I took it and held it and looked into her face; and I tried to tell her, as well as plain ‘good-night’ would do it, that I knew what had happened and wanted her to forgive me. I think she guessed what my look meant, by the sudden crimson flame in her face; but she walked out of the room with as much dignity as she had first walked into it, without another word.
The early days of December were cold and wet, and the shearing was a protracted and troublesome affair. Don hovered about restlessly, whether in or out of the house, always bothered and anxious, and paying frequent visits to the barometer. The ladies clung to their fireside as if they had been in England; and I tied myself to Lizzie’s apron-string with an abject alacrity that puzzled and charmed her. My opportunities for ‘improving the occasion’ were many, but somehow I could never turn them to account. The pride of that little maiden was quite beyond my management. Lizzie threw us together; she left us alone; she did all that in her lay to further my desires for a reconciliation and an understanding; but the implacable resentment of the last of the Lindsays towards me for that wretched slip of the tongue was a stone wall I could not climb over. The worst of it was, she did and said nothing tangibly offensive; and I was precluded by all sorts of considerations from mentioning the subject we were both (and that we both knew we were) thinking of. So matters went on day after day. And before a great many days were past I was over head and ears in love—I may as well say it and have done with it—and began to feel desperate and dangerous. She walked about the house with her grand air, my Queen Marie Antoinette, my little tyrant that I could almost have demolished with a finger and thumb; and I, standing six feet three in my stockings, had to acknowledge that she was invincible as well as unmerciful. Unregenerate savage as I was, I had faint longings now and then to take her by those slender shoulders, and shake her.
There were times when she became her sweet self, and could not help it though she tried; and these times were born of music. She and I both loved music with that special love that nature permits to a few people; but to no one else in the house did the ‘heaven-born maid’ present attractions. Don, hard at work all day, could go to sleep after dinner in his arm-chair; and Lizzie, after her manner, could go out of the room in the middle of the most charming song. Then, when we were singing together, or when she was gentle and gracious with the spirit of melody in her, then was the oil thrown upon my troubled waters. At times such as these it flashed across me that she was aware of it.
At length on one of these occasions I made a dash at her guarded citadel; I will not say in what words, but with the blundering foolishness that I suppose characterises all implied aspirations; albeit with sufficient plainness to leave no chance of being misunderstood; and then I had indeed to bite the dust for once in my life. She had been singing Ruth with the most touching pathos and abandonment—‘Where thou goest I will go, and there will I be buried’—and I could not stand it. Don was in the room, but snoring in that comfortable undertone which denoted a sound and quiet slumber. She stood with her back to the piano, and the sheet of music trembling and rustling in her hands, watching his nodding head in the distance, and turning her delicate profile to my view.
‘No; I will not,’ she half whispered with haughty rapidity. ‘You should have known I would not. I do not particularly want to marry anybody,’ she added, flashing round upon me with her crimson face; ‘but I will never marry you. I made up my mind to that long ago.’
Everybody knows how, in the supremely solemn moments of one’s life, one is apt to be assailed with most incongruously ludicrous ideas. In spite of my bitter mortification at her reply, an absurd rhyme that I had heard somewhere, flashed into my head:
Do not be like Nancy Baxter,
Who refused a man before he’d axed her.
I believe she saw the ghost of a smile that might have hovered round my eyes when I begged to know why she had made up her mind never to marry me; and that made her savage.
‘Because you think I came here to be made love to,’ she retorted, with all the concentrated contempt that her sweet face and voice could hold. ‘You think Lizzie and I have been plotting to catch you—you think we wanted to inveigle you into marrying me! I know what you are going to say’—as I rose and seized her hands, to stop her—‘but it is not the truth. I heard you’—lifting her angry eyes, now wet with unshed tears, to mine—‘I heard you, with my own ears, tell Don to warn Lizzie beforehand that you did not want to be married.’