"And can you take care of them all yourself?"
"Do you wonder at that, because I cannot see?" she said, merrily; "but all the same, I understand them very well, and I know what is good for them--I can tell by the scent, which of them are fading, and which are opening, and whether they are in want of water--they seem to speak to me. Only I cannot gather one for you; I tear my hands so with the thorns."
"Let me gather one for you;" he said, and broke off a monthly rose--she took it--but--"You have broken off too many buds," she said--"I will keep this one to put in water, and there is the full blown rose for you."
They walked up and down the neatly kept path, until they were called to dinner--Clement felt embarrassed with his father--but Marlene, generally so modest in the part she took in conversation, now found a thousand things to ask and say. And thus the vicar forgot the painful feeling left by that first meeting with his son, and the old footing of cordiality was soon resumed.
In the course of the next few days, however, they could not fail to find occasion to revive their quarrel. When his father enquired about the present state of theology at that University, Clement endeavoured to turn the conversation to general subjects; but the farther he retreated, the hotter grew his father in pursuit. Often an anxious, and sometimes an indignant look from his mother, would come to support him in his resolution to avoid all plain speaking on this subject; but whenever he broke off, or was forced to say a thing that to him meant nothing, the awkward silence fell upon his spirits, and chilled him to the heart Marlene only was always able to recover the proper tone. But he saw that she too was grieved, and therefore he avoided her when she was alone. He knew that she would question him, and from her he could have concealed nothing. A shade came over him now whenever he saw her. Was it the memory of that childish promise he had long since broken? Was it the feeling that in the schism of opinion that threatened to estrange him from his parents she remained standing on their side?
And yet he felt his tenderness for her more irresistibly than ever; it was a thing he found impossible to deny, but which he did strive most resolutely to conquer. He was too much absorbed in study and in his visions of the future, not to struggle with the energy of an aspiring nature against everything that might cling to his steps, or eventually chance to clog them.
"I have to be a traveller," he said: "a traveller on foot--my bundle must be light." He felt strangely burthened when he thought of binding himself to a wife who would have a claim to a large share of his life; and a blind one too, whom he would feel it wrong to leave. Here in her native village, where everything wore the simple aspect she had known from childhood, she was secure from the embarrassments which a residence in a town must inevitably have produced; and so he persuaded himself that he should do her a wrong by drawing closer to her. That he could be causing pain by this self-denial of his, was more than he could trust himself to believe.
His measures became more decisive. On the last day of his stay, after he had embraced his parents, and heard that Marlene was in the garden, he only left a farewell message for her, and with a beating heart he took the road to the village, and then turned down a path across the fields, to reach the woods. But the vicarage garden also opened to these fields, and the nearest way to them would have been through its small wicket gate. It was a long way round he had preferred, but at the last, he could not make up his mind to go farther on his narrow way through the young corn, without at least, one pause of retrospection.
He stood still in the serene sunshine, looking towards the hamlet with its cottages and houses--behind the hedge that bounded his father's garden, he caught sight of the young girl's slender figure. Her face was turned his way, but she had no perception of his presence.
His tears sprang quick and hot, but he struggled and overcame them; then, leaping wildly over banks and ditches, he reached the hedge; she started: "Farewell, Marlene! I am going. I may be away for a year;" and he passed his hand over her hair and forehead. "Good-bye!"--"You are going?" she said; "one thing I should like to ask of you--write oftener;--do!--your mother needs it, and sometimes send me a little message."