He stopped short suddenly, moved by the accusation; but unfortunately Agnes too, startled by his start, stopped also, and gave him a curious, half-defiant, half-appealing look, as if asking what he was going to do; and this look took away all the irritation which her words had produced. He proceeded to excuse himself, walking on, but at a slower pace, compelling her to wait for him—for it did not occur to Agnes, though she had protested against his company, to take the remedy into her own hands, and be so rude as to break away.
‘What could I do?’ he said piteously. ‘You would not tell me even your name—you know mine. I don’t know how to address you, nor how to seek acquaintance in all the proper forms. It is no fault of mine.’
This confused Agnes by a dialectic artifice for which she was not prepared. He gave a very plausible reason, not for the direct accusation against him, but for a lesser collateral fault. She had to pause for a moment before she could see her way out of the maze. ‘I did not mean that. I meant you should not come at all,’ she said.
‘Ah! you cannot surely be so hard upon me,’ cried Oswald, in real terror, for it had not occurred to him that she would, in cold blood, send him away. ‘Don’t banish me!’ he cried. ‘Tell me what I am to do for the introduction—where am I to go? I will do anything. Is it my fault that I did not know you till that day?—till that good child, bless her, broke her leg. I shall always be grateful to poor little Emmy. She shall have a crutch of gold if she likes. She shall never want anything I can give her. Do you think I don’t feel the want of that formula of an introduction? With that I should be happy. I should be able to see you at other times than hospital days, in other places than the streets. The streets are beautiful ever since I knew you,’ cried the young man, warming with his own words, which made him feel the whole situation much more forcibly than before, and moved him at least, whether they moved her or not.
‘Oh!’ cried Agnes, in distress, ‘you must not talk to me so. You must not come with me, Mr. Meredith; is not my dress enough——’
‘There now!’ he said, ‘see what a disadvantage I am under. I dare not call you Agnes, which is the only sweet name I know. And your dress! You told me yourself you were not a Sister.’
‘It is quite true,’ she said, looking at him, trying another experiment. ‘I am a poor teacher, quite out of your sphere.’
‘But then, fortunately, I am not poor,’ said Oswald, almost gaily, in sudden triumph. ‘Only tell me where your people are, where I am to go for that introduction. I thank thee, Lady Agnes, Princess Agnes, for teaching me that word. I will get my introduction or die.’
‘Oh, here we are at the House!’ she cried suddenly, in a low tone of horror, and darted away from him up the steps to the open door. Sister Mary Jane was standing there unsuspicious, but visibly surprised. She had just parted with someone, whom poor Agnes, in her terror, ran against; for in the warmth of the discussion they had come up to the very gate of the House, the entrance to that sanctuary where lovers were unknown. Sister Mary Jane opened a pair of large blue eyes, which Oswald (being full of admiration for all things that were admirable) had already noted, and gazed at him, bewildered, letting Agnes pass without comment. He took off his hat with his most winning look of admiring respectfulness as he went on—no harm in winning over Sister Mary Jane, who was a fair and comely Sister, though no longer young. Would Agnes, he wondered, have the worldly wisdom to make out that he was an old acquaintance, or would she confess the truth? Would Sister Mary Jane prove a dragon, or, softened by her own beauty and the recollection of past homages, excuse the culprit? Oswald knew very well that anyhow, while he walked off unblamed and unblamable, the girl who had been only passive, and guilty of no more than the mildest indiscretion, would have to suffer more or less. This, however, did not move him to any regret for having compromised her. It rather amused him, and seemed to give him a hold over her. She could not take such high ground now and order him away. She was in the same boat, so to speak. Next time they met she would have something to tell which he would almost have a right to know. It was the establishing of confidence between them. Oswald did not reckon at a very serious rate the suffering that might arise from Sister Mary Jane’s rebuke. ‘They have no thumbscrews in those new convents, and they don’t build girls up in holes in the walls now-a-days,’ he said to himself, and, on the whole, the incident was less likely to end in harm than in good.
Agnes did not think so, who rushed in—not to her room, which would have been a little comfort, but to the curtained corner of the dormitory, from which she superintended night and day ‘the middle girls,’ who were her charge, and where she was always afraid of some small pair of peeping eyes prying upon her seclusion. She threw off her bonnet, and flung herself on her knees by the side of her little bed. ‘Oh, what a farce it was,’ she thought, to cover such feelings as surged in her heart under the demure drapery of that black cloak, or to tie the conventual bonnet over cheeks that burned with blushes, called there by such words as she had been hearing! She bent down her face upon the coverlet and cried as if her heart would break, praying for forgiveness, though these same foolish words would run in and out of her prayers, mixing with her heart-broken expressions of penitence in the most bewildering medley. After all, there was no such dreadful harm done. She was not a Sister, nor had she ever intended to be a Sister, but that very simple reflection afforded the fanciful girl no comfort. She had come here to seek a higher life, and lo, at once, at the first temptation, had fallen—fallen, into what? Into the foolishness of the foolishest girl without an ideal—she whose whole soul had longed to lay hold on the ideal, to get into some higher atmosphere, on some loftier level of existence. It was not Sister Mary Jane she was afraid of, it was herself whom she had so offended; for already, could it be possible? insidious traitors in her heart had begun to ply her with suggestions of other kinds of perfection; wicked lines of poetry stole into her head, foolish stories came to her recollection. Oh! even praying, even penitence were not enough to keep out this strife. She sprang to her feet, and rushed to St. Cecilia, the room which was her battleground, and where the noise of the girls putting away their books and work, and preparing to go to tea, promised her exemption, for a little while at least, from any possibility of thought. But Agnes was not to be let off so easily. In the passage she met Sister Mary Jane. ‘I was just going to send for you,’ said the Sister, benign but serious. ‘Come to my room, Agnes. Sister Sarah Ann will take the children to tea.’