A STERNER WOOING
It was an unusual thing for the middle of August to find Richard
Dagworthy still in Dunfield. Through all the other months of the year he
stuck closely to the mill, but the best three weeks of August were his
holiday; as a rule, he went to Scotland, sometimes in company with a
friend, more often alone. In the previous year he had taken a wider
flight, and made his first visit to the Continent, but this was not
likely to be repeated for some time. He always referred to it as more or
less of a feat. The expense, to begin with, was greater than he could
readily reconcile himself to, and the indulgence of his curiosity, not
inactive, hardly compensated for his lack of ease amid the unfamiliar
conditions of foreign travel. Richard represented an intermediate stage
of development between the hard-headed operative who conquers wealth,
and his descendant who shall know what use to make of it. Therein lay
the significance of the man's life.
Its pathos, moreover. Looking at him casually from the outside, one
found small suggestion of the pathetic in his hard face and brusque
manners; nearer companionship revealed occasional glimpses of a mood out
of harmony with the vulgar pursuits and solicitudes which for the most
part seemed to absorb him. One caught a hint of loneliness in his
existence; his reticences, often very marked in the flow of his
unpolished talk, seemed to indicate some disappointment, and a dislike
to dwell upon it. In point of fact, his life was rather lonely; his two
sisters were married in other towns, and, since the death of his wife,
he had held no communications with her relatives. The child was all he
had of family, and, though his paternal affections were strong, he was
not the man to content his hours of leisure with gambols in a nursery.
His dogs were doubtless a great resource, and in a measure made up to
him for the lack of domestic interests; yet there sometimes passed days
during which he did not visit the kennels, always a sign to the servants
to beware of his temper, which at such seasons was easily roused to
fury. The reputation he had in Dunfield for brutality of behaviour dated
from his prosecution for violent assault by a groom, whom, in one of his
fits of rage, he had all but pounded to a jelly. The incident occurred
early in his married life, and was, no doubt, the origin of the very
prevalent belief that he had ruled his wife by similar methods. Dunfield
society was a little shy of him for some time after, until, indeed, by
becoming a widower, he presented himself once more in an interesting
light. Though he possibly brought about his wife's death by ill-usage,
that did not alter the fact that he had a carriage and pair to offer to
the lady whom he might be disposed to make her successor.
His marriage had been of a kind that occasioned general surprise, and,
in certain circles, indignation. There had come to live, in one of the
smaller houses upon the Heath, a family consisting of a middle-aged lady
and her two daughters; their name was Hanmer, and their previous home
had been in Hebsworth, the large manufacturing town which is a sort of
metropolis to Dunfield and other smaller centres round about. Mr. Hanmer
was recently dead; he had been a banker, but suffered grave losses in a
period of commercial depression, and left his family poorly off. Various
reasons led to his widow's quitting Hebsworth; Dunfield inquirers
naturally got hold of stories more or less to the disgrace of the
deceased Mr. Hanmer. The elder of the two daughters Richard Dagworthy
married, after an acquaintance of something less than six months.
Dunfield threw up its hands in amazement: such a proceeding on young
Dagworthy's part was not only shabby to the families which had upon him
the claim of old-standing expectancy, but was in itself inexplicable.
Miss Hanmer might be good-looking, but Richard (always called 'young' to
distinguish him from his father) had surely outgrown such a very
infantile reason of choice, when other attractions were, to the Dunfield
mind, altogether wanting. The Hanmers were not only poor, but, more
shameful still, positively 'stuck up' in their poverty. They came
originally from the south of England, forsooth, and spoke in an affected
way, pronouncing their vowels absurdly. Well, the consoling reflection
was that his wife would soon make him see that she despised him, for if
ever there was a thorough Yorkshireman, it was Richard.
Dunfield comments on Mrs. Dagworthy seemed to find some justification in
the turn things took. Richard distinctly began to neglect those of his
old friends who smacked most of the soil; if they visited his house, his
wife received them with an affected graciousness which was so
unmistakably 'stuck up' that they were in no hurry to come again, and
her behaviour, when she returned visits, was felt to be so offensive
that worthy ladies--already prejudiced--had a difficulty in refraining
from a kind of frankness which would have brought about a crisis. The
town was perpetually busy with gossip concerning the uncomfortableness
of things in the house on the Heath. Old Mr. Dagworthy, it was declared,
had roundly bidden his son seek a domicile elsewhere, since joint
occupancy of the home had become impossible. Whether such a change was
in reality contemplated could never be determined; the old man's death
removed the occasion. Mrs. Dagworthy survived him little more than half
a year. So there, said Dunfield, was a mistake well done with; and it
was disposed to let bygones be bygones.
What was the truth of all this? That Dagworthy married hastily and found
his wife uncongenial, and that Mrs. Dagworthy passed the last two years
of her life in mourning over a fatal mistake, was all that could be
affirmed as fact, and probably the two persons most nearly concerned
would have found it difficult to throw more light upon the situation.
Outwardly it was as commonplace a story as could be told; even the
accession of interest which would have come of Dagworthy's cruelty was
due to the imagination of Dunfield gossips. Richard was miserable enough
in his home, and frequently bad-tempered, but his wife had nothing worse
from him than an angry word now and then. After the first few months of
their marriage, the two lived, as far as possible, separate lives; Mrs.
Dagworthy spent the days with her mother and sister, Richard at the
mill, and the evenings were got through with as little friction as might
be between two people neither of whom could speak half a dozen words
without irritating or disgusting the other. The interesting feature of
the case was the unexpectedness of Dagworthy's choice. It evinced so
much more originality than one looked for in such a man. It was, indeed,
the outcome of ambitions which were not at all clear to their possessor.
Miss Hanmer had impressed him as no other woman had done, simply because
she had graces and accomplishments of a kind hitherto unknown to him;
Richard felt that for the first time in his life he was in familiar
intercourse with a 'lady.' Her refined modes of speech, her little
personal delicacies, her unconscious revelation of knowledge which he
deemed the result of deep study, even her pretty and harmless witticisms
at the expense of Dunfield dignitaries, touched his slumbering
imagination with singular force. Miss Hanmer, speedily observing her
power, made the most of it; she was six-and-twenty, and poverty rendered
her position desperate. Dagworthy at first amused her as a specimen of
the wealthy boor, but the evident delight he found in her society
constrained her to admit that the boor possessed the elements of good
taste. The courtship was of rapid progress, the interests at stake being
so simply defined on either side, and circumstances presenting no kind
of obstacle. The lady accepted him without hesitation, and triumphed in
her good fortune.
Dagworthy conceived that his end was gained; in reality it was the
beginning of his disillusion. It speedily became clear to him that he
did not really care for his wife, that he had been the victim of some
self-deception, which was all the more exasperating because difficult to
be explained. The danger of brutality on his part really lay in this
first discovery of his mistake; the presence of his father in the house
was a most fortunate circumstance; it necessitated self-control at a
time when it was hardest to maintain. Later, he was too much altered
from the elementary creature he had been to stand in danger of grossly
ill-using his wife. His marriage developed the man surprisingly; it made
him self-conscious in a degree he could not formerly have conceived. He
had fully believed that this woman was in love with him, and the belief
had flattered him inexpressibly; to become aware that she regarded him
with disgust, only kept under by fear, was to receive light on many
things besides the personal relations between himself and her. If he had
not in reality regarded her at any time with strong feeling, what had
made him so bent on gaining her for his wife? To puzzle this over--the
problem would not quit his mind--was to become dimly aware of what he
had hoped for and what he had missed. It was not her affection: he felt
that the absence of this was not the worst thing he had to bear.
Gradually he came to understand that he had been deceived by
artificialities which mocked the image of something for which he really
longed, and that something was refinement, within and without, a life
directed by other motives and desires than those he had known, a spirit
aiming at things he did not understand, yet which he would gladly have
had explained to him. There followed resentment of the deceit that had
been practised on him; the woman had been merely caught by his money,
and it followed that she was contemptible. Instead of a higher, he had
wedded a lower than himself; she did not care even to exercise the
slight hypocrisy by which she might have kept his admiration; the
cruelest feature of the wrong he had suffered was that, by the
disclosure of her unworthiness, his wife was teaching him the real value
of that which he had aimed at blindly and so deplorably failed to gain.
Dagworthy had a period almost of despair; it was then that, in an access
of fury, he committed the brutality which created so many myths about
his domestic life. To be hauled into the police-court, and to be well
aware what Dunfield was saying about him, was not exactly an agreeable
experience, but it had, like his marriage, an educational value; he knew
that the thrashing administered to the groom had been a vicarious one,
and this actively awakened sense of a possible inner meaning of things
was not without its influence upon him. It was remarked that he heard
the imposition of his fine with a suppressed laugh. Dunfield, repeating
the story with florid circumstance, of course viewed it as an
illustration of his debauched state of mind; in reality the laugh came
of a perception of the solemn absurdity of the proceedings, and Richard
was by so much the nearer to understanding himself and the world.
His wife's death came as an unhoped-for relief; he felt like a man
beginning the world anew. He had no leaning to melancholy, and a
prolongation of his domestic troubles would not have made him less
hearty in his outward bearing, but the progress of time had developed
elements in his nature which were scarcely compatible with a continuance
of the life he had been leading. He had begun to put to himself ominous
questions; such, for instance, as--What necessity was he under to
maintain the appearance of a cheerful domesticity? If things got just a
trifle more unbearable, why should he not make for himself somewhere
else a new home? He was, it is true, startled at his own audacity, and
only some strangely powerful concurrence of motives--such as he was yet
to know--could in reality have made him reckless. For the other features
of his character, those which tended to stability, were still strong
enough to oppose passions which had not found the occasion for their
full development. He was not exactly avaricious, but pursuit of money
was in him an hereditary instinct. By mere force of habit he stuck
zealously to his business, and, without thinking much about his wealth,
disliked unusual expenditure. His wife had taunted him with meanness,
with low money-grubbing; the effect had been to make him all the more
tenacious of habits which might have given way before other kinds of
reproof. So he had gone on living the ordinary life, to all appearances
well contented, in reality troubled from time to time by a reawakening
of those desires which he had understood only to have them frustrated.
He groped in a dim way after things which, by chance perceived, seemed
to have a certain bearing on his life. The discovery in himself of an
interest in architecture was an instance; but for his visit to the
Continent he might never have been led to think of the subject. Then
there was his fondness for the moors and mountains, the lochs and
islands, of the north. On the whole, he preferred to travel in Scotland
by himself; the scenery appealed to a poetry that was in him, if only he
could have brought it into consciousness. Already he had planned for the
present August a tour among the Hebrides, and had made it out with his
maps and guidebooks, not without careful consideration of expense. Why
did he linger beyond the day on which he had decided to set forth?
For several days it had been noticed at the mill that he lacked
something of his wonted attention in matters of business. Certainly his
occupation about eleven o'clock one morning had little apparent bearing
on the concerns of his office; he was standing at the window of his
private room, which was on the first floor of the mill, with a large
field-glass at his eyes. The glass was focussed upon the Cartwrights'
garden, in which sat Jessie with Emily Hood. They were but a short
distance away, and Dagworthy could observe them closely; he had done so,
intermittently, for almost an hour, and this was the second morning that
he had thus amused himself. Yet, to judge from his face, when he turned
away, amusement was hardly his state of mind; his features had a
hard-set earnestness, an expression almost savage. And then he walked
about the little room, regarding objects absently.
Four days later he was again with his glass at the window; it wanted a
few minutes of ten o'clock. Emily Hood had just reached the garden; he
saw her enter and begin to pace about the walks, waiting for Jessie's
arrival. Dagworthy of a sudden put the glass aside, took his hat, and
hastened away from the mill. He walked along the edge of the
cattle-market, till he came into the road by which Jessie must approach
the garden; he saw her coming, and went on at a brisk pace towards her.
The girl was not hurrying, though she would be late; these lessons were
beginning to tax her rather too seriously; Emily was so exacting.
Already she had made a change in the arrangements, whereby she saved
herself the walk to Banbrigg; in the garden, too, it was much easier to
find excuses for trifling away time than when she was face to face with
Emily at a table. So she came along the road at a very moderate pace,
and, on seeing who it was that neared her, put on her pleasantest smile,
doubly glad of the meeting; it was always something to try her devices
on Richard Dagworthy, and at present the chat would make a delay for
which she could urge reasonable excuse.
'The very person I wanted to meet!' Dagworthy exclaimed. 'You've saved
me a run all the way up to your house. What are you doing this way?
Going to school?'
He pointed to the books she carried.
'Something like it,' replied Jessie, with a wry movement of her lips.
'Why did you want to meet me, though?'
'Because I want you to do something for me--that is, if you will. But,
really, where were you going? Perhaps you can't spare time?'
'I was going to the garden,' she said, pointing in that direction. 'I
have lessons there with Emily Hood. Beastly shame that I should have to
do lessons, isn't it? I feel too old for that; I've got other things to
think about.'
She put her head on one side, and rustled the pages of a French grammar,
at last throwing a glance at Richard from the corners of her eyes.
'But do you expect Miss Hood to come soon?' Dagworthy asked, playing his
part very well, in spite of a nervousness which possessed him.
'No doubt she's in the garden already. I've given her a key, so that if
she gets there first--But what do you want me to do?'
'Why, I was going to ask you to walk to the station and meet the ten
thirty-five train from Hebsworth. Your father will get in by it, I
expect, and I want him to come and see me at once at the mill.'
'All right,' Jessie exclaimed with eagerness, 'I'll go. Just let me run
and tell Emily--'
Dagworthy was consulting his watch.
'You've only bare time to get to the station, walking as quickly as you
can? Which is your garden? Let me go and tell her you are not coming.'
'Will you? The second door round the corner there, You'll have to
apologize properly--I hope you know how to.'
This was Jessie's maidenly playfulness; she held out her hand, with many
graces, to take leave.
'If he doesn't come,' said Dagworthy, 'will you just walk over to the
mill to let me know?'
'I don't know that I shall; I don't think it would be proper.'
'Ho, ho! I like that! But you'll have to be off, or you'll never get
there in time.'
She ran away, rejoicing in her escape from the lesson, Of course she
looked back several times; the first glance showed her Dagworthy still
gazing after her, at the second she saw that he was walking towards the
garden.
He pushed open the wooden door, and passed between the hedges; the next
door stood open, and he already saw Emily; she had seated herself under
one of the pear trees, and was reading. As soon as his eyes discovered
her he paused; his hands clasped themselves nervously behind him. Then
he proceeded more slowly. As soon as he stepped within the garden, Emily
heard his approach, and turned her head with a smile, expectant of
Jessie, At the sight of Dagworthy the smile vanished instantly, she
became noticeably pale, and at length rose with a startled motion.
Dagworthy drew near to her; when close enough to hold out his hand, he
could no longer keep his eyes upon her face; they fell, and his visage
showed an embarrassment which, even in her confusion--her all but
dread--Emily noticed as a strange thing. She was struggling to command
herself, to overcome by reason the fear which always attacked her in
this man's presence. She felt it as a relief to be spared the steady
gaze which, on former meetings, he had never removed from her.
'You are surprised to see me here?' he began, taking hold of the chair
which Emily had risen from and swaying it backwards and forwards. Even
his voice was more subdued than she had ever known it. 'I have come to
apologise to you for sending Miss Cartwright to meet her father at the
station. I met her by chance just out there in the road, and as I wanted
a messenger very badly I took advantage of her good-nature. But she
wouldn't go unless I promised to come here and explain her absence.'
'Thank you,' Emily replied, as naturally as she could. 'Will she still
come back for her lesson, do you think?'
'I'm afraid not; she said I had better ask you to excuse her this
morning.'
Emily gathered up two or three books which lay on the other chair.
'You find her rather troublesome to teach, I should be afraid,'
Dagworthy pursued, watching her every moment. 'Jessie isn't much for
study, is she?'
'Perhaps she is a little absent now and then,' replied Emily, saying the
first thing that occurred to her.
She had collected her books and was about to fasten a strap round them.
'Do let me do that for you,' said Dagworthy, and he forestalled her
assent, which she would probably not have given, by taking the books
from her hands. He put up his foot on the chair, as if for the
convenience of doing the strapping on his knee, but before he had
finished it he spoke again.
'You are fond of teaching, I suppose?'
'Yes, I like it.'
She stood in expectant waiting, her hands held together before her, her
head just bent. The attitude was grace itself. Dagworthy raised his eyes
slowly from her feet to her face.
'But you wouldn't care to go on with it always?'
'I--I don't think about it,' she replied, nervousness again seizing her.
There was a new look in his eyes, a vehemence, a fervour, which she
dared not meet after the first glance. He would not finish the strapping
of the books, and she could not bid him do so. Had she obeyed her
instinct, she would have hastened away, heedless of anything but the
desire to quit his presence.
'How long will your holidays be?' he asked, letting the books fall to
the chair, as if by accident.
'Till the end of September, I think.'
'So long? I'm glad to hear that. You will come again some day to my
house with your father, won't you?'
The words trembled upon his lips; it was not like his own voice, he
could not control it.
'Thank you, Mr. Dagworthy,' she replied.
He bent to the books again, and this time succeeded in binding them
together. As he fastened the buckle, drops of perspiration fell from his
forehead.
Emily thanked him, and held forth her hand for the books. He took it in
his own.
'Miss Hood--'
She drew her hand away, almost by force, and retreated a step; his face
terrified her.
'I sent Jessie off on purpose,' he continued. 'I knew you were here, and
wanted to speak to you alone. Since I met you that day on the Heath, I
have had no rest--I've wanted so to see you again. The other morning at
the Cartwrights' it was almost more than I could do to go away. I don't
know what's come to me; I can't put you out of my thoughts for one
minute; I can't give my attention to business, to anything. I meant to
have gone away before now, but I've put it off, day after day; once or
twice I've all but come to your house, to ask to see you--'
He spoke in a hurried, breathless way, almost with violence; passion was
forcing the words from him, in spite of a shame which kept his face on
fire. There was something boyish in the simplicity of his phrases; he
seemed to be making a confession that was compelled by fear, and at
length his speech lost itself in incoherence. He stood with his eyes
fixed on the ground; perspiration covered his face.
'Mr. Dagworthy--'
Emily tried to break the intolerable silence. Her strength was answering
now to the demand upon it; his utter abashment before her could not but
help her to calmness. But the sound of her first word gave him voice
again.
'Let me speak first,' he broke forth, now looking full at her. 'That's
nothing of what I wanted to say; it sounds as if I wasn't man enough to
know my own mind. I know it well enough, and I must say all I have to
say, whilst you're here to listen to me. After all, you're only a girl;
but if you'd come here straight from heaven, I couldn't find it harder
to speak to you.'
'Mr. Dagworthy, don't speak like this--don't say more--I beg you not to!
I cannot listen as you would wish me to.'
'You can't listen? But you don't know what I have to say still,' he
urged, with hasty entreaty, his voice softer. 'I'm asking nothing yet; I
only want you to know how you've made me feel towards you. No feeling
will ever come to you like this that's come to me, but I want you to
know of it, to try and understand what it means--to try and think of
me. I don't ask for yes or no, it wouldn't be reasonable; you haven't
had to think of me in this way. But God knows how I shall live without
you; it would be the cruelest word woman ever said if you refused even
to give me a hope.'
'I cannot--do hear me--it is not in my power to give you hope.'
'Oh, you say that because you think you must, because I have come to you
so suddenly; I have offended you by talking in this way when we scarcely
know each other even as friends, and you have to keep me at a distance;
I see it on your face. Do you think there is a danger that I should be
less respectful to you than I ought? That's because you don't understand
me. I've spoken in rough, hasty words, because to be near you takes all
sense from me. Look, I'm quieter now. What I ought to have said at first
is this. You're prejudiced against me; you've heard all sorts of tales;
I know well enough what people say about me--well, I want you to know me
better. We'll leave all other feelings aside. We'll say I just wish you
to think of me in a just way, a friendly way, nothing more. It's
impossible for you to do more than that at first. No doubt even your
father has told you that I have a hasty temper, which leads me to say
and do things I'm soon sorry for. It's true enough, but that doesn't
prove that I am a brute, and that I can't mend myself. You've heard
things laid to my charge that are false--about my doings in my own
home--you know what I mean. Get to know me better, and some day I'll
tell you the whole truth. Now it's only this I ask of you--be just to
me. You're not a woman like these in Dunfield who talk and talk behind
one's back; though I have seen so little of you, don't I know the
difference between you and them? I'm ignorant enough, compared with you,
but I can feel what it is that puts you above all other women. It must
be that that makes me mad to gain a kind word from you. One word--that
you'll try to think of me; and I'll live on that as long as I can.'
The mere utterances help little to an understanding of the terrible
force of entreaty he put into this speech. His face, his hands, the
posture of his body, all joined in pleading. He had cast off all
shamefacedness, and spoke as if his life depended on the answer she
would return; the very lack of refinement in his tone, in his
pronunciation of certain words, made his appeal the more pathetic. With
the quickness of jealousy, he had guessed at the meaning there might lie
in Emily's reluctance to hear him, but he dared not entertain the
thought; it was his passionate instinct to plead it down. Whatever it
might be that she had in mind, she must first hear him. As he spoke, he
watched her features with the eagerness of desire, of fear; to do so was
but to inflame his passion. It was an extraordinary struggle between the
force of violent appetite and the constraint of love in the higher
sense. How the former had been excited, it would be hard to explain.
Wilfrid Athel had submitted to the same influence. Her beauty was of the
kind which, leaving the ordinary man untouched, addressed itself with
the strangest potency to an especially vehement nature here and there.
Her mind, uttering itself in the simplest phrases, laid a spell upon
certain other minds set apart and chosen. She could not speak but the
soul of this rude mill-owner was exalted beyond his own intelligence.
Forced to wait the end of his speech, Emily stood with her head bowed in
sadness. Fear had passed; she recognised the heart-breaking sincerity of
his words, and compassionated him. When he became silent, she could not
readily reply. He was speaking again, below his breath.
'You are thinking? I know how you can't help regarding me. Try only to
feel for me.'
'There is only one way in which I can answer you,' she said; 'I owe it
to you to hide nothing. I feel deeply the sincerity of all you have
said, and be sure, Mr. Dagworthy, that I will never think of you
unjustly or unkindly. But I can promise nothing more; I have already
given my love.'
Her voice faltered before the last word, the word she would never
lightly utter. But it must be spoken now; no paraphrase would confirm
her earnestness sufficiently.
Still keeping her eyes on the ground, she knew that he had started.
'You have promised to marry some one?' he asked, as if it were necessary
to have the fact affirmed in the plainest words before he could accept
it.
She hoped that silence might be her answer.
'Have you? Do you mean that?'
'I have.'
She saw that he was turning away from her, and with an effort she looked
at him. She wished she had not; his anguish expressed itself like an
evil passion; his teeth were set with a cruel savageness. It was worse
when he caught her look and tried to smile.
'Then I suppose that's--that's the end,' he said, as if he would make an
effort to joke upon it, though his voice all but failed in speaking the
few words.
He walked a little apart, then approached her again.
'You don't say this just to put me off?' he asked, with a roughness
which was rather the effect of his attempt to keep down emotion than
intentional.
'I have told you the truth,' Emily replied firmly.
'Do other people know it? Do the Cartwrights?'
'You are the only one to whom I have spoken of it.'
'Except your father and mother, you mean?'
'They do not know.'
Though so troubled, she was yet able to ask herself whether his delicacy
was sufficiently developed to enjoin silence. The man had made such
strange revelation of himself, she felt unable to predict his course. No
refinement in him would now have surprised her; but neither would any
outbreak of boorishness. He seemed capable of both. His next question
augured ill.
'Of course it is not any one in Dunfield?'
'It is not.'
Jealousy was torturing him. He was quite conscious that he should have
refrained from a single question, yet he could no more keep these back
than he could the utterance of his passion.
'Will you--'
He hesitated.
'May I leave you, Mr. Dagworthy?' Emily asked, seeing that he was not
likely to quit her. She moved to take the books from the chair.
'One minute more.--Will you tell me who it is?--I am a brute to ask you,
but--if you--Good God! How shall I bear this?'
He turned his back upon her; she saw him quiver. It was her impulse to
walk from the garden, but she feared to pass him.
He faced her again. Yes, the man could suffer.
'Will you tell me who it is?' he groaned rather than spoke. 'You don't
believe that I should speak of it? But I feel I could bear it better; I
should know for certain it was no use hoping.'
Emily could not answer.
'It is some one in London?'
'Yes, Mr. Dagworthy, I cannot tell you more than that. Please do not ask
more.'
'I won't. Of course your opinion of me is worse than ever. That doesn't
matter much.--If you could kill as easily as you can drive a man mad, I
would ask you to still have pity on me.--I'm forgetting: you want me to
go first, so that you can lock up the garden.--Good-bye!'
He did not offer his hand, but cast one look at her, a look Emily never
forgot, and walked quickly away.
Emily could not start at once homewards. When it was certain that
Dagworthy had left the garden, she seated herself; she had need of rest
and of solitude to calm her thoughts. Her sensation was that of having
escaped a danger, the dread of which thrilled in her. Though fear had
been allayed for an interval, it regained its hold upon her towards the
end of the dialogue; the passion she had witnessed was so rude, so
undisciplined, it seemed to expose elementary forces, which, if need be,
would set every constraint at defiance. It was no exaggeration to say
that she did not feel safe in the man's presence. The possibility of
such a feeling had made itself known to her even during the visit to his
house; to find herself suddenly the object of his almost frenzied desire
was to realize how justly her instinct had spoken. This was not love, as
she understood it, but a terrible possession which might find
assuagement in inflicting some fearful harm upon what it affected to
hold dear. The Love of Emily's worship was a spirit of passionate
benignity, of ecstatic calm, holy in renunciations, pure unutterably in
supreme attainment. Her knowledge of life was insufficient to allow her
to deal justly with love as exhibited in Dagworthy; its gross side was
too offensively prominent; her experience gave her no power of rightly
appreciating this struggle of the divine flame in a dense element.
Living, and having ever lived, amid idealisms, she was too subjective in
her interpretation of phenomena so new to her. It would have been easier
for her to judge impartially had she witnessed this passion directed
towards another; addressed to her, in the position she occupied, any
phase of wooing would have been painful; vehemence was nothing less than
abhorrent. Wholly ignorant of Dagworthy's inner life, and misled with
regard to the mere facts of his outward behaviour, it was impossible
that she should discern the most deeply significant features of the love
he expressed so ill, impossible for her to understand that what would be
brutality in another man was in him the working of the very means of
grace, could circumstances have favoured their action. One tribute her
instinct paid to the good which hid itself under so rude a guise; as she
pondered over her fear, analysing it as scrupulously as she always did
those feelings which she felt it behoved her to understand once for all,
she half discovered in it an element which only severe self-judgment
would allow; it seemed to her that the fear was, in an infinitesimal
degree, of herself, that, under other conditions, she might have known
what it was to respond to the love thus offered her. For she neither
scorned nor loathed the man, notwithstanding her abhorrence of his
passion as devoted to herself. She wished him well; she even found
herself thinking over those women in Dunfield whom she knew, if
perchance one of them might seem fitted to make his happiness. None the
less, it was terrible to reflect that she must live, perhaps for a long
time, so near to him, ever exposed to the risk of chance meetings, if
not to the danger of a surprise such as to-day's for she could not
assure herself that he would hold her answer final. One precaution she
must certainly take; henceforth she would never come to the garden save
in Jessie's company. She wondered how Dagworthy had known of her
presence here, and it occurred to her to doubt of Jessie; could the
latter have aided in bringing about this interview? Dagworthy,
confessing his own manoeuvre, would naturally conceal any conscious part
in it that Jessie might have taken.
Her spirits suffered depression as she communed thus with herself; all
the drearier aspects of her present life were emphasised; she longed,
longed with aching of the heart for the day which should set her free
for ever from these fears and sorrows. Another secret would henceforth
trouble her. Would that it might remain a secret! If Jessie indeed knew
of this morning's events, there was small likelihood that it would
remain unknown to others; then the whole truth must be revealed. Would
it not be better to anticipate any such discovery, to tell her father
this very day what had happened and why it was so painful to her? Yet to
speak of Dagworthy might make her father uneasy in his position at the
mill--would inevitably do so. Therein lay a new dread. Was Dagworthy
capable of taking revenge upon her father? Oh surely, surely not!--The
words passed her lips involuntarily. She would not, she could not,
believe so ill of him; had he not implored her to do him justice?...
When Mr. Hood returned from business on the following day, he brought
news that Dagworthy had at last gone for his holiday. It was time, he
said; Dagworthy was not looking himself; at the mill they had been in
mortal fear of one of his outbreaks.
'Did he speak harshly to you, father?' Emily was driven to ask, with
very slight emphasis on the 'you.'
'Fortunately,' was the reply, with the sad abortive laugh which was Mr.
Hood's nearest approach to mirth, 'fortunately he left me alone, and
spoke neither well nor ill. He didn't look angry, I thought, so much as
put out about something.'
Emily was relieved from one fear at least, and felt grateful to
Dagworthy. Moreover, by observation, she had concluded that Jessie could
not possibly be aware of what had taken place in the garden. And now
Dagworthy was likely to be away for three weeks. Her heart was lighter
again.