“Why should you say that?” she asked almost with petulance. “You make too much of me! I do not belong in this gallery at all. I am very angry with myself for being here. I ought not to have allowed Mrs. Emanuel to persuade me against my own judgment. It did not enter into my head that I should be seen by anybody. I was on my vacation—I take it early, because some of the girls like to get away at Whitsuntide—and at Bath I saw in a paper some reference to the state with which your grandfather would be buried, and the whim seized me to see the funeral. I came on my bicycle most of the way, till the hills got too bad. I thought no one would be the wiser for my coming and going. And one thing—you must not ask me to come into the castle again. I am going to the inn to get my machine, and go down to Craven Arms or Clun for the night. I have looked both roads out on my map. Is Clun interesting, do you know?”
“I have not the remotest idea. In fact, there is only one idea of any sort in my mind just now. It is that you are not to be allowed to go away. Have you seen the dungeons in which we fasten up people whose presence is particularly desired, and who will not listen to reason?”
The jesting tone of his words was belied by the glance in his eyes. She frowned a little. “No, there is no reason in it at all. What have I to do with these people? They are not my kind. It is the merest accident that you and I happen to be acquainted. If you did not know me now, nothing is more certain than that we should never meet in the world. And our seeming to each other like friends on those other occasions—that had nothing to do with the present. The circumstances are entirely different. There is nothing in common between us now, or hardly anything at all. You ought to understand that. And I look to you to realize how matters are altered, and not to insist upon placing me in a very undignified and unpleasant position.” She had spoken with increasing rapidity of utterance, and with rising agitation. “Not that your insisting would make any difference!” she added now, almost defiantly.
He looked at her in silence. The face half turned from him, with its broad brow, its shapely and competent profile, the commanding light in its gray eyes, the firm lips drawn into tightened curves of proud resistance to any weakness of quivering—it was the face that had made so profound an impression upon him at the outset of that wonderful journey from Rouen. The memory became on the instant inexpressibly touching to him. She was almost as she had been then—it might well be the same sober gray frock, the same hat, save that the ribbon now was black instead of fawn. She would have no varied wardrobe, this girl who earned her own bread, and gave her mind to the large realities of life. But this very simplicity of setting, how notably it emphasized the precious quality of what it framed! He recalled that in his first rapt study of this face it had seemed to him like the face of the young Piedmontese bishop who had once come to his school—pure, wise, sweet, tender, strong. And now, beholding it afresh, it was beyond all these things the face which woke music in his heart—the face of the woman he loved.
With gentle slowness he answered her: “The position I seek to place you in does not seem to me undignified. I should like to hope that you would not find it unpleasant. You know what I mean—I offered it to you in advance, before it was yet mine to give. I beg you again to accept it, now when it is mine to give. If you will turn, you can see Caermere from where you stand. It has had in all its days no mistress like you. Will you take it from my hands?”
She confronted him with a clear, steady gaze of disapproval. “All this is very stupid!” she said, peremptorily. “Last week—it had its pretty and graceful side then perhaps, but it is not nice at all now. It does not flatter me; it does not please me in any way to-day. I told you then, I had my own independence, my own personal pride and dignity, which are dearer to me than anything else. If I had them then, I have them very much more now. What kind of idea of me is this that you have—that I am to change my mind because now you can talk of fifty thousand a year? I like you less than I did when you had nothing at all! For then we seemed to understand each other better. You would not have rattled your money-box at me then! You had finer sensibilities—I liked you more!”
He returned her gaze with a perplexed smile. “But I am asking you to be my wife,” he pointed out.
She sniffed with a suggestion of contempt at the word. “Wife!” she told him stormily. “You do not seem to know what the word ‘wife’ means! You are not thinking of a ‘wife’ at all. It is a woman to play Duchess to your Duke that you have in mind, and you feel merely that she ought to be presentable and intelligent, and personally not distasteful to you; we’ll even say that you prefer a woman towards whom you have felt a sort of comrade’s impulse. But that has nothing to do with a ‘wife.’ And even on your own ground how foolish you are! In heaven’s name, why hit on me of all women? There are ten thousand who would do it all vastly better, and who, moreover, would leap at the chance. You have only to look about you. England is full of beauties in training for just such a place. They know the ways of your set—the small talk, the little jokes, the amusements and social duties and distinctions, and all that. Go and find what you want among them. What have I to do with such people? They’re not in my class at all.”
Christian sighed, and then sought her glance again with a timid, whimsical smile. “Ah, how you badger me always!” he said. “But I have still something more to say.”
“Let me beg that it be left unsaid!” She folded up the map, and began moving along the ridge as she spoke. “It is all as distressful to me as can be. You cannot understand—or will not understand—and it puts me in an utterly hateful position. I do not like to be saying unpleasant things to you. I had only the nicest feelings towards you when we last parted; and this noon, when I saw you in the church, you made a picture in my mind that I had quite—quite a tenderness for. But now you force me into disagreeable feelings and words, which I don’t like any more than you do. I seem to be never myself when I am with you. I have actually never seen you but three times, and you disturb me more—you make me hate myself more—than everything else in the world.”