"There is nothing that troubles me about to-night except the fear that you may regret it, that you might ever come to have a doubt of how I feel about it. I want you to feel that whatever you choose is right to me, and though I hope for nothing so much as to make you my wife, I shall not urge you beyond what you feel that you can do without urging."
It was a generous letter, and no doubt it had its weight in persuading me to trust the situation, in the face of that instinct which saves women, even from passions that seem their own justification. If he had counted on the naturalness of love to set up its own public obligation, he had not been far wrong with me. If it had been practicable, I should have walked out with him any day those first weeks to be married. But marriage is a very complicated business in Italy. In a measure I had satisfied my fret for the visible tie, with a ring which he had bought me in Florence, which, as the stones flashed in the sun, turned me back on the thought I had when first he set it on my hand.
"Helmeth, do you suppose that we are pushed on to make laws and observances about marriage because the bond that comes into being then has a consistency and validity beyond what we feel about it?"
"Oh, beyond what we feel about it, yes." He sat up then a little away from me, as he often did when he drew upon experiences lying beyond the points at which his life had been touched by mine, and began skipping little stones into the water. "Yes, I'm sure that what you feel about a thing that happens to you is not always the test of what it does to you. Sometimes I think feelings haven't much to do with our experiences except to get us into them." He left off skipping stones and began to pile them into a little heap. "I was thinking of Laura," he concluded. It was not often that he spoke to me of his wife.
"I can't remember that I had a great deal of feeling about her; I was too busy, I suppose, getting on with my engineering; but she had a grip on me. She had a grip. Look here, my dear, I ought to tell you this, you're the wonder of the earth for me, and I know very well that my wife's world was a very little one; it was bounded by the church on one side and by conventions on all the others. But somehow I don't want to get too far away from it, and I don't want the girls to get too far." He swung about to look squarely up at me. "This that you've given me, it's heaven; it's a thing for a man to die for and die happy; but there's the other too." He laughed a little awkwardly; he caught my feet in one of his strong hands. "Have I made you understand?"
"I understand that kind of life. It's like a clean, scrubbed room. I know. I was brought up in it. There have been times when I have been desperate because I couldn't go back and live there. But I ought to tell you, Helmeth, I can't find my way back."
"You! Why should you? You were made to live in Kings' houses. But I wanted to be sure you weren't going to be disappointed if I haven't the manners that always belong to palaces. I've been in camps where a scrubbed room looked mighty good to me." He stretched himself and rolled over on the ground, lying with his back to the sun, soaking in it in simple, animal content. Little white flecks showed on the lake, the sails of the fisher-boats tilted slowly and composed themselves anew with the line of the shore and the flowing hills. Directly opposite, the walls of Cadenabbia showed white amid the green, like a little streak of Arcady.
"We've never been," I reminded him.
"I thought you wanted to leave it so you could always think of its being as romantic as it looks, without making sure that it isn't." That was the reason I had given him, but the truth was that Cadenabbia was on one of those tourist routes where, supposing anybody we knew to be wandering about Europe, we would be sure to run into them. This morning, however, I was seized with an irresistible desire to visit it.
"But supposing it isn't as interesting as it looks," I submitted, "if I go there with you I shall never know it. And think how disappointed I should be if I should ever come there without you and find that it is the one place we ought to have seen."