“It’s something I want to ask you,” said Oldmeadow—“And it will astonish you. You may find it hard to forgive; because I’ve meant to ask it from the beginning; from our deciding to go away together. As far back as the time in the hospital.”
“But you may ask anything. Anything at all,” she almost urged upon him. “After what I’ve asked you—you have every right. If there’s anything I can do in the wide, wide world for you—oh! you know how glad and proud I should be. As for forgiveness”—he heard the smile in her voice, she was troubled, yet tranquil, too—“you’re forgiven in advance.”
“Am I? Wait and see.” He, too, tried to smile, as he used the tag; but it was a mechanical smile and he felt his heart knocking against the chair-back as he went on: “Because I haven’t done what you asked me to do as you asked me to do it. I haven’t done it from the motive you supposed. It’s been for Barney and for Nancy and for you; but it’s been most of all for myself.” He screwed his glass into his eye as he spoke with a gesture as mechanical as the smile had been and he looked at her at last, thus brought nearer. “I want you not to go on to-morrow.” It was the first, the evident, the most palpable desire that rose to his lips. “I want you never to go on again, alone. If you can’t stay with me, I want you to let me follow you. When the time comes I want you to marry me. I love you.”
The light as it fell on her seemed suddenly strange, almost portentous in its brilliancy. Or was it her stillness, as she sat and gazed at him after he had spoken the words, that was strange and portentous? It was as if they arrested the currents of her being and she sat tranced, frozen into the fixed shape of an astonishment too deep for emotion. Her eyes did not alter in their gentleness; but the gentleness became tragic and pitiful, like the inappropriate calm on the mask of a dead face at Pompeii, fixed in an eternal unreadiness by the engulfing lava.
She put up her hand at last and pushed back her hair. With her forehead bared she became more like the photograph of her father. When she spoke her voice was slow and feeble, like the voice of a person dangerously ill. “I don’t understand you.”
“Try to,” said Oldmeadow. “You must begin far back.”
She still kept her hand pressed upon her hair. “You don’t mean that it’s the conventionally honourable thing to do? Oh, no; you don’t mean that?” Her face in its effort to understand was appalled.
“No; I don’t mean anything conventional,” he returned. “I’m thinking only of you. Of my love. I’ll come with you to Serbia to-morrow—if you’ll let me. I could kneel and worship you as you sit there.”
“Oh,” she more feebly murmured. She sank back in her chair.
“My darling, my saint,” said Oldmeadow, gazing at her; “if you must leave me, you’ll take that with you; that the man who destroyed you is your lover; that you are dearer to him than anything on earth.”