Her hand lay passive in his grasp, yet he could feel the pulses throbbing to the very tips of those small, rosy fingers, so strongly and tumultuously, that he could not reconcile such evidence of her quick and lively feeling with the fixed tranquillity of the eye which was bent upon his own, with the rigidity of the marble brow.
At length, and contrary to what is wont to happen, it was he who first broke silence.
“Theresa,” he said, “I have grieved—I have pained—perhaps offended you.”
And then she started, as his voice smote her ears, so complete had been the abstraction of her mind, and recovering all her faculties and readiness of mind on the instant,
“Yes, Durzil,” she said, very sweetly, but very sorrowfully, “you have grieved me, you have pained me, very, very deeply; but oh, do not imagine that you have offended—that you could offend me. No; you have torn away too suddenly, too roughly, the veil that covered my eyes and my heart. You have awakened thoughts, and feelings, and perceptions in my soul, of whose existence I never dreamed before. You have made me know myself as it were, better within the last few minutes than I ever knew myself before. It seems to me, that I have lived longer and felt more, since we have sat here together, than in all the years I can count before. And, oh, my heart! my heart! I am most unhappy.”
“You cannot love me, then, Theresa,” he said, tranquilly; for he had vast self-control, and he was too much of a man to suffer his own agitation or distress to agitate or distress her further. “You cannot love me as I would be loved by you—you cannot be mine.”
“Durzil,” she said, in tones full of the deepest emotion, “until the moment in which you spoke to me, I never thought of love, I never dreamed or imagined to myself what it should be, other than the love I bear to my father, to you, to all that is kind, and good, and beautiful in humanity or in nature. But your words, I know not how nor wherefore, have awakened me, as it were, into a strange sort of knowledge. I do not love, I almost hope that I never may love, as you would wish me to love you; but I do feel now that I know what such love should be; and I tremble at the knowledge. I feel that it would be too strong, too full of fear, of anxiety, of agony, to allow of happiness. Oh, no, no! Durzil, do not ask me, do not wish me to love you so; pray, rather pray for me to God rather, that I may never love at all—for so surely as I do love, I know that I shall be a wretched, wretched woman!”
That was a strange scene, and it passed between a strange pair. Great influences had been at work in the minds of both within the last few hours, and it would have been very difficult to say in which the greatest change had been wrought.
In her, the tranquil, innocent, unconscious girl had been aroused into the powerful, passionate, thoughtful woman. A knowledge of that whereof she had been most ignorant before “her glassy essence” had awakened her, as the breeze awakens the lake from repose into power.
In him, the violent, hot-headed, stubborn, and impetuous man of action had been tamed down by a conversion almost as sudden and convincing into the slow, self-controlled, self-denying man of counsel. As the discovery of power had aroused her into life, so had the discovery of long cherished, long injurious error, tamed him into tranquillity.