“Would that I had! I ought to have. But would it be useless?”
“As useless as it would be cruel, sweet, I vow to you.”
“But ’tis cruel to let you stay. ’Tis a wonder your presence in the neighbourhood isn’t known already—a wonder the poacher hasn’t betrayed you.”
“Nay, he is true as steel. We are in the same galley—both rebels, he against the game laws and the world’s injustice, I against the present dynasty. You must know, we outlaws stand together.—You are again in the mood of fearing for my safety. But see how baseless your fears have been so far. Trust our stars, dearest: mine, at least, has ever been fortunate.”
“My fears are always returning. Sometimes I have the most poignant feeling of danger surrounding us, of reproach to myself that I was the cause of interrupting your flight. I have that feeling now. Oh, Everell, loth as I am to send you away, I feel in my soul that I ought! My heart, which would keep you here, at the same time urges you to fly: with one beat it calls to you, ‘Stay,’ and with the next cries, ‘Go!’ Oh, why did you not go on with your friend?”
“Indeed, ’tis better he and I are apart, since that fellow at the inn knew we travelled together,” replied Everell, trying to reassure her. “If the man really meant to continue dogging us, our separation was the best means of confusing him. Dismiss your fears, sweet. If your regard for me were love rather than compassion,—love such as I have for you,—the only impulse of your heart would be to keep me with you: beyond that, you would not think, either with hope or fear. And yet your compassion, so angelic,—nay, so womanly,—I would rather have than the love of any other woman.”
He said this honestly; for she had never in plain terms owned to him that she loved him, and he, in the humility of a man’s first love, saw himself unworthy of her by as much as he adored her, and therefore did not imagine himself capable of eliciting from her what he felt for her. Her indulgence he ascribed to the pity of a gentle heart for one whose situation, both as a refugee and as a lover, pleaded for him while his courtesy and honour gave assurance that her tenderness was safe from betrayal. If her heart desired him to stay near her, he supposed, ’twas because it hesitated to put him to the unhappiness of leaving her. That she might suffer on her own account in his absence, did not occur to him: she herself was all loveliness, and where she was, there would all loveliness be; what was he that she should find him necessary to make the world complete? Were his presence needful to her content, she would not limit their meetings to so few moments in a long day. Thus he thought, or, rather, thus he felt without analyzing the feeling.
“’Tis the duty of my compassion, then,” she answered, “to drive you away. I am more convinced of it now than ever. Such foreboding, such misgiving!—why do I feel so? I pray Heaven ’tis not yet too late.—Hark! what was that?”
“’Tis only the master and his guests a-laughing over their dissipations,” said Prudence, near whom the lovers happened at the moment to be standing. “They’ve left the window open, ma’am.”
“See how easily you are frightened without cause,” said Everell. “Come, has not the mood run its course?”