“No, no,” he admitted; “certainly not from you; but—well, perhaps I may say that I had some ground for thinking that you—possibly—No, I don't think I ought to say that. At any rate, I thought then that I had. As for that young friend of yours—but he's nothing. It's you I want to make my peace with.”
“It's not difficult,” she said. “I tell you that I don't bear any malice. I bore none at the time. I wanted to go.”
He let her hand slide from his, and plunged his own into his pockets. “I know you did; I felt that at the time. That hurt me a good bit. I had come to rely upon you so much—oh, for every mortal thing. I expect the whole place has gone to the devil now. You had your hand on the tiller, by Jove! You kept a straight course, You see, I'd got into the way of thinking we were—married, don't you know, and all that—-”
“I think you had, indeed,” she said. He saw her wry smile.
“I know what you mean by that. You mean, if that's marriage—many thanks! Well, my dear, all I can say is, you were absolutely wrong. It was not marriage—it never had been, and you know it couldn't have been. But if it had been, Sancie, you'd have been as right as rain. You know you would. Your own place—everything to your hand—Society—all that kind of thing. Why, you'd never have thought it amiss in me to go off tiger-shooting for a bit. You'd have had your whack of travelling, playing the grass widow; you'd have entertained, had all sorts of little games—and both of us been all the better. No! But it was just because our relationship was so infernally irregular that you felt those separations—took them, if I may say it, so hard. Depend upon it, that was it.”
Her lip curled back, though she said nothing. She wondered if he had always been quite so fatuous as this, quite so sublimely unhumorous. If he had, what under heaven had she been about? That she could have believed this smug cockscomb to have loved her—to have been capable of anything but hunger and thirst for her—incredible! It made her out precisely as fatuous as he. And yet she said nothing. With the likes of him nothing seemed worth doing except to forget him.
And she was to marry him, to live in his house, to see him daily—ah, and more than that; and yet she said nothing of what her curled back lip expressed. She was in the presence of her fate, and, as ever, was dumb before it. To make him shrivel under scorn, to wind her tongue about him like a whip till he writhed; to play the honest woman and tell him quietly that she did not love and had nothing more to say to him; or to ask him urgently for release—she did none of these things: none of them entered her head. She had never shirked the apportioning of the Weaving Women. Destiny was unquestionable. She felt that she abhorred Ingram. What she was to suffer from him she knew but too well. And yet she knew also that she was going to marry him, to be neglected by him, put to scorn, betrayed. All these things she would undergo, because they could not be avoided. She was bound as well as gagged. Her destiny was before her, as her character was within. The one had begotten the other. She had sowed, and now she was to reap. Her stony mind contemplated the harvest, and saw that it was just.
Therefore she said nothing, but stood with her foot on the fender, shading her face from the fire with her thin hand. In this attitude, though able to see sideways what was coming upon her, she stood nerveless to his approach. “Sancie, my own Sancie,” he said, and put his arm about her, and drew her bodily to his side. She stiffened, but allowed it.
“Dearest girl, tell me that you forgive me—tell me that. I am wretched without you—I can't go on like this. It's not good for me; my health suffers. Darling Sancie, forgive poor old Nevile. He was once your boy—you loved him so much. For the sake of old times, Sancie, my dear.”
She could only say, “I have forgiven you—you know that. I have told you so.” He pressed her closely to him, feeling his urgent need to make the most of what she had to give him. Her apathy struck him mortally chill; he wooed her the more desperately.