“I don’t know,” she swayed towards him, but he kept her arms rigid, like a bar between them, “but I don’t want to lose you.”
“You can’t,” he assured her.
“And though you think you have me in your heart, the me that doesn’t change, you’d like the other one too, wouldn’t you? I mean, you’d really like to hold me? Not just the thought of me? Tell me you love me in that way too.”
“Yes,” he said, “I love you in that way too, but I tell you it doesn’t matter.” He dropped her hands as though he had no more strength. “Marry your Francis Sales. You still belong to me.”
“But will you belong to me?” she asked softly. She could not lose him, she wanted to have them both, and Charles, perhaps unwisely, perhaps from the depth of his wisdom, which was truth, answered quietly, “I belonged to you since the first day I saw you.”
She let out a sigh of inexpressible relief.
§ 10
To Rose, the time between the death of Caroline and the coming of spring was like an invalid’s convalescence. She felt a languor as though she had been ill, and a kind of content as though she were temporarily free from cares. She knew that Henrietta and Charles Batty often met, but she did not wish to know how Charles had succeeded in preventing her escape: she did not try to connect Christabel’s illness with Henrietta’s return; she enjoyed unquestioningly her rich feeling of possession in the presence of the girl, who was much on her dignity, very well behaved, but undeniably aloof. She had not yet forgiven her aunt for that episode in the gipsies’ hollow, but it did not matter. Rose could tell herself without any affectation of virtue that she had hoped for no benefit for herself; looking back she saw that even what might be called her sin had been committed chiefly for Francis’s sake, only she had not sinned enough.
But for the present she need not think of him. He had gone away, she heard, and she could ride over the bridge without the fear of meeting him and with the feeling that the place was more than ever hers. It was gloriously empty of any claim but its own. To gallop across the fields, to ride more slowly on some height with nothing between her and great massy clouds of unbelievable whiteness, to feel herself relieved of an immense responsibility, was like finding the new world she had longed for. She wished sincerely that Francis would not come back; she wished that, riding one day, she might find Sales Hall blotted out, leaving no sign, no trace, nothing but earth and fresh spikes of green.
Day by day she watched the advance of spring. The larches put out their little tassels, celandines opened their yellow eyes, the smell of the gorse was her youth wafted back to her and she shook her head and said she did not want it. This maturity was better: she had reached the age when she could almost dissociate things from herself and she found them better and more beautiful. She needed this consolation, for it seemed that her personal relationships were to be few and shadowy; conscious in herself of a capacity for crystallizing them enduringly, they yet managed to evade her; it was some fault, some failure in herself, but not knowing the cause she could not cure it and she accepted it with the apparent impassivity which was, perhaps, the origin of the difficulty.