"I wish you 'd guessed," he said. "It throws it all on to my shoulders. Now I shall have to hoist the confession up like my own portmanteau, and perhaps look a bigger ass than ever, with my knees all bent under it. Anyhow, here goes—one, two, three ... I 'm going to be married.
"Well?" he inquired, after a pause. "Won't you say you 're sorry now? It 's all my own silly fault, I know, and I deserved to be married for being such a fool ... but still—can't you squeeze one little drop of pity for me?"
"Are you really going to be married?" asked the girl. She spoke in a very level and, it struck him, a very unemotional voice.
"Great goodness, little woman," he exclaimed, "what an unbelieving Israelite you are! Do you think I do a wholesale and export trade in tarradiddles? You did n't use to suspect me before, even when I told you I was a great composer. Won't you believe me now, when I 'm willing to confess myself an awful idiot? On my word and conscience, then ... I 'm going to be married."
"I hope ... you 'll be very, very happy," said the girl.
For her, he thought the words and the wish somewhat prosaic. At this moment she lacked one of those beautiful little emotional touches with which she could illuminate the simplest saying to poetry. Her voice, soft though it was, and so full of sympathetic interest, yet struck him with a painful feeling of matter-of-fact. He and his marriage seemed suddenly stuck up in hard, unpoetic affirmation, like the tin price-shield in a pork-pie. The subtlety of artistic suggestion was altogether lacking, all the romance was gone. The thing he had wished delicately hinting at, a mysterious romantic melody for celli con sordini, to suit the orchestra of the evening and of their mood, was become a commonplace tune for a drunken cornet to play outside a public-house door on Saturday night. All at once he began to feel that the coverlet of dreams was fast slipping away from him. The moonlight was clearer: the hedges harder in outline. In spite of the hand that lay on the girl's arm, as though to retain that part of the dream at any rate, they were no longer spiritually united. There was an intangible, invisible, impalpable something between them as keen as the sword of flame at the Gate of the Garden of Eden. Like many another martyr before him, in his crucial hour the roseate illusions that had fortified him to his purpose were floating away from him now, and leaving him only his actual senses to realise externals and apprise him of the horrible pangs of suffering. Before, he had been temporising at the stake; trying the rope to see how its bondage felt, without allowing the cruel loops to cut into his flesh; posturing as martyr before the girl in mind only—but now he had made the girl a participant of his purpose.
And the worst of it was that he must profess that the parting meant nothing so very much to either of them. He must not insult the girl by suggesting that his going affected only her—that she would deeply feel the loss of him who felt her loss so little that he was leaving her for another. And yet! And yet!
O Lord! And yet! All his present life was but a meaningless series of disjunctive conjunctions; words of contingency and speculation; ifs, buts, supposes, peradventures, perchances, and the like.
"I say ... you 're very silent, little woman," he remarked, after a while. "Don't be hard on a fellow because he 's down on his luck. You 're not offended with me, are you?"
"Offended with you?" she said. "Oh, no, indeed. What should make me offended ... with you?"