"A fool."
"And you would rather marry him than me?"
"Yes; because you are not one."
"That is a novel reason for refusing to marry a man," he said, leaning his elbow on the table and watching her keenly.
"It is a wise one," she said shortly. "If I marry him I shall shake him off my hand when it suits me. If I remained with him for twelve months he would never have dared to kiss my hand. As far as I wish he should come, he comes, and no further. Would you ask me what you might and what you might not do?"
Her companion raised the moustache with a caressing movement from his lip and smiled. It was not a question that stood in need of any answer.
"Why do you wish to enter on this semblance of marriage?"
"Because there is only one point on which I have a conscience. I have told you so."
"Then why not marry me?"
"Because if once you have me you would hold me fast. I shall never be free again." She drew a long, low breath.
"What have you done with the ring I gave you?" he said.
"Sometimes I wear it; then I take it off and wish to throw it into the fire; the next day I put it on again, and sometimes I kiss it."
"So you do love me a little?"
"If you were not something more to me than any other man in the world, do you think--" She paused. "I love you when I see you; but when you are away from me I hate you."
"Then I fear I must be singularly invisible at the present moment," he said. "Possibly if you were to look less fixedly into the fire you might perceive me."
He moved his chair slightly, so as to come between her and the firelight. She raised her eyes to his face.
"If you do love me," he asked her, "why will you not marry me?"
"Because, if I had been married to you for a year I should have come to my senses and seen that your hands and your voice are like the hands and the voice of any other man. I cannot quite see that now. But it is all madness. You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch. If I married you, afterward it would arise and a.s.sert itself, and I should hate you always, as I do now sometimes."
"I like you when you grow metaphysical and a.n.a.lytical," he said, leaning his face upon his hand. "Go a little further in your a.n.a.lysis; say, "I love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being the case, my affection for you is not of a duly elevated, intellectual and spiritual nature." I like you when you get philosophical."
She looked quietly at him; he was trying to turn her own weapons against her.
"You are acting foolishly, Lyndall," he said, suddenly changing his manner, and speaking earnestly, "most foolishly. You are acting like a little child; I am surprised at you. It is all very well to have ideals and theories; but you know as well as any one can that they must not be carried into the practical world. I love you. I do not pretend that it is in any high, superhuman sense; I do not say that I should like you as well if you were ugly and deformed, or that I should continue to prize you whatever your treatment of me might be, or to love you though you were a spirit without any body at all. That is sentimentality for beardless boys. Every one not a mere child (and you are not a child, except in years) knows what love between a man and a woman means. I love you with that love. I should not have believed it possible that I could have brought myself twice to ask of any woman to be my wife, more especially one without wealth, without position, and who--"
"Yes--go on. Do not grow sorry for me. Say what you were going to--"who has put herself into my power, and who has lost the right of meeting me on equal terms." Say what you think. At least we two may speak the truth to one another."
Then she added after a pause:
"I believe you do love me, as much as you possibly could love anything; and I believe that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the most generous act you ever have performed in the course of your life, or ever will; but, at the same time, if I had required your generosity, it would not have been shown me. If, when I got your letter a month ago, hinting at your willingness to marry me, I had at once written, imploring you to come, you would have read the letter. "Poor little devil!" you would have said, and tore it up. The next week you would have sailed for Europe, and have sent me a check for a hundred and fifty pounds (which I would have thrown in the fire), and I would have heard no more of you."
The stranger smiled.
"But because I declined your proposal, and wrote that in three weeks I should be married to another, then what you call love woke up. Your man"s love is a child"s love for b.u.t.terflies. You follow till you have the thing, and break it. If you have broken one wing, and the thing flies still, then you love it more than ever, and follow till you break both; then you are satisfied when it lies still on the ground."
"You are profoundly wise in the ways of the world; you have seen far into life," he said.
He might as well have sneered at the firelight.
"I have seen enough to tell me that you love me because you cannot bear to be resisted, and want to master me. You liked me at first because I treated you and all men with indifference. You resolved to have me because I seemed unattainable. This is all your love means."
He felt a strong inclination to stoop down and kiss the little lips that defied him; but he restrained himself. He said, quietly: "And you loved me--"
"Because you are strong. You are the first man I ever was afraid of.
And"--a dreamy look came into her face--"because I like to experience, I like to try. You don"t understand that."
He smiled.
"Well, since you will not marry me, may I inquire what your intentions are, the plan you wrote of. You asked me to come and hear it, and I have come."
"I said, "Come if you wish." If you agree to it, well; if not, I marry on Monday."
"Well?"
She was still looking beyond him at the fire.
"I cannot marry you," she said slowly, "because I cannot be tied; but if you wish, you may take me away with you, and take care of me; then when we do not love any more we can say good-bye. I will not go down country," she added; "I will not go to Europe. You must take me to the Transvaal. That is out of the world. People we meet there we need not see again in our future lives."
"Oh, my darling," he said, bending tenderly, and holding his hand out to her, "why will you not give yourself entirely to me? One day you will desert me and go to another."
She shook her head without looking at him.
"No, life is too long. But I will go with you."
"When?"
"Tomorrow. I have told them that before daylight I go to the next farm.
I will write from the town and tell them the facts. I do not want them to trouble me; I want to shake myself free of these old surroundings; I want them to lose sight of me. You can understand that is necessary for me."
He seemed lost in consideration; then he said:
"It is better to have you on those conditions than not at all. If you will have it, let it be so."
He sat looking at her. On her face was the weary look that rested there so often now when she sat alone. Two months had not pa.s.sed since they parted; but the time had set its mark on her. He looked at her carefully, from the brown, smooth head to the little crossed feet on the floor. A worn look had grown over the little face, and it made its charm for him stronger. For pain and time, which trace deep lines and write a story on a human face, have a strangely different effect on one face and another. The face that is only fair, even very fair, they mar and flaw; but to the face whose beauty is the harmony between that which speaks from within and the form through which it speaks, power is added by all that causes the outer man to bear more deeply the impress of the inner.
The pretty woman fades with the roses on her cheeks, and the girlhood that lasts an hour; the beautiful woman finds her fullness of bloom only when a past has written itself on her, and her power is then most irresistible when it seems going.
From under their half-closed lids the keen eyes looked down at her. Her shoulders were bent; for a moment the little figure had forgotten its queenly bearing, and drooped wearily; the wide, dark eyes watched the fire very softly.
It certainly was not in her power to resist him, nor any strength in her that made his own at that moment grow soft as he looked at her.
He touched one little hand that rested on her knee.