He got up quickly and began walking up and down the verandah.
“Where is she?” he said. “I must see her again. I must say what I said again, and tell her she must answer me.”
The Hermit, for all his inhuman life, had some glimmerings of sense.
“You must do nothing of the sort,” he said. “You don’t seem to realise what you have done already. Why, she is engaged to Philip, to your friend, and you have told her you love her. Good gracious, is not that enough to make her moan?”
“I told you I should a week ago,” said Evelyn.
“Yes, but you told me that conditionally. You said you would do so when you saw she loved you. Instead—— Good heavens! Evelyn, you must be unaware of what you have done. You were left with the girl during a thunderstorm, a thing that excites you and terrifies her, and you took advantage of your excitement and her terror to say this. It’s ugly; it’s beastly. But I can say it isn’t like you.”
Evelyn showed no sign of resenting this. As far as the mere criticism of what he had done was concerned, he appeared merely to feel a speculator’s interest in how it all struck another spectator. Even Lady Ellington’s hard, polished mind could not have presented a surface more impervious to scratches.
“You speak as if I did it all intentionally,” he remarked. “But I never intended anything less. It had nothing to do with what I could control. I had no more power over it than I had over the thunderstorm. After all, you don’t blame your thrush for eating worms. If one acts instinctively, nobody has any right to blame me. Besides, I don’t want your moral judgment. I just want to know what it means. You have called me a Pagan before now, and I did not deny it. But there I am. I don’t happen to like the colour of your hair, but I accept it. It seems to me buttery, if you want to know. And I seem to you Pagan, without conscience, you think I have acted uglily. Very well.”
Merivale hesitated a moment; he had no desire to say hard things because they were hard. On the other hand, he felt that the game must be played, rules had to be observed, or human life broke up in confusion, as if the fielders in a game of cricket would not run after the ball or the bowler bowl. He himself did not go in for cricket, he deliberately stood aside, but the rules were binding on those who played. Yet it was no use trying to convince a person who fundamentally disagreed.
“Well, you asked me,” he said, “and I have given you my opinion. That’s all. Nobody’s opinion is binding on anyone else. But I do ask you to think it over.”