This new element in his attitude towards her did not, however, issue in any excess of physical jealousy. What it did lead to, unluckily for Lacrima, was a certain queer diminution of his ideal respect for her personality. In place of focussing his attention upon the sublime sacrifice she contemplated for his sake, the events she narrated concentrated his mind upon the mere brutal and accidental fact that Mr. Goring had so desperately desired her. The mere fact of her having been so desired by such a man, changed her in his eyes. His cynical distrust of all women led him to conceive the monstrous and grotesque idea that she must in her heart be gratified by having aroused this passion in the farmer. It did not carry him quite so far as to make him believe that she had consciously excited such emotion; but it led him to the very brink of that outrageous fantasy. Had Lacrima come to him with a shame-faced confession that she had let herself be seduced by the Priory-tenant he could hardly have gazed at her with more changed and troubled eyes. He felt the same curious mixture of sorrowful pity and remote unlawful attraction to the object of his pity, that he would have felt in a casual conversation with some luckless child of the streets. By being the occasion of Mr. Goring’s passion, she became for him no less than such an unfortunate; the purer sentiment he had hitherto cherished changing into quite a different mood.
He lifted her up by the wrists and pressed her closely to him, kissing her again and again. The girl’s heart went on anxiously beating. She could hardly restrain her impatience for him to speak. Why did he not speak?
Disentangling herself from his embrace with a quick feminine instinct that something was wrong, she pulled him down upon the bench by her side and taking his hand in hers looked with pitiful bewilderment into his face.
“So when this thing happens,” she said, “all your troubles will be over. You will be free forever from that horrid office.”
“And you,” said Mr. Quincunx—his mood changing again, and his goblin-like smile twitching his nostrils,—“You will be the mistress of the Priory. Well! I suppose you will not desert me altogether when that happens!”
So that was the tone he adopted! He could afford to turn the thing into a jest—into God knows what! She let his hand drop and stared into empty space, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing.
This time Maurice realized that he had disappointed her; that his cynicism had carried him too far. Unfortunately the same instinct that told him he had made a fool of himself pushed him on to seek an issue from the situation by wading still further into it.
“Come—come,” he said. “You and I must face this matter like people who are really free spirits, and not slaves to any ridiculous superstition. It is noble, it is sweet of you to think of marrying that brute so as to set me free. Of course if I was free, and you were up at the Priory, we should see a great deal more of each other than we do now. I could take one of those vacant cottages close to the church.
“Don’t think—Lacrima dear,” he went on, possessing himself of one of her cold hands and trying to recall her attention, “don’t think that I don’t realize what it is to you to have to submit to such a frightful thing. Of course we know how outrageous it is that such a marriage should be forced on you. But, after all, you and I are above these absurd popular superstitions about all these things. Every girl sooner or later hates the man she marries. It is human nature to hate the people we have to live with; and when it comes down to actual reality, all human beings are much the same. If you were forced to marry me, you would probably hate me just as much as you’ll hate this poor devil. After all, what is this business of being married to people and bearing them children? It doesn’t touch your mind. It doesn’t affect your soul. As old Marcus Aurelius says, our bodies are nothing! They are wretched corpses, anyway, dragged hither and thither by our imprisoned souls. It is these damned clergymen, with their lies about ‘sin’ and so forth, that upset women’s minds. For you to be married to a man you hate, would only be like my having to go to this Yeoborough office with people I hate. You will always have, as that honest fellow Epictetus says, your own soul to retire into, whatever happens. Heavens! it strikes me as a bit of humorous revenge,”—here his nostrils twitched again and the hobgoblin look reappeared—“this thought of you and me living peacefully at our ease, so near one another, and at these confounded rascals’ expense!”
Lacrima staggered to her feet. “Let me go,” she said. “I want to go back—away—anywhere.”