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Page 23
She looked at him with stupid amazement, as if the real meaning of this
already once declared desire had only just distinctly reached her mind,
or as if the effect of its first announcement had been quite effaced by
the succeeding outburst.
"Why, I thought you knew! You can't have heard--about me," she said.
"I have heard, I know all," he exclaimed, taking a step forward and
standing over her. "Forgive me, darling! forgive me for being almost glad
when I heard that you were free, and not married out of my reach. I can't
think of anything except that I've found you. It is you, isn't it? It is
you. I don't care what's happened to you, if it is only you."
As he spoke in this vehement, fiery way, she had been regarding him with
an expression of faint curiosity. "I believe you do really mean it," she
said, wonderingly, lingering over the words; "you always were a queer
fellow."
"Mean it!" he exclaimed, kneeling before her, his voice all tremulous
with the hope which the slightly yielding intonation of her words had
given him. "Yes--yes--I mean it."
The faint ghost of a smile, which only brought out the sadness of her
face, as a taper in a crypt reveals its gloom, hovered about her eyes.
"Poor boy!" she said; "I've, treated you very badly. I was going to make
an end of myself this afternoon, but I will wait till you are tired of
your fancy for me. It will make but little difference. There! there!
Please don't kiss me."
CHAPTER VIII.
He did not insist on their marriage taking place at once, although in her
mood of dull indifference she would not have objected to anything he
might have proposed. It was his hope that after a while she might become
calmer, and more cheerful. He hoped to take in his at the altar a hand a
little less like that of a dead person.
Introducing her as his betrothed wife, he found her very pleasant
lodgings with an excellent family, where he was acquainted, provided her
with books and a piano, took her constantly out to places of amusement,
and, in every way which his ingenuity could suggest, endeavoured to
distract and divert her. To all this she offered neither objection nor
suggestion, nor did she, beyond the usual conventional responses, show
the slightest gratitude. It was as if she took it for granted that he
understood, as she did, that all this was being done for himself, and not
for her, she being quite past having anything done for her. Her only
recognition of the reverential and considerate tenderness which he showed
her was an occasional air of wonder that cut him to the quick. Shame,
sorrow, and despair had incrusted her heart with a hard shell,
impenetrable to genial emotions. Nor would all his love help him to get
over the impression that she was no longer an acquaintance and familiar
friend, but somehow a stranger.
So far as he could find out, she did absolutely nothing all day except to
sit brooding. He could not discover that she so much as opened the books
and magazines he sent her, and, to the best of his knowledge, she made
little more use of her piano. His calls were sadly dreary affairs. He
would ask perhaps half a dozen questions, which he had spent much care in
framing with a view to interesting her. She would reply in monosyllables,
with sometimes a constrained smile or two, and then, after sitting a
while in silence, he would take his hat and bid her good-evening.
She always sat nowadays in an attitude which he had never seen her adopt
in former times, her hands lying in her lap before her, and an absent
expression on her face. As he looked at her sitting thus, and recalled
her former vivacious self-assertion and ever-new caprices, he was
overcome with the sadness of the contrast.
Whenever he asked her about her health, she replied that she was well;
and, indeed, she had that appearance. Grief is slow to sap the basis of a
healthy physical constitution. She retained all the contour of cheek and
rounded fulness of figure which had first captivated his fancy in the
days, as it seemed, so long ago.
He took her often to the theatre, because in the action of the play she
seemed at times momentarily carried out of herself. Once, when they were
coming home from a play, she called attention to some feature of it. It
was the first independent remark she had made since he had brought her to
her lodgings. In itself it was of no importance at all, but he was
overcome with delight, as people are delighted with the first words that
show returning interest in earthly matters on the part of a convalescing
friend whose soul has long been hovering on the borders of death. It
would sound laughable to explain how much he made of that little remark,
how he spun it out, and turned it in and out, and returned to it for days
afterward. But it remained isolated. She did not make another.
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