“It cannot be sooner, Marmaduke says. I met him on board the ship at Weymouth; when he told me of this innocent little scheme he was transacting.”
“But you will not tell”—
“Uncle Brian? No, of course not. Yet I think it would do Uncle Brian good to know how dearly Marmaduke and all his friends here care for him. Yet he might not believe it—I think he never did.”
Anne was silent.
“He used to say,” continued Nathanael, who was sitting where he could not see his wife, and for once heard not her soft step over the carpet—“Uncle Brian used to say, that it was wisest neither to love nor need love. I think different. It is a cruel, hardening, embittering thing for a man to feel that no one loves him.”
—“Love—love! Have you two sage ones been discussing that folly? Now, may I have the honour to hear?”
“If Anne will talk; I have done speaking,” said Mr. Harper, as he gave Agatha his chair, and slowly moved away to the other circle.
Thus, ever thus, he went from her, escaping the chance of either being wounded or healed. Agatha was nearly wild. With all her might she flung herself into conversation with Mr. Trenchard, and tried to conjugate that verb—hitherto a mystery to her innocent mind—to flirt. She wished to make herself beautifully hateful—bewitchingly foul; or rather she did not care what she made herself, if she only made him—who had now in her thoughts sank to the namelessness, which proves that one name is fast filling up the whole world—made him stir from that mountain height of impassive calm—melted him into repentance—shook him into frenzied jealousy. Anything—anything—so that he no longer should stand before her like a serene Alp, which nothing human could disturb, and which—ah, in all her madness, she saw that but too clearly!—which had always such a heavenly light shining on its forehead—a purity “God-given,” like his name.
His name, which she had once so disliked, but which now caught a strange beauty. Lately, she had looked out its meaning in a list of Bible names; and many a time, the night before, she had said it to herself, crying it out into the dark, until its soft Hebrew vowels grew musical, and its holy Hebrew meaning grew divine. “Nathanael—Nathanael—God-given.” Might he not indeed be a husband given unto her of God—to lead her in the right way, and make a true noble woman of her; such as a woman is always made by the love of, and the loving of, a noble man.
But these were sacred night-time thoughts which vanished in the daylight, or only came in snatches and rifts, careering through the blackness that surrounded her.