As for Agnes, she not only saw Oswald every time he made his appearance, whether she allowed him to know it or not, but she felt his presence in every nerve and vein, with anger for the first day or two after Roger’s visit, then with a softening of all her heart towards him as she caught his reverential glance, his eager appeal to her attention. After all, whispers to Cara, whom he had known all her life—little Cara, who even to Agnes herself seemed a child—could not mean half so much as this daily haunting of her own walks, this perpetual appearance wherever she was. That was a totally different question from her own struggle not to notice him, not to think of him. The fact that it was shocking and terrible on her part to allow her mind to dwell on any man, or any man’s attentions, while occupied in the work to which she had devoted herself, and filling almost the position of a consecrated Sister, was quite a different thing from the question whether he was a false and untrustworthy person, following her with the devices of vulgar pursuit, a thing too impious to think of, too humiliating. Agnes was anxious to acquit the man who admired and sought her, as well as determined to reject his admiration; and, for the moment, the first was actually the more important matter of the two. Herself she could be sure of. She had not put her hand to the plough merely to turn back. She was not going to abandon her ideal at the call of the first lover who held out his hand to her. Surely not; there could be no doubt on that subject; but that this generous, gentle young man, with those poetic sentiments which had charmed yet abashed her mind, that he should be false to his fair exterior, and mean something unlovely and untrue, instead of a real devotion, that was too terrible to believe. Therefore, she did not altogether refuse to reply to Oswald’s inquiries when the next hospital day brought about another meeting. This time he did not even pretend that the meeting was accidental, that he had been too late for making the proper inquiries in his own person, but went up to her, eagerly asking for ‘our little patient,’ with all the openness of a recognised acquaintance.
‘Emmy is better—if you mean Emmy,’ said Agnes, with great state. ‘The fever is gone, and I hope she will soon be well.’
‘Poor little Emmy,’ said Oswald; ‘but I don’t want her to be well too soon—that is, it would not do to hurry her recovery. She must want a great deal of care still.’
He hoped she would smile at this, or else take it literally and reply seriously; but Agnes did neither. She walked on, with a stately air, quickening her pace slightly, but not so as to look as if she were trying to escape.
‘I suppose, as the fever is gone, she has ceased to imagine herself in heaven,’ said Oswald. ‘Happy child! when sickness has such illusions, it is a pity to be well. We are not so well off in our commonplace life.’
He thought she would have responded to the temptation and turned upon him to ask what he meant by calling life commonplace; and indeed the wish stirred Agnes so that she had to quicken her pace in order to resist the bait thus offered. She said nothing, however, to Oswald’s great discomfiture, who felt that nothing was so bad as silence, and did not know how to overcome the blank, which had more effect on his lively temperament than any amount of disapproval and opposition. But he made another valorous effort before he would complain.
‘Yours, however, is not a commonplace life,’ he said. ‘We worldlings pay for our ease by the sense that we are living more or less ignobly, but it must be very different with you who are doing good always. Only, forgive me, is there not a want of a little pleasure, a little colour, a little brightness? The world is so beautiful,’ said Oswald, his voice slightly faltering, not so much from feeling, as from fear that he might be venturing on dubious ground. ‘And we are so young.’
That pronoun, so softly said, with such a tender emphasis and meaning, so much more than was ever put into two letters before, went to the heart of Agnes. She was trying so hard to be angry with him, trying to shut herself against the insinuating tone of his voice, and those attempts to beguile her into conversation. All the theoretical fervour that was in her mind had been boiling up to reply, and perhaps her resolution would not have been strong enough to restrain her, had not that we come in, taking the words from her lips and the strength from her mind. She could neither protest against the wickedness and weakness of consenting to live an ignoble life, nor indignantly declare that there was already more than pleasure, happiness, and delight in the path of self-sacrifice, when all the force was stolen out of her by that tiny monosyllable—we! How dared he identify himself with her? draw her into union with him by that little melting yet binding word? She went on faster than ever in the agitation of her thoughts, and was scarcely conscious that she made him no answer; though surely what he had said called for some reply.
Oswald was at his wit’s end. He did not know what to say more. He made a little pause for some answer, and then getting none, suddenly changed his tone into one of pathetic appeal. ‘Are you angry with me? ‘he said. ‘What have I done? Don’t you mean to speak to me any more?’
‘Yes,’ she said, turning suddenly round, so that he could not tell which of his questions she was answering. ‘I am vexed that you will come with me. Gentlemen do not insist on walking with ladies to whom they have not been introduced—whom they have met only by chance——’