‘That reason, from myself to myself, Victoria, may be enough. It is not enough from you to me.’
‘From me to you then,’ she said; ‘will this do? All things leave us, as we stand here in this Isle; all things pass us by. Whatever comes to us, as surely goes. Why should we hope to keep it, when that must be the end? God has marked us out for solitude: let us bow to God’s will. Nothing could keep you here: it is written. Nothing has kept others.’
The pang that had almost ceased darted through me again with its full force, at these last words. ‘Cold, cruel heart!’ I said in a fury of pain, ‘you have never cared to keep me. Why had you not pity enough to let me die, when the waves tossed me here?’
She gave me one glance, of which I could not catch the full expression in the uncertain light, straightened herself, folded her hands behind her, and turned her face towards the sea.
The wrathful agony of my feelings endured even under this rebuke, much as I felt I deserved it. I was distinctly aware that I was playing a pitiful part before her, and distinctly unable to help playing it. The torment of losing her, of being nothing to her, overpowered every finer feeling: and the more I felt the degradation of my violence, the more desperate the violence seemed to become. I felt only the goading of the pain of loss, and, forgetting all my fine resolves to treat her with the disdain with which I thought she was treating me, I caught her in my arms and covered her lips, her eyes, her brow, with passionate kisses, till she sank for support upon a jutting stone. It was no timid first kiss of pastoral flirtation, but twenty, following as quick on one another as a rain of angry blows. There was a sort of anger in them, as well as love. I seemed to feel that I had been made the sport of her innocence. What had I not lost by trying to outdo her in tenderness, in generosity, and reserve? So I interpret my feelings now: at the moment, nothing could have been more devoid of conscious motive than the madness of this act. The brute that is in each of us, and that is only half held in check by laws, observances, and uses, seemed suddenly to have slipped his chain.
Yet, if the act was a surprise to me, in itself, it was a greater surprise in its effect upon Victoria. The girl seemed to sink down, from sheer want of the power of resistance. The lips parted, without word or sound, but the eyes met the fierce gaze of mine with infinite tenderness; and, when she did speak, this was what I heard:
‘Oh, I love you, I love you—better than my own life: and I will never have you love me: and to-morrow you shall go away from me for ever.’
The thing had been said, and there was no unsaying it. In vain, Victoria, resuming her self-control almost as quickly as she had lost it, disengaged herself from my arms, which had sought her beautiful shape.
She sat silent, in what I could not but feel was a silence of shame. For the moment, I was silent too. We were both, in a manner, stunned by the shock of that avowal. Victoria had said what she meant never to say: I had heard what I never hoped to hear. If I had expectation of anything—though, indeed, I think I had none—it was rather of anger and fierce repulse.
I was the first to recover speech, if not self-possession. I took her hand: thank Heaven I had enough sense and feeling left not to claim her lips on the strength of what had just passed. I tried to tell her something of what I had wanted to tell her all this weary time—how my love for her had come, first, through the divine suggestion of her shape, and voice, and ways, and how her soul had completed what they had begun, and turned enchantment into one of the laws of being.