They walked a few steps farther, into the deepest recesses of the place, and he told her all he had suffered, and how he hated himself for his selfishness, and how his only thought now was to efface it all from her mind by their marriage as soon as possible.
"I think we will go up to town together, and we will marry there. What do you say?"
His face was very pale as he spoke the decisive words—words that had never passed his lips to any woman before, and that he had always thought vaguely he would say some day in such different circumstances—circumstances where they would mean linking himself to brilliant, worldly prospects, to landed possessions, to high lineage, to a family old as his own; and now they were being said to this simple girl, who had none of these, and not even that surprising beauty which sometimes outweighs them all.
She had conquered him where other women all his life long had tried and tried in vain. Why was it? Unless this ground on which they walked were indeed enchanted. As is the case with so many men, love and marriage stood widely separated in his mind. Love was a wonderful, passionate pleasure, which had been his companion all his life. Marriage was a stupid business arrangement, that he might have to make some time, because certain practical advantages went with it.
He had immense property to leave behind him, and as he entertained the usual family dislike of all his brothers and sisters, he would have preferred to have a legitimate son to whom it would go, but it had been urged upon him, ever since he could remember, that to marry was "his duty," and as he had always found the "duties" discovered for him by others were extremely disagreeable, he had come naturally to have a very real distaste for it. No one had suggested to him that marriage meant, or could or ought to mean, pleasure.
Pleasure and sin were always jumbled together, and held before his eyes, through his childhood and youth, in his severe Scottish home, and marriage was associated with duty, with constraint, with bondage, with monetary considerations, and nothing else; with everything that he most hated.
And the result of this training had been far from what his stern family would have wished. The Oriental youth, who leads a cleaner life than English youths, and is a stranger to dissipation, is taught differently. Marriage to him is not represented as a holy penance, involving renunciation and sacrifice, but as the only gate to supreme delight. In all Eastern languages the word for marriage is identical with the word for pleasure.
Does it not seem a wiser method?
So that, considering his upbringing, it was no wonder that Everest's face paled and his heart sank as he pronounced the dismal word "marry," which had always seemed to him to mean the end of everything, the termination of freedom, the finishing of pleasure, the dismissal of love, only to be compensated for by great worldly gain. And here there was no gain. His feet had somehow got entangled in the horrid mesh at last. Yet, as he glanced at the girl beside him, so bright, with her springing step, her rose-like face and her wide, innocent eyes, he could not feel that she had spread it for him, as others had done in vain. No, he had courted disaster, and himself pulled it down upon his head.