For a few seconds an uncertain smile trembled round her lips. She drew back from him, half ignorant whether his question had been asked in earnest; then, lifting her eyes, Marjorie encountered the beseeching entreaty written on Geoffrey’s face. There came impulsive, over-quick submission.
‘I mean to love you with my whole soul some day. Does not that content you? Well, then, I mean—if you will give me breathing space—to love you now.’
The midsummer morning was young, the blackbirds called aloud for joy in the Tintajeux orchards, and Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s age was twenty-four. Before they parted, ere Marjorie could repulse him or surrender, he caught the girl in a swift embrace; he kissed her reverently, passionately on the lips.
CHAPTER XXXVII A STONE FOR BREAD
The kiss cost him dear. A fledgling girl is not, finally, to be captured without a struggle, save by a master hand; and Geoffrey’s was the hand of a prentice.
Marjorie’s heart leaped with novel tenderness at the contact of his lips. She suffered him to hold her in his arms. She watched him with shy pride, with a child’s delight in the new sense of ownership, as he walked away, along the accustomed path, from Tintajeux. Then, later, when she found herself in her own little white-draped realm, when, later still, she had slept and awakened and dressed herself for a fresh day, the current of feeling swerved. She shivered at realising how absolutely her life had become entangled with his. She was assailed by reminiscences, all uncomfortable ones, of Major Tredennis. She was sensible of a longing, that had almost passion in it, for the liberty she had been betrayed into relinquishing.
‘I mean, if you will give me breathing space, to love you now.’ Here, surely, was what she needed—time for becoming used to the new phenomenon of a lover.
During the past fortnight, Geoffrey had filled every thought of her waking hours; a haunting sense of his nearness had touched her dreams. At this point she had fain stood still—six months—a year—tacitly engaged, if need be, but on the same fraternal footing as when they walked together yesterday among the Langrune cornfields. Why hurry into commonplace? The Bartrands were not a kissing race. Geff ought to have divined their likes and dislikes, thought the poor child petulantly. And yet, pleaded another voice in this conscience of seventeen, the kiss was sweet! It seemed that she had become, suddenly and distinctly, two persons—one a girl weakly contented, as our grandmothers used to be, at the prospect of husband and home and fireside; the other, a strong-headed, Minerva-like young woman coolly criticising the question of love and marriage from a vantage ground, and liking it ill. Which of the two,—she asked herself this pretty often throughout the sunny tedium of the long day,—which was the real, which the artificial Marjorie Bartrand?