“My darling, ten thousand thanks for that sweet word. If my love is not spurned, surely it will some day be returned! Bride, you will at least let me hope that?”
“I cannot help what you hope,” she answered, with childlike frankness. “But, Eustace, I do not think I can ever love you as you wish, and I can never, never, never be your wife unless I do. I like you as a cousin; but indeed that is all. I do not understand what it is that makes you wish to marry me. We should be very unhappy together—I am quite sure of that.”
“Ah! no, Bride! Do not speak so. Unhappy, and with you!”
“I should be very unhappy,” answered the girl steadily, “and you ought to be, Eustace, if you really knew what love meant.”
He looked at her in amaze; that she should be speaking to him of the nature of love with that look of divine compassion in her eyes was a thing altogether too strange and perplexing. Her very attitude and quiet composure told of a heart unruffled as yet by any touch of human passion, and yet she was turning upon him and rebuking him for his ignorance. It was she who broke the momentary pause, seeming almost to read his thoughts.
“You wonder how I know perhaps, but, ah! if you had seen my father and mother together you would have understood. If you had known what love there was between my mother and me, you would understand. Do not I know what love is? Ah! do I not? It is the power to lay bare the innermost sanctuary of your soul, and to know that you will be understood, helped, strengthened, comforted. It is the knowledge that thoughts too deep, and hopes too wonderful and mysterious for words are shared together, and can be whispered of together without being tarnished by the poor attempt to reduce them to speech; the consciousness that in everything we are in accord, that we are often thinking the same things at the same moment; the knowledge that the deeper and deeper we go the more and more sympathy and sweet accord there is between us; that not only are we one in opinion about temporal and changing things, but knit close, close together in soul and spirit as well, sharing the same faith, the same hope, the same love! Ah! Eustace! if you had known such a love as that, you could never think that there would be happiness for you and me in linking our lives together!”
He stood silent, almost abashed, before her, marvelling alike at her eloquence and at the insight displayed of a union of spirit, of which Eustace was forced to admit that he had not thought. To win Bride as his wife, to set her up as his object of adoring love, had seemed all-sufficient to him hitherto. Now it suddenly dawned upon him that with such a woman as this, that would be but the travesty and mockery of happiness. She was right and he was wrong: without a deeper sympathy and love than any which had come into his philosophy as yet, marriage would be a doleful blunder. He would be no nearer to her than before—perhaps farther away. He must learn to share with her that inner and mystic life of which he saw glimpses from time to time when she opened out for a moment and showed him what lay below the calm surface of her nature. Either he must share that with her, or wean her away from it; replacing mysticism with philanthropy, fanaticism with practical benevolence, objective with subjective religion. One of those two ends must be accomplished before he could hope to win the desire of his heart. As he stood in the bright spring sunshine facing her, he became suddenly aware of that, and a new light leaped into his eyes—the light of battle and of resolve. He would win her yet, but it must be by slower steps than any he had contemplated hitherto. She was worthy of better things than becoming a mere dreamer and nunlike recluse. It should be his to lead her steps to surer ground, to show her that there was a higher Christianity than any of which she had hitherto dreamed. Not now—not all at once, but he would come again and begin upon a surer foundation. He looked into her eyes, and gently taking her hand before she had time to draw it away, he said quietly—
“Do not be afraid, Bride; I see that you judged more wisely than I. You are right and I am wrong, and I will go away and trouble you no more in the present; but the time will come when I shall return, and I trust that by slow and sure degrees we shall draw so closely together that you will no longer shrink from me in fear and trembling. You are very young, sweet cousin, and there are many things you have yet to learn. It is a beautiful thing, I doubt not, to hold commune in the spirit with the higher world; but we are set in our place here below for something I hold to be more truly noble than that. We are set in a world of sin and misery that we may gird our armour upon us and fight the battle with this sin and misery—fight it for our poor and afflicted brethren, as they cannot fight it for themselves. That is the true Christianity; that is the highest form of religious devotion. You can read it for yourself in your Bible—‘True religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the widows and orphans in their affliction’—to be ministers, in fact, of mercy and blessing in any sphere, of which one is given as the type.”
“Yes,” answered Bride very softly, “and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
She looked straight at Eustace as she spoke, and he looked back at her, marvelling at the extraordinary depth and beauty of those dark eyes. He longed, as he had never longed before, to take her in his arms and hold her to his heart; but he knew that he must not, so with a great effort he restrained himself, and kept back the words of passionate love which rose to his lips.