‘What can cause this deep recoil in you from Mr. Harris’s offer? What can occasion your detestation of it and the bitter feeling of shame? His offer reached you in the most inoffensive manner possible. There is hardly a woman who would not find something in such an offer of marriage made by such a man under such conditions to laugh at. No honourable offer of marriage can fill a woman with loathing. A man can pay a woman no higher compliment than to ask her to be his wife, and no woman therefore is to be unutterably outraged, as you tell me you are, by the highest compliment our sex can receive. Nor is it as though Mr. Harris were a monster of a figure and face to justify the abhorrence his offer has excited. What, then, is the reason of this abhorrence?’
She sank into a little reverie during which I watched her almost breathlessly. ‘I shall not be at all surprised, Agnes,’ said she presently, ‘if you prove to be a married woman in spite of your not wearing a wedding ring. There must be a reason for your not wearing a wedding-ring, and some of these days, please God, you will be able to account for its missing from your finger. I believe—yes, I earnestly believe’—she went on looking me eagerly in the eyes—‘that your antipathy to this offer, the sense of insult that has attended this offer, arises from a rebellion of the instincts which possess the truth, though they are unable to communicate it to the intelligence. The impression of marriage—the great momentous step of every woman’s life—is too deep to perish. Your secret horror, your unaccountable loathing, is the subtle and unintelligible revolt of your chastity as a wife against an offer that is an insult to that chastity. I believe this, my dear, I do indeed.’
‘Oh God!’ I cried, and my bursting heart could find no other vent than that cry of ‘Oh God!’
‘You must not be distressed,’ continued the dear little woman, clasping my hand, ‘because our speculations should be tending the right way. Suppose we are able to satisfy ourselves that you are a wife; the knowledge will be a distinct gain, something to employ with profit on our return to England. But to be able to form no ideas whatever about you, my dear——And now I wish to say a word about your future. Can you believe that after our association on board this ship, after the friendship between you and my darling child, I could bear to lose sight of you on our return home?——But you have been so much upset by what has happened to-day that I will not talk to you now about the future. Come with me to Alice,’ said she rising; ‘it is not long after eight; she has been wanting you all the afternoon and evening, and will be glad if you will sit with her for an hour.’
* * * * *
And now happened another interval of shipboard life, during which there occurred nothing of interest enough to trouble you with. That Captain Ladmore had delivered my answer to Mr. Harris, and that he had also requested, perhaps commanded, his first officer to trouble me no further with his attentions, I could not doubt, for when, next morning, I met Mr. Harris at the breakfast table, I never once caught him looking my way. The twist of his mouth seemed a little dryer than usual, and his countenance might generally express a slight increase of acidity of feeling; nevertheless, he talked somewhat more freely than was commonly his custom, was attentive to what was said, and appeared to direct his eyes at everybody but at me.
His behaviour made me easy, the more so since I was sure he would not talk of what had passed, so that the ridiculous, and to me the humiliating incident, would be known to nobody on board excepting the Lees and the captain of the ship.
And here I may as well say—for it is time that I should dismiss the few shadowy figures which flit between this part of my story and the sequel—that ever after, whilst I remained on board the Deal Castle, the behaviour of Mr. Harris remained the same; that is to say, he never looked at me and never accosted me. If I approached that part of the deck where he was standing, he instantly walked away. For a day or two after I had received his ‘offer’ I would briefly salute him with a ‘Good-morning,’ or some such phrase, if we had not before met in the day, but he never turned his eyes to my face, nor answered me, nor took any notice of me; for which behaviour in him, as you may suppose, I was truly thankful. And yet somehow he so contrived his manner that his downright cutting of me, if I may so express it, was much less noticeable than his conduct had been whilst, as I may suppose, he was making up his mind to offer me marriage. Nobody remarked upon his behaviour; I never, indeed, heard a whisper about it.
He was, indeed, an extraordinary person in his way. I suffer my memory to dwell briefly upon him before he stalks ghost-like off the little stage of my dark and memorable experience. I have, I may say, no doubt whatever he was in earnest in his desire to marry me; and I have since understood that it was in the power of Captain Ladmore to have united us, for it seems that amongst the privileges enjoyed by the master of a merchant vessel is the right to solemnise holy matrimony, and to make two people one as effectually as though they were tied together by a clergyman on shore. I often recall the poor man and speculate on his motive. It would be ridiculous to feign that he had fallen in love with me; my face and thin, white hair must have preserved him from that passion. He might, indeed, have imagined in me certain intellectual graces and qualities, and fallen in love with his own ideal. Was it pure goodness of heart that caused him to take pity on my lonely and helpless condition? or—the notion having been put into his head by Sir Frederick Thompson—did he secretly believe that I belonged to a fine old family, that his marriage to me would connect him with people of title and wealth, and that, for all he knew, when my memory returned I would be able to tell him that he had married a fortune, or enough money, at all events, to release him from a calling which he appeared to hate?
His strange offer of marriage, however, resulted in persuading me that I was a married woman. It would never have entered my head to imagine such a thing but for Mrs. Lee; and then when I came to think over her words, and to reason upon the horror that had visited me whilst I listened to Captain Ladmore, there grew up in my mind a strong secret conviction that I was a wife. It was not a discovery. Indeed, as a surmise, it was no more helpful to my memory than the little City knight’s assurance that I was a member of the house of Calthorpe; and yet it could not have affected me more had it been a discovery. I would lie awake for hours during the night thinking of it. When I was with Alice my mind would wander from the book I read aloud to her from, or my attention would stray from her language, whilst my whole intellectual being sank as it were into the black chasm of memory, where the mind with sightless vision would go on fruitlessly groping until the useless quest grew at times into so keen a torment that often I was convinced I should go mad.