“Oh God!” said Winterborne within himself. His head was turned askance as he still resolutely regarded the ground. For the last several minutes he had seen this great temptation approaching him in regular siege; and now it had come. The wrong, the social sin, of now taking advantage of the offer of her lips had a magnitude, in the eyes of one whose life had been so primitive, so ruled by purest household laws, as Giles’s, which can hardly be explained.
“Did you say anything?” she asked, timidly.
“Oh no—only that—”
“You mean that it must be already settled, since my father is coming home?” she said, gladly.
Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this while—though he would have protected Grace’s good repute as the apple of his eye—was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods. In face of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a man’s weakness. Since it was so—since it had come to this, that Grace, deeming herself free to do it, was virtually asking him to demonstrate that he loved her—since he could demonstrate it only too truly—since life was short and love was strong—he gave way to the temptation, notwithstanding that he perfectly well knew her to be wedded irrevocably to Fitzpiers. Indeed, he cared for nothing past or future, simply accepting the present and what it brought, desiring once in his life to clasp in his arms her he had watched over and loved so long.
She started back suddenly from his embrace, influenced by a sort of inspiration. “Oh, I suppose,” she stammered, “that I am really free?—that this is right? Is there really a new law? Father cannot have been too sanguine in saying—”
He did not answer, and a moment afterwards Grace burst into tears in spite of herself. “Oh, why does not my father come home and explain,” she sobbed, “and let me know clearly what I am? It is too trying, this, to ask me to—and then to leave me so long in so vague a state that I do not know what to do, and perhaps do wrong!”
Winterborne felt like a very Cain, over and above his previous sorrow. How he had sinned against her in not telling her what he knew. He turned aside; the feeling of his cruelty mounted higher and higher. How could he have dreamed of kissing her? He could hardly refrain from tears. Surely nothing more pitiable had ever been known than the condition of this poor young thing, now as heretofore the victim of her father’s well-meant but blundering policy.
Even in the hour of Melbury’s greatest assurance Winterborne had harbored a suspicion that no law, new or old, could undo Grace’s marriage without her appearance in public; though he was not sufficiently sure of what might have been enacted to destroy by his own words her pleasing idea that a mere dash of the pen, on her father’s testimony, was going to be sufficient. But he had never suspected the sad fact that the position was irremediable.
Poor Grace, perhaps feeling that she had indulged in too much fluster for a mere kiss, calmed herself at finding how grave he was.