On going to Budmouth three days later, she found to her surprise that
the steward had been there, had introduced himself, and had seen her
brother. A few delicacies had been brought him also by the same hand.
Owen spoke in warm terms of Manston and his free and unceremonious call,
as he could not have refrained from doing of any person, of any kind,
whose presence had served to help away the tedious hours of a long day,
and who had, moreover, shown that sort of consideration for him which
the accompanying basket implied--antecedent consideration, so telling
upon all invalids--and which he so seldom experienced except from the
hands of his sister.
How should he perceive, amid this tithe-paying of mint, and anise, and
cummin, the weightier matters which were left undone?
Again the steward met her at Carriford Road Station on her return
journey. Instead of being frigid as at the former meeting at the same
place, she was embarrassed by a strife of thought, and murmured brokenly
her thanks for what he had done. The same request that he might see her
home was made.
He had perceived his error in making his kindness to Owen a conditional
kindness, and had hastened to efface all recollection of it. ‘Though I
let my offer on her brother’s--my friend’s--behalf, seem dependent on my
lady’s graciousness to me,’ he whispered wooingly in the course of their
walk, ‘I could not conscientiously adhere to my statement; it was said
with all the impulsive selfishness of love. Whether you choose to have
me, or whether you don’t, I love you too devotedly to be anything but
kind to your brother.... Miss Graye, Cytherea, I will do anything,’ he
continued earnestly, ‘to give you pleasure--indeed I will.’
She saw on the one hand her poor and much-loved Owen recovering from
his illness and troubles by the disinterested kindness of the man
beside her, on the other she drew him dying, wholly by reason of her
self-enforced poverty. To marry this man was obviously the course of
common sense, to refuse him was impolitic temerity. There was reason
in this. But there was more behind than a hundred reasons--a woman’s
gratitude and her impulse to be kind.
The wavering of her mind was visible in her tell-tale face. He noticed
it, and caught at the opportunity.
They were standing by the ruinous foundations of an old mill in the
midst of a meadow. Between grey and half-overgrown stonework--the only
signs of masonry remaining--the water gurgled down from the old millpond
to a lower level, under the cloak of rank broad leaves--the sensuous
natures of the vegetable world. On the right hand the sun, resting on
the horizon-line, streamed across the ground from below copper-coloured
and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a sky of pale soft
green. All dark objects on the earth that lay towards the sun were
overspread by a purple haze, against which a swarm of wailing gnats
shone forth luminously, rising upward and floating away like sparks of
fire.
The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity. The only
wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless.
The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all such
temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a
single entity under the sky.
He came so close that their clothes touched. ‘Will you try to love me?
Do try to love me!’ he said, in a whisper, taking her hand. He had never
taken it before. She could feel his hand trembling exceedingly as it
held hers in its clasp.
Considering his kindness to her brother, his love for herself, and
Edward’s fickleness, ought she to forbid him to do this? How truly
pitiful it was to feel his hand tremble so--all for her! Should she
withdraw her hand? She would think whether she would. Thinking, and
hesitating, she looked as far as the autumnal haze on the marshy
ground would allow her to see distinctly. There was the fragment of a
hedge--all that remained of a ‘wet old garden’--standing in the middle
of the mead, without a definite beginning or ending, purposeless and
valueless. It was overgrown, and choked with mandrakes, and she could
almost fancy she heard their shrieks.... Should she withdraw her hand?
No, she could not withdraw it now; it was too late, the act would not
imply refusal. She felt as one in a boat without oars, drifting with
closed eyes down a river--she knew not whither.
He gave her hand a gentle pressure, and relinquished it.
Then it seemed as if he were coming to the point again. No, he was not
going to urge his suit that evening. Another respite.