They sat in this way for a moment or two in silence, and during those moments Alice was summoning up her courage to speak. The palpitation at her heart was already gone, and she was determined that she would speak.
"Though I am very glad to see you," she said, at last, "I am sorry that my letter should have given you the trouble of this journey."
"Trouble!" he said. "Nay, you ought to know that it is no trouble. I have not enough to do down at Nethercoats to make the running up to you at any time an unpleasant excitement. So your Swiss journey went off pleasantly?"
"Yes; it went off very pleasantly." This she said in that tone of voice which clearly implies that the speaker is not thinking of the words spoken.
"And Kate has now left you?"
"Yes; she is with her aunt, at the seaside."
"So I understand;--and your cousin George?"
"I never know much of George"s movements. He may be in Town, but I have not seen him since I came back."
"Ah! that is the way with friends living in London. Unless circ.u.mstances bring them together, they are in fact further apart than if they lived fifty miles asunder in the country. And he managed to get through all the trouble without losing your luggage for you very often?"
"If you were to say that we did not lose his, that would be nearer the mark. But, John, you have come up to London in this sudden way to speak to me about my letter to you. Is it not so?"
"Certainly it is so. Certainly I have."
"I have thought much, since, of what I then wrote, very much,--very much, indeed; and I have learned to feel sure that we had better--"
"Stop, Alice; stop a moment, love. Do not speak hurriedly. Shall I tell you what I learned from your letter?"
"Yes; tell me, if you think it better that you should do so."
"Perhaps it may be better. I learned, love, that something had been said or done during your journey,--or perhaps only something thought, that had made you melancholy, and filled your mind for a while with those unsubstantial and indefinable regrets for the past which we are all apt to feel at certain moments of our life. There are few of us who do not encounter, now and again, some of that irrational spirit of sadness which, when over-indulged, drives men to madness and self-destruction. I used to know well what it was before I knew you; but since I have had the hope of having you in my house, I have banished it utterly. In that I think I have been stronger than you.
Do not speak under the influence of that spirit till you have thought whether you, too, cannot banish it."
"I have tried, and it will not be banished."
"Try again, Alice. It is a d.a.m.ned 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 to-morrow morning in our usual quiet, loving way, and that I may return home to-morrow evening. p.r.o.nounce 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?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sed between us. Must you not be ill when you seek to put an end to all that without any cause a.s.signed."
"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 pa.s.sed, 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 to-morrow,--to-morrow, or next month, or the month after. But if it cannot be so, then I will wait. Nothing but your marriage with some one else would convince me."
"I cannot convince you in that way," she said, smiling.
"You will convince me in no other. You have not spoken to your father of this as yet?"
"Not as yet."
"Do not do so, at any rate for the present. You will own that it might be possible that you would have to unsay what you had said."
"No; it is not possible."
"Give yourself and me the chance. It can do no harm. And, Alice, I ask you now for no reasons. I will not ask your reasons, or even listen to them, because I do not believe that they will long have effect even on yourself. Do you still think of going to Cheltenham?"
"I have decided nothing as yet."
"If I were you, I would go. I think a change of air would be good for you."