To such an appeal a lover can make but one reply. After that, whenever Collingwood saw her struggling with one of her moods of gloom, he bent his energies to its conquest, none the less willingly that he had discovered a ready charm for its exorcising in the caresses for which his own affection was glad to find an excuse.
He had early learned the futility of argument against her despondent moods, not only because her intelligence was better trained than his own, but because, as he admitted to himself, she had all the argument on her side. But he possessed, in the final appeal to tenderness, a power before which she was invariably vanquished. There was, in her shy acceptance of his caresses, an element of childishness, of a child yielding to some forbidden pleasure, self-rebuking, fearing a price to be paid, yet infinitely content in the moment. She was wonderfully self-reliant in her thinking processes, and adorably dependent in her emotions. She could think, and she was begging of the unseen Fates to be spared thinking. She could decide, but she was grateful to him for taking decision out of her hands. She loved him, but she found unutterable difficulty in voicing her feelings. He had found, in truth, what the coquette must skilfully feign—the woman’s dread of her own emotions, the alternate advance and retreat, the struggle with her own nature, before she could submit to a master. She was veritably a wild creature, striving to conceal the fact, a woman of nearly thirty as timid as a girl in her teens. He was secretly amused at the evident difficulty she experienced in recognizing her own capacity for romance and affection; but her careful repression of her emotions lent savor to a wooing which had in it some of the elements of mediævalism. For the time when she would see fit to cease her own struggle against the mysterious influences which he felt battling against him, he could afford to wait. That such a time would come, his natural optimism and his previous experiences with women made him certain. In the meanwhile, he did not intend to risk a chance word as he felt his hand so near closing on hers forever.
Protected by the darkness within the carriage hood, he threw an arm about her and held her pressed to his side while he put his lips against hers and finally pressed his face against her cheek in a wordless caress.
“There is nothing to be said that we have not said,” he murmured at length. “But I entreat you, in God’s name, put your fears aside to-night. Are we the first man and woman who have dared risk and calamity for the sake of loving? Oh! the word sticks in your throat, I dare say. It is wonderful how you have coquetted with every reason which may excuse our marriage except the only one that justifies it.”
“Ah, if I only knew that we could be sure of ourselves,” she murmured. “But suppose it is a mistake; suppose you find me something different from what you fancy me—I tell you every day that you idealize me—that I cannot live up to your conception of me! Suppose you come to hate me, as some men do hate women that are tied for life to them, millstones around their necks!” She shuddered.
It was a line of thought so unnatural for a girl to indulge in on the eve of her marriage, that Collingwood found time for a moment’s wonder what could have been the formative influences of her life to make her look so despondently on her own powers of holding affection. But the moment was not for indecision. Collingwood drew his face away from hers although he still continued to encircle her with his arm.
“You may not be sure of yourself,” he said. “The processes of your education seem to have left you muddled on matters that you ought to have been clear on before now. But I’m sure of myself. I’m marrying you for love—for a consuming passion, if you like the term. I got it out of a novel. I don’t pretend to combat your reasons. All that you have said may be in the light of prophecy. You may be right, but no power on earth could make me give you up without the utmost struggle that I am capable of. I believe that we have a happy life before us. But if I believed that it was going to end in the blackest tribulation that man ever entered into this side of the eternal torments, I would go on and mortgage my life for the few weeks of joy I’ve had and the few that may be ahead of us before the thing goes to smash. As for you, you have resisted at every step, and I’ve felt every minute that you were fighting yourself more than me.” He crushed her against him suddenly, and as suddenly dropped his arm from her waist. “There, now, you are free. Do you mean to tell me that you like this better—that you are not happy in my arms? Then something in you that isn’t your tongue lies. Why, I’ve felt it at every caress I’ve ever given you—the struggle and the yielding and the gladness. Come! Stop coquetting with yourself! Isn’t it so?”
In the minute or two which intervened before her reply, he held his breath for fear he had gone too far. Then the soundness of his instinctive judgment was demonstrated to his entire satisfaction. For a second or two Miss Ponsonby strained her clasped hands to her eyes, then she deliberately nestled back to his side, and slipped an arm around his neck. She began to cry, the first tears her lover had seen her shed, though he suspected that she shed many, and he hushed her to his breast as if she were a grieving child. She cried very quietly, and he knew that she was ashamed of her weakness. She soon regained control of herself, and she answered his question with an instinctive sense of fairness which he had often noticed in her. Most women would have taken advantage of the tears to evade an acknowledgment of defeat.
“You are right, Martin,” she admitted. “I have coquetted with myself, I have been pretending to myself that I meant ultimately to back out, and in my heart of hearts I knew I would not, I knew I could not. I have been selfish. I have spoiled your happiness, and refused to accept my own for fear of the future. Yours is the only sensible view. There are chances—but we cannot reason, we cannot think. We must just take what life gives us; and if by and by comes sorrow, why, we’ve had a little taste of joy. I am through coquetting, dear. I am happy—now—here. I do not care what comes. I’ve been a wretched prophet of evil, because secretly I meant to ride rough-shod over whatever I summoned to oppose. I surrender. I throw myself on your mercy. I don’t deserve quarter, but I know you will give it.”
There was a very long silence in the victoria. At the end of it, Miss Ponsonby said with a little choking laugh, “But, Martin, I—I distrust I’m marrying my master.”