Thus she was glad when the darkness hid her face. He could not see the thrill that shot through her, as she wondered what the next half hour was to bring forth for her, and she managed to control her voice, and to say calmly—
‘Pray be quick. I do not know why I have granted you this favour at all. It is far beyond your deserts.’
‘As for that, there may be two opinions. If you’d heard me out to-night, instead of pouncing upon me as you did——’
‘Do not allude to that. It is over, and I have not repented my refusal to you. It was quite obvious what people thought when you appeared with that girl on your arm. Not for worlds would I have put myself into such a position.’
‘Position—position! You spit out that word just as women do when they want to make out that their dearest friend is doing something bad. I’ve heard that your friendship is a dangerous kind of thing, Magdalen, but I have never heeded such reports. I don’t know whether they are true or not, but I know you have often talked a lot about friendship, and the duty of sticking to your friend when you have got one. I wondered whether you dared show every one that you were my friend to-night.’
‘Absurd! To show myself your friend in that fashion means one of two things—either that I am engaged to be married to you, or else that I show myself a bold, vulgar woman, whom any other man might well be afraid to marry. That is not friendship; it is senseless bravado; it is being loud and fast, and all to no purpose. Such a proceeding could serve no possible end.’
‘I know that. Do you think I am a fool?’ said he. ‘But when you began to pitch into me, without losing any time, you made me so wild, that I was resolved to pay you out, cost what it might. Magdalen——’ his voice sank, and it thrilled through her, and with it a sense of dread and terror, and the miserable consciousness that she, who had so long contrived to have the reins in her own hands, was now the one to be dominated with bit and bridle, and made to turn this way and that, at the will of another. She listened, stooping a little forward, in a crouching attitude, waiting to hear her doom. ‘I’ve got what they call a bad character. Whatever it is, good or bad, it is a pretty correct estimate they have made of me. They’ll tell you that I drink, and I dice, and I bet. So I do, and like them all; and, of course, they’ll tell you I’m no fitting husband for a decent woman. As for decent, I know nothing; but from what I’ve seen of women, I should judge it wanted a bold one to undertake me. If you would, Magdalen—Magdalen! I don’t say I’d make you happy, for I know I should make you miserable, but whatever I seemed—I can’t always answer for myself—whatever I seemed, I’d love you to the end of my life, ten times better than I do now. Dare you do it?’
Silence. The carriage rolled softly on over the snowy road. Otho had seized hold of her two hands. His face she could not see, but she heard his breath, laboured and heavy. A very strange, wild sensation surged through her whole being. As in a flash of lightning, in a kind of revelation, she seemed to see all the terrible possibilities of the dim future—all that could be implied by his ‘dare you do it?’ He did not urge her when she did not answer; his passion seemed to have softened into patience. He waited and waited for her to reply.
‘Otho!’—her face almost touched his as she spoke—‘I know what you are. I have been trying to tear you out of my heart. I did not want you there. I cannot kill the love I have for you. I dare do anything for you.’
As she ceased to speak, their lips met in a clinging kiss—a kiss which bound their two fates together from henceforth, for evermore, and which made her heart beat chokingly with terror and passion, but which was utterly devoid of the joy and springing rapture it might have had. When Magdalen said, ‘I know what you are,’ she spoke the truth. She was nearly a year older than he was, and had all her life seen very clearly out of her passive eyes. When he said, ‘Dare you do it?’ that meant, and she knew that it meant, not that he was going to give up his evil ways for her sake, and try to become mild and human and gentle, and a fitting husband for a civilised lady, but that she accepted his evil ways along with himself, and endured them as best she might.