Lady Constantine was so agitated at the unexpected boldness of such a proposal from one hitherto so boyish and deferential that she sank into the observing-chair, her intention to remain for only a few minutes being quite forgotten.
She covered her face with her hands. ‘No, no, I dare not!’ she whispered.
‘But is there a single thing else left to do?’ he pleaded, kneeling down beside her, less in supplication than in abandonment. ‘What else can we do?’
‘Wait till you are famous.’
‘But I cannot be famous unless I strive, and this distracting condition prevents all striving!’
‘Could you not strive on if I—gave you a promise, a solemn promise, to be yours when your name is fairly well known?’
St. Cleeve breathed heavily. ‘It will be a long, weary time,’ he said. ‘And even with your promise I shall work but half-heartedly. Every hour of study will be interrupted with “Suppose this or this happens;” “Suppose somebody persuades her to break her promise;” worse still, “Suppose some rival maligns me, and so seduces her away.” No, Lady Constantine, dearest, best as you are, that element of distraction would still remain, and where that is, no sustained energy is possible. Many erroneous things have been written and said by the sages, but never did they float a greater fallacy than that love serves as a stimulus to win the loved one by patient toil.’
‘I cannot argue with you,’ she said weakly.
‘My only possible other chance would lie in going away,’ he resumed after a moment’s reflection, with his eyes on the lantern flame, which waved and smoked in the currents of air that leaked into the dome from the fierce wind-stream without. ‘If I might take away the equatorial, supposing it possible that I could find some suitable place for observing in the southern hemisphere,—say, at the Cape,—I might be able to apply myself to serious work again, after the lapse of a little time. The southern constellations offer a less exhausted field for investigation. I wonder if I might!’
‘You mean,’ she answered uneasily, ‘that you might apply yourself to work when your recollection of me began to fade, and my life to become a matter of indifference to you? . . Yes, go! No,—I cannot bear it! The remedy is worse than the disease. I cannot let you go away!’