“The human nature unto which I felt
That I belonged, and reverenced with love,
Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit
Diffused through time and space, with aid derived
Of evidence from monuments, erect,
Prostrate, or leaning toward their common rest
In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime
Of vanished nations.”
—WORDSWORTH: _The Prelude_.
Sir Hugo carried out his plan of spending part of the autumn at Diplow,
and by the beginning of October his presence was spreading some
cheerfulness in the neighborhood, among all ranks and persons
concerned, from the stately home of Brackenshaw and Quetcham to the
respectable shop-parlors in Wanchester. For Sir Hugo was a man who
liked to show himself and be affable, a Liberal of good lineage, who
confided entirely in reform as not likely to make any serious
difference in English habits of feeling, one of which undoubtedly is
the liking to behold society well fenced and adorned with hereditary
rank. Hence he made Diplow a most agreeable house, extending his
invitations to old Wanchester solicitors and young village curates, but
also taking some care in the combination of the guests, and not feeding
all the common poultry together, so that they should think their meal
no particular compliment. Easy-going Lord Brackenshaw, for example,
would not mind meeting Robinson the attorney, but Robinson would have
been naturally piqued if he had been asked to meet a set of people who
passed for his equals. On all these points Sir Hugo was well informed
enough at once to gain popularity for himself and give pleasure to
others—two results which eminently suited his disposition. The rector
of Pennicote now found a reception at Diplow very different from the
haughty tolerance he had undergone during the reign of Grandcourt. It
was not that the baronet liked Mr. Gascoigne; it was that he desired to
keep up a marked relation of friendliness with him on account of Mrs.
Grandcourt, for whom Sir Hugo’s chivalry had become more and more
engaged. Why? The chief reason was one that he could not fully
communicate, even to Lady Mallinger—for he would not tell what he
thought one woman’s secret to another, even though the other was his
wife—which shows that his chivalry included a rare reticence.
Deronda, after he had become engaged to Mirah, felt it right to make a
full statement of his position and purposes to Sir Hugo, and he chose
to make it by letter. He had more than a presentiment that his fatherly
friend would feel some dissatisfaction, if not pain, at this turn of
his destiny. In reading unwelcome news, instead of hearing it, there is
the advantage that one avoids a hasty expression of impatience which
may afterward be repented of. Deronda dreaded that verbal collision
which makes otherwise pardonable feeling lastingly offensive.
And Sir Hugo, though not altogether surprised, was thoroughly vexed.
His immediate resource was to take the letter to Lady Mallinger, who
would be sure to express an astonishment which her husband could argue
against as unreasonable, and in this way divide the stress of his
discontent. And in fact when she showed herself astonished and
distressed that all Daniel’s wonderful talents, and the comfort of
having him in the house, should have ended in his going mad in this way
about the Jews, the baronet could say,
“Oh, nonsense, my dear! depend upon it, Dan will not make a fool of
himself. He has large notions about Judaism—political views which you
can’t understand. No fear but Dan will keep himself head uppermost.”
But with regard to the prospective marriage she afforded him no
counter-irritant. The gentle lady observed, without rancor, that she
had little dreamed of what was coming when she had Mirah to sing at her
musical party and give lessons to Amabel. After some hesitation,
indeed, she confessed it _had_ passed through her mind that after a
proper time Daniel might marry Mrs. Grandcourt—because it seemed so
remarkable that he should be at Genoa just at that time—and although
she herself was not fond of widows she could not help thinking that
such a marriage would have been better than his going altogether with
the Jews. But Sir Hugo was so strongly of the same opinion that he
could not correct it as a feminine mistake; and his ill-humor at the
disproof of his disagreeable conclusions on behalf of Gwendolen was
left without vent. He desired Lady Mallinger not to breathe a word
about the affair till further notice, saying to himself, “If it is an
unkind cut to the poor thing (meaning Gwendolen), the longer she is
without knowing it the better, in her present nervous state. And she
will best learn it from Dan himself.” Sir Hugo’s conjectures had worked
so industriously with his knowledge, that he fancied himself well
informed concerning the whole situation.
Meanwhile his residence with his family at Diplow enabled him to
continue his fatherly attentions to Gwendolen; and in these Lady
Mallinger, notwithstanding her small liking for widows, was quite
willing to second him.
The plan of removal to Offendene had been carried out; and Gwendolen,
in settling there, maintained a calm beyond her mother’s hopes. She was
experiencing some of that peaceful melancholy which comes from the
renunciation of demands for self, and from taking the ordinary good of
existence, and especially kindness, even from a dog, as a gift above
expectation. Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness
complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking
at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and
evening—still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure
fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness—as
a salvation that reconciles us to hardship. Those who have a
self-knowledge prompting such self-accusation as Hamlet’s, can
understand this habitual feeling of rescue. And it was felt by
Gwendolen as she lived through and through again the terrible history
of her temptations, from their first form of illusory self-pleasing
when she struggled away from the hold of conscience, to their latest
form of an urgent hatred dragging her toward its satisfaction, while
she prayed and cried for the help of that conscience which she had once
forsaken. She was now dwelling on every word of Deronda’s that pointed
to her past deliverance from the worst evil in herself, and the worst
infliction of it on others, and on every word that carried a force to
resist self-despair.
But she was also upborne by the prospect of soon seeing him again: she
did not imagine him otherwise than always within her reach, her supreme
need of him blinding her to the separateness of his life, the whole
scene of which she filled with his relation to her—no unique
preoccupation of Gwendolen’s, for we are all apt to fall into this
passionate egoism of imagination, not only toward our fellow-men, but
toward God. And the future which she turned her face to with a willing
step was one where she would be continually assimilating herself to
some type that he would hold before her. Had he not first risen on her
vision as a corrective presence which she had recognized in the
beginning with resentment, and at last with entire love and trust? She
could not spontaneously think of an end to that reliance, which had
become to her imagination like the firmness of the earth, the only
condition of her walking.
And Deronda was not long before he came to Diplow, which was a more
convenient distance from town than the Abbey. He had wished to carry
out a plan for taking Ezra and Mirah to a mild spot on the coast, while
he prepared another home which Mirah might enter as his bride, and
where they might unitedly watch over her brother. But Ezra begged not
to be removed, unless it were to go with them to the East. All outward
solicitations were becoming more and more of a burden to him; but his
mind dwelt on the possibility of this voyage with a visionary joy.
Deronda, in his preparations for the marriage, which he hoped might not
be deferred beyond a couple of months, wished to have fuller
consultation as to his resources and affairs generally with Sir Hugo,
and here was a reason for not delaying his visit to Diplow. But he
thought quite as much of another reason—his promise to Gwendolen. The
sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his
heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always
called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed
indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually
paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk
or even current philosophy. It was no treason to Mirah, but a part of
that full nature which made his love for her the more worthy, that his
joy in her could hold by its side the care for another. For what is
love itself, for the one we love best?—an enfolding of immeasurable
cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
Deronda came twice to Diplow, and saw Gwendolen twice—and yet he went
back to town without having told her anything about the change in his
lot and prospects. He blamed himself; but in all momentous
communication likely to give pain we feel dependent on some preparatory
turn of words or associations, some agreement of the other’s mood with
the probable effect of what we have to impart. In the first interview
Gwendolen was so absorbed in what she had to say to him, so full of
questions which he must answer, about the arrangement of her life, what
she could do to make herself less ignorant, how she could be kindest to
everybody, and make amends for her selfishness and try to be rid of it,
that Deronda utterly shrank from waiving her immediate wants in order
to speak of himself, nay, from inflicting a wound on her in these
moments when she was leaning on him for help in her path. In the second
interview, when he went with new resolve to command the conversation
into some preparatory track, he found her in a state of deep
depression, overmastered by some distasteful miserable memories which
forced themselves on her as something more real and ample than any new
material out of which she could mould her future. She cried
hysterically, and said that he would always despise her. He could only
seek words of soothing and encouragement: and when she gradually
revived under them, with that pathetic look of renewed childlike
interest which we see in eyes where the lashes are still beaded with
tears, it was impossible to lay another burden on her.
But time went on, and he felt it a pressing duty to make the difficult
disclosure. Gwendolen, it was true, never recognized his having any
affairs; and it had never even occurred to her to ask him why he
happened to be at Genoa. But this unconsciousness of hers would make a
sudden revelation of affairs that were determining his course in life
all the heavier blow to her; and if he left the revelation to be made
by different persons, she would feel that he had treated her with cruel
inconsiderateness. He could not make the communication in writing: his
tenderness could not bear to think of her reading his virtual farewell
in solitude, and perhaps feeling his words full of a hard gladness for
himself and indifference for her. He went down to Diplow again, feeling
that every other peril was to be incurred rather than that of returning
and leaving her still in ignorance.
On this third visit Deronda found Hans Meyrick installed with his easel
at Diplow, beginning his picture of the three daughters sitting on a
bank, “in the Gainsborough style,” and varying his work by rambling to
Pennicote to sketch the village children and improve his acquaintance
with the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but
Deronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect the artificiality of
a lady’s bloom from its being a little too high-toned and steadily
persistent (a “Fluctuating Rouge” not having yet appeared among the
advertisements). Also with all his grateful friendship and admiration
for Deronda, Hans could not help a certain irritation against him, such
as extremely incautious, open natures are apt to feel when the breaking
of a friend’s reserve discloses a state of things not merely
unsuspected but the reverse of what had been hoped and ingeniously
conjectured. It is true that poor Hans had always cared chiefly to
confide in Deronda, and had been quite incurious as to any confidence
that might have been given in return; but what outpourer of his own
affairs is not tempted to think any hint of his friend’s affairs is an
egotistic irrelevance? That was no reason why it was not rather a sore
reflection to Hans that while he had been all along naively opening his
heart about Mirah, Deronda had kept secret a feeling of rivalry which
now revealed itself as the important determining fact. Moreover, it is
always at their peril that our friends turn out to be something more
than we were aware of. Hans must be excused for these promptings of
bruised sensibility, since he had not allowed them to govern his
substantial conduct: he had the consciousness of having done right by
his fortunate friend; or, as he told himself, “his metal had given a
better ring than he would have sworn to beforehand.” For Hans had
always said that in point of virtue he was a _dilettante_: which meant
that he was very fond of it in other people, but if he meddled with it
himself he cut a poor figure. Perhaps in reward of his good behavior he
gave his tongue the more freedom; and he was too fully possessed by the
notion of Deronda’s happiness to have a conception of what he was
feeling about Gwendolen, so that he spoke of her without hesitation.
“When did you come down, Hans?” said Deronda, joining him in the
grounds where he was making a study of the requisite bank and trees.
“Oh, ten days ago; before the time Sir Hugo fixed. I ran down with Rex
Gascoigne and stayed at the rectory a day or two. I’m up in all the
gossip of these parts; I know the state of the wheelwright’s interior,
and have assisted at an infant school examination. Sister Anna, with
the good upper lip, escorted me, else I should have been mobbed by
three urchins and an idiot, because of my long hair and a general
appearance which departs from the Pennicote type of the beautiful.
Altogether, the village is idyllic. Its only fault is a dark curate
with broad shoulders and broad trousers who ought to have gone into the
heavy drapery line. The Gascoignes are perfect—besides being related
to the Vandyke duchess. I caught a glimpse of her in her black robes at
a distance, though she doesn’t show to visitors.”
“She was not staying at the rectory?” said Deronda.
“No; but I was taken to Offendene to see the old house, and as a
consequence I saw the duchess’ family. I suppose you have been there
and know all about them?”
“Yes, I have been there,” said Deronda, quietly.
“A fine old place. An excellent setting for a widow with romantic
fortunes. And she seems to have had several romances. I think I have
found out that there was one between her and my friend Rex.”
“Not long before her marriage, then?” said Deronda, really interested,
“for they had only been a year at Offendene. How came you to know
anything of it?”
“Oh—not ignorant of what it is to be a miserable devil, I learn to
gloat on the signs of misery in others. I found out that Rex never goes
to Offendene, and has never seen the duchess since she came back; and
Miss Gascoigne let fall something in our talk about charade-acting—for
I went through some of my nonsense to please the young ones—something
that proved to me that Rex was once hovering about his fair cousin
close enough to get singed. I don’t know what was her part in the
affair. Perhaps the duke came in and carried her off. That is always
the way when an exceptionally worthy young man forms an attachment. I
understand now why Gascoigne talks of making the law his mistress and
remaining a bachelor. But these are green resolves. Since the duke did
not get himself drowned for your sake, it may turn out to be for my
friend Rex’s sake. Who knows?”
“Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?”
said Deronda, ready to add that Hans’s success in constructing her
fortunes hitherto had not been enough to warrant a new attempt.
“You monster!” retorted Hans, “do you want her to wear weeds for _you_
all her life—burn herself in perpetual suttee while you are alive and
merry?”
Deronda could say nothing, but he looked so much annoyed that Hans
turned the current of his chat, and when he was alone shrugged his
shoulders a little over the thought that there really had been some
stronger feeling between Deronda and the duchess than Mirah would like
to know of. “Why didn’t she fall in love with me?” thought Hans,
laughing at himself. “She would have had no rivals. No woman ever
wanted to discuss theology with me.”
No wonder that Deronda winced under that sort of joking with a
whip-lash. It touched sensibilities that were already quivering with
the anticipation of witnessing some of that pain to which even Hans’s
light words seemed to give more reality:—any sort of recognition by
another giving emphasis to the subject of our anxiety. And now he had
come down with the firm resolve that he would not again evade the
trial. The next day he rode to Offendene. He had sent word that he
intended to call and to ask if Gwendolen could receive him; and he
found her awaiting him in the old drawing-room where some chief crises
of her life had happened. She seemed less sad than he had seen her
since her husband’s death; there was no smile on her face, but a placid
self-possession, in contrast with the mood in which he had last found
her. She was all the more alive to the sadness perceptible in Deronda;
and they were no sooner seated—he at a little distance opposite to
her—than she said:
“You were afraid of coming to see me, because I was so full of grief
and despair the last time. But I am not so to-day. I have been sorry
ever since. I have been making it a reason why I should keep up my hope
and be as cheerful as I can, because I would not give you any pain
about me.”
There was an unwonted sweetness in Gwendolen’s tone and look as she
uttered these words that seemed to Deronda to infuse the utmost cruelty
into the task now laid upon him. But he felt obliged to make his answer
a beginning of the task.
“I _am_ in some trouble to-day,” he said, looking at her rather
mournfully; “but it is because I have things to tell you which you will
almost think it a want of confidence on my part not to have spoken of
before. They are things affecting my own life—my own future. I shall
seem to have made an ill return to you for the trust you have placed in
me—never to have given you an idea of events that make great changes
for me. But when we have been together we have hardly had time to enter
into subjects which at the moment were really less pressing to me than
the trials you have been going through.” There was a sort of timid
tenderness in Deronda’s deep tones, and he paused with a pleading look,
as if it had been Gwendolen only who had conferred anything in her
scenes of beseeching and confession.
A thrill of surprise was visible in her. Such meaning as she found in
his words had shaken her, but without causing fear. Her mind had flown
at once to some change in his position with regard to Sir Hugo and Sir
Hugo’s property. She said, with a sense of comfort from Deronda’s way
of asking her pardon,
“You never thought of anything but what you could do to help me; and I
was so troublesome. How could you tell me things?”
“It will perhaps astonish you,” said Deronda, “that I have only quite
lately known who were my parents.”
Gwendolen was not astonished: she felt the more assured that her
expectations of what was coming were right. Deronda went on without
check.
“The reason why you found me in Italy was that I had gone there to
learn that—in fact, to meet my mother. It was by her wish that I was
brought up in ignorance of my parentage. She parted with me after my
father’s death, when I was a little creature. But she is now very ill,
and she felt that the secrecy ought not to be any longer maintained.
Her chief reason had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew.”
“_A Jew_!” Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an
utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping
through her system.
Deronda colored, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes
fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her way in the dark by the
aid of various reminiscences. She seemed at last to have arrived at
some judgment, for she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if
remonstrating against the mother’s conduct,
“What difference need that have made?”
“It has made a great difference to me that I have known it,” said
Deronda, emphatically; but he could not go on easily—the distance
between her ideas and his acted like a difference of native language,
making him uncertain what force his words would carry.
Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, “I hope there is
nothing to make you mind. _You_ are just the same as if you were not a
Jew.”
She meant to assure him that nothing of that external sort could affect
the way in which she regarded him, or the way in which he could
influence her. Deronda was a little helped by this misunderstanding.
“The discovery was far from being painful to me,” he said, “I had been
gradually prepared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been prepared
for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas
have attracted me so much that I think of devoting the best part of my
life to some effort at giving them effect.”
Again Gwendolen seemed shaken—again there was a look of frustration,
but this time it was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with
lips childishly parted. It was not that she had yet connected his words
with Mirah and her brother, but that they had inspired her with a
dreadful presentiment of mountainous travel for her mind before it
could reach Deronda’s. Great ideas in general which she had attributed
to him seemed to make no great practical difference, and were not
formidable in the same way as these mysteriously-shadowed particular
ideas. He could not quite divine what was going on within her; he could
only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure.
“That is an object,” he said, after a moment, “which will by-and-by
force me to leave England for some time—for some years. I have
purposes which will take me to the East.”
Here was something clearer, but all the more immediately agitating.
Gwendolen’s lips began to tremble. “But you will come back?” she said,
tasting her own tears as they fell, before she thought of drying them.
Deronda could not sit still. He rose, and went to prop himself against
the corner of the mantel-piece, at a different angle from her face. But
when she had pressed her handkerchief against her cheeks, she turned
and looked up at him, awaiting an answer.
“If I live,” said Deronda—“_some time_.”
They were both silent. He could not persuade himself to say more unless
she led up to it by a question; and she was apparently meditating
something that she had to say.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, at last, very mildly. “Can I
understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?”
“I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition
of my race in various countries there,” said Deronda, gently—anxious
to be as explanatory as he could on what was the impersonal part of
their separateness from each other. “The idea that I am possessed with
is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a
nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have,
though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a
task which presents itself to me as a duty; I am resolved to begin it,
however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I
may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my
own.”
There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger
round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst.
The thought that he might come back after going to the East, sank
before the bewildering vision of these wild-stretching purposes in
which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible
moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger
destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other
neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where
the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an
invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know
nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls
forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the
shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the
Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and
lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew
poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the
wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling
fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under
the thunder of unrelenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and
no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it
is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even
in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human
struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which
is something else than a private consolation.
That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in
Gwendolen’s small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure
of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from
her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon
was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was
revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and widowhood had still
left her with the implicit impression which had accompanied her from
childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her,
and it was because of this that no personal jealousy had been roused in
her relation to Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him as
rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a
shock which went deeper than personal jealousy—something spiritual and
vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all her anger
into self-humiliation.
There had been a long silence. Deronda had stood still, even thankful
for an interval before he needed to say more, and Gwendolen had sat
like a statue with her wrists lying over each other and her eyes
fixed—the intensity of her mental action arresting all other
excitation. At length something occurred to her that made her turn her
face to Deronda and say in a trembling voice,
“Is that all you can tell me?”
The question was like a dart to him. “The Jew whom I mentioned just
now,” he answered, not without a certain tremor in his tones too, “the
remarkable man who has greatly influenced my mind, has not perhaps been
totally unheard of by you. He is the brother of Miss Lapidoth, whom you
have often heard sing.”
A great wave of remembrance passed through Gwendolen and spread as a
deep, painful flush over neck and face. It had come first at the scene
of that morning when she had called on Mirah, and heard Deronda’s voice
reading, and been told, without then heeding it, that he was reading
Hebrew with Mirah’s brother.
“He is very ill—very near death now,” Deronda went on, nervously, and
then stopped short. He felt that he must wait. Would she divine the
rest?
“Did she tell you that I went to her?” said Gwendolen, abruptly,
looking up at him.
“No,” said Deronda. “I don’t understand you.”
She turned away her eyes again, and sat thinking. Slowly the color
dried out of face and neck, and she was as pale as before—with that
almost withered paleness which is seen after a painful flush. At last
she said—without turning toward him—in a low, measured voice, as if
she were only thinking aloud in preparation for future speech,
“But _can_ you marry?”
“Yes,” said Deronda, also in a low voice. “I am going to marry.”
At first there was no change in Gwendolen’s attitude: she only began to
tremble visibly; then she looked before her with dilated eyes, as at
something lying in front of her, till she stretched her arms out
straight, and cried with a smothered voice,
“I said I should be forsaken. I have been a cruel woman. And I am
forsaken.”
Deronda’s anguish was intolerable. He could not help himself. He seized
her outstretched hands and held them together, and kneeled at her feet.
She was the victim of his happiness.
“I am cruel, too, I am cruel,” he repeated, with a sort of groan,
looking up at her imploringly.
His presence and touch seemed to dispel a horrible vision, and she met
his upward look of sorrow with something like the return of
consciousness after fainting. Then she dwelt on it with that growing
pathetic movement of the brow which accompanies the revival of some
tender recollection. The look of sorrow brought back what seemed a very
far-off moment—the first time she had ever seen it, in the library at
the Abbey. Sobs rose, and great tears fell fast. Deronda would not let
her hands go—held them still with one of his, and himself pressed her
handkerchief against her eyes. She submitted like a half-soothed child,
making an effort to speak, which was hindered by struggling sobs. At
last she succeeded in saying, brokenly,
“I said—I said—it should be better—better with me—for having known
you.”
His eyes too were larger with tears. She wrested one of her hands from
his, and returned his action, pressing his tears away.
“We shall not be quite parted,” he said. “I will write to you always,
when I can, and you will answer?”
He waited till she said in a whisper, “I will try.”
“I shall be more with you than I used to be,” Deronda said with gentle
urgency, releasing her hands and rising from his kneeling posture. “If
we had been much together before, we should have felt our differences
more, and seemed to get farther apart. Now we can perhaps never see
each other again. But our minds may get nearer.”
Gwendolen said nothing, but rose too, automatically. Her withered look
of grief, such as the sun often shines on when the blinds are drawn up
after the burial of life’s joy, made him hate his own words: they
seemed to have the hardness of easy consolation in them. She felt that
he was going, and that nothing could hinder it. The sense of it was
like a dreadful whisper in her ear, which dulled all other
consciousness; and she had not known that she was rising.
Deronda could not speak again. He thought that they must part in
silence, but it was difficult to move toward the parting, till she
looked at him with a sort of intention in her eyes, which helped him.
He advanced to put out his hand silently, and when she had placed hers
within it, she said what her mind had been laboring with,
“You have been very good to me. I have deserved nothing. I will
try—try to live. I shall think of you. What good have I been? Only
harm. Don’t let me be harm to _you_. It shall be the better for me—”
She could not finish. It was not that she was sobbing, but that the
intense effort with which she spoke made her too tremulous. The burden
of that difficult rectitude toward him was a weight her frame tottered
under.
She bent forward to kiss his cheek, and he kissed hers. Then they
looked at each other for an instant with clasped hands, and he turned
away.
When he was quite gone, her mother came in and found her sitting
motionless.
“Gwendolen, dearest, you look very ill,” she said, bending over her and
touching her cold hands.
“Yes, mamma. But don’t be afraid. I am going to live,” said Gwendolen,
bursting out hysterically.
Her mother persuaded her to go to bed, and watched by her. Through the
day and half the night she fell continually into fits of shrieking, but
cried in the midst of them to her mother, “Don’t be afraid. I shall
live. I mean to live.”
After all, she slept; and when she waked in the morning light, she
looked up fixedly at her mother and said tenderly, “Ah, poor mamma! You
have been sitting up with me. Don’t be unhappy. I shall live. I shall
be better.”