And so, instead of avoiding Hesper, he sought her the more persistently, and by some means so far wooed her from her reticence as to win her consent to a walk together one autumn afternoon. How little do we know the measure of our own proposing! That walk was to be the most fateful his feet had ever trodden through field and wood, yet it seemed the most accidental of gallantries. A little town-maid, with a romantic passion for 'us'; it would be interesting to watch the child; it would be like giving her a day's holiday, so much sunshine 'in our presence.' And so on. But what an entirely different complexion was the whole thing beginning to take before they had walked a mile. Behind the flippancy one had gone to meet were surely the growing features of a solemnity. Why, the child was a woman indeed; she could talk, she had brains, ideas—and, Lord bless us, Theories! She had that 'excellent thing in woman,' not only a voice, which she had, too, but character. Narcissus began to loose his regal robes, and from being merely courteously to be genuinely interested. Why, she was a discovery! As they walked on, her genuine delight in the autumnal nature, the real imaginative appeal it had for her, was another surprise. She had, evidently, a deep poetry in her disposition, rarest of all female endowments. In a surprisingly few minutes from the beginning of their walk he found himself taking that 'little child' with extreme seriousness, and wondering many 'whethers.'
They walked out again, and yet again, and Narcissus' first impressions deepened. He had his theories, too; and, surely, here was the woman! He was not in love—at least, not with her, but with her fitness for his theory.
They sat by a solitary woodside, beneath a great elm tree. The hour was full of magic, for though the sun had set, the smile of her day's joy with him had not yet faded from the face of earth. It was the hour vulgarised in drawing-room ballads as the 'gloaming.' They sat very near to each other; he held her hand, toying with it; and now and again their eyes met with the look that flutters before flight, that says, 'Dare I give thee all? Dare I throw my eyes on thine as I would throw myself on thee?' And then, at last, came the inevitable moment when the eyes of each seem to cry 'O yes!' to the other, and the gates fly back; all the hidden light springs forth, the woods swim round, and the lips meet with a strange shock, while the eyes of the spirit close in a lapping dream of great peace.
If you are not ready to play the man, beware of a kiss such as the lips of little Hesper, that never knew to kiss before, pressed upon the mouth of Narcissus. It sent a chill shudder through him, though it was so sweet, for he could feel her whole life surging behind it; and was the kiss he had given her for it such a kiss as that? But he had spoken much to her of his ideas of marriage; she knew he was sworn for ever against that. She must know the kiss had no such meaning; for, besides, did she not scorn the soiled 'tie' also? Were not their theories at one in that? He would be doing her no wrong; it was her own desire. Yet his kiss did mean more than he could have imagined it meaning a week before. She had grown to be genuinely desirable. If love tarried, passion was awake—that dangerous passion, too, to which the intellect has added its intoxication, and that is, so to say, legitimised by an 'idea.'
Her woman's intuition read the silence and answered to his thought. 'Have no fear,' she said, with the deep deliberation of passion; 'I love you with my whole life, but I shall never burden you, Narcissus. Love me as long as you can, I shall be content; and when the end comes, though another woman takes you, I shall not hinder.'
O great girl-soul! What a poltroon, indeed, was Narcissus beside you at that moment. You ready to stake your life on the throw, he temporising and bargaining as over the terms of a lease. Surely, if he could for one moment have seen himself in the light of your greatness, he had been crushed beneath the misery of his own meanness. But as yet he had no such vision; his one thought was, 'She will do it! will she draw back?' and the feeble warnings he was obliged to utter to keep his own terms, by assuring his conscience of 'her free-will,' were they not half-fearfully whispered, and with an inward haste, lest they should give her pause? 'But the world, my dear—think!' 'It will have cruel names for thee.' 'It will make thee outcast—think!'
'I know all,' she had answered; 'but I love you, and two years of your love would pay for all. There is no world for me but you. Till to-night I have never lived at all, and when you go I shall be as dead. The world cannot hurt such a one.'
Ah me, it was a wild, sweet dream for both of them, one the woman's, one the poet's, of a 'sweet impossible' taking flesh! For, do not let us blame Narcissus overmuch. He was utterly sincere; he meant no wrong. He but dreamed of following a creed to which his reason had long given a hopeless assent. In a more kindly-organised community he might have followed it, and all have been well; but the world has to be dealt with as one finds it, and we must get sad answers to many a fair calculation if we 'state' it wrongly in the equation. That there is one law for the male and another for the female had not as yet vitally entered into his considerations. He was too dizzy with the dream, or he must have seen what an unequal bargain he was about to drive.
At last he did awake, and saw it all; and in a burning shame went to Hesper, and told her that it must not be.
Her answer was unconsciously the most subtly dangerous she could have chosen: 'If I like to give myself to you, why should you not take me? It is of my own free-will. My eyes are open.' It was his very thought put into words, and by her. For a moment he wavered—who could blame him? 'Am I my brother's keeper?'