot tell you with what contentment I would marry you tomorrow—tomorrow, or next month, or the month after. But if it cannot be
