‘Indeed, indeed!’ she said, clasping her hands, ‘you ought not—you must not! I have said so before.’
‘Do you think it likely,’ said Oswald, with fine seriousness, ‘that I should have followed you like your shadow for so long, and leave off all at once, without explanation, without reason? Agnes, here we are safe and quite out of the reach of interruption. Here you may listen to me without shocking—yourself, or anyone. Hear me first. The poorest beggar in the street you will give a hearing to, why not to me? Let me tell you everything. Let me ask you what I must ask—let me know my fate.’
‘Mr. Meredith,’ she said, speaking very low and quickly, ‘these are not words to be used to me. I—I do not know you——’
‘Not know me!’ he repeated with ingenuous wonder.
‘I mean—of course I have seen you a great many times. Of course I—but I ought not to know you,’ she went on, with a little vehemence. ‘I have—nothing to do with you.’
‘How unkind, how unkind you are!’
This reproach silenced her. She gave him a hasty look, with a sudden, half-supplicating movement of her hands.
‘When a man loves a woman,’ said Oswald, with anxious art, ‘they are almost always strangers to each other. Do you blame him if he takes every means to introduce himself, to try to get her to know him, to believe in him, to reply to him? You are not at home; not in circumstances to allow this. What could I do? I would have brought my mother; but I told you what happened to us, and the trouble my mother is in. And, besides, pardon me if I had a hope that you, who were not a common girl like others, would understand me, would let me speak without all the vulgar preliminaries——. We are not like two nobodies, two butterflies of whom no one knows anything,’ he said, with a vague flourish of trumpets.
Agnes made him no reply; she was without words. Indeed, she was a little overawed by this explanation—‘not like two nobodies, of whom no one knows anything.’ Who was he? what had he done to lift him to the rank of those whom other people knew?
‘At all events,’ he said, after a pause, ‘will you not give me my chance now? We are here, with no one to say a word, nobody to interfere with us, no one to think we are doing wrong. Let me have my chance now. If you condemn me I promise to go away, I shall have no heart to trouble you longer,’ he said, in a pathetic tone, which made poor Agnes tremble. Had she the heart to condemn him? Oh, how little he knew! She yielded, saying to herself that it was the shortest way; that anything else would be foolish; and gave her consent, without looking at him, with a grave little movement of her head. He led her to the rock where he had been sitting waiting for her, and where she now followed him without a word. How their hearts were beating, both of them, though all was so still! She sat down on the smooth rock, he half kneeling on the sand by her side. The soft summer air surrounded them; the sea, dropping out of its morning smiles, fell into a hush of listening, and stilled everything about that the tale might not be disturbed. ‘Hus—sh,’ said the soft, long waves as the tide stole in. A few soft clouds flitted over the sun, softening his mid-day radiance: the hush of noon fell upon earth and sea. And there Agnes sat, throned in that momentary judgment-seat of her womanhood, with his fate, as he said, in her hands. The words had a deeper meaning than Oswald thought of. The fate of other lives hung on that decision—of her own more than of his. But neither of them thought of that. Would she accept him? it was incredible that she could refuse him. This was the real conviction in his heart; and yet he trembled too.