"LOVE THE GIFT"
Her answer was altogether astonishing; she leant back in the boat and
looked him full in the face. A quick flush tinged her own, and the
incomparable eyebrows were raised and arched; but underneath there was
an honest tenderness which Olivia was not the girl to conceal.
"Was that your water-lilies?" said she; but this was not the astonishing
speech. He had lured her afloat on impudently false pretences; she had a
right to twit him with that.
"There are no water-lilies," he confessed; "at least, never mind them if
there are. Oh, I was obliged to make some excuse! There was nowhere else
where we could talk so well. I tell you again I have the cheek to love
you! I can't help it; I've loved you ever since that day in London, and
you've got to know it for good or bad. If it makes you very angry, I'll
row you back this minute." He was resting on his oars under cover of
the little island; the Towers were out of sight.
"Why in the world didn't you speak yesterday?" was Olivia's
extraordinary reply.
"Yesterday?" faltered Jack.
"It was such a chance!"
"Not for me! My tongue was tied. Olivia, I was under a frightful cloud
yesterday! You don't understand----"
"What if I do? What if I did at the time?"
"I don't see how you could," said Jack.
"Instinctively," replied Olivia, to screen her mother. "I knew something
was wrong, and I have since been told what. If only you had spoken
then!"
She dropped her eyes swiftly; the tear ran down her cheek.
"But why? Why then, better than now?"
"Because _I_ care, too," she whispered, so that the words just travelled
to his ear.
"Olivia! My--do you know what you've said? Do you mean it?"
"Of course I care. I mean that much. You are different from everybody
else."
"Then----"
"There must be no 'then.'"
"But you said you cared. Tell me--I don't understand."
"I can never marry you," said Olivia, looking him once more in the face.
And her eyes were dry.
"Why not, if it is true--that you care?"
"Because you are what you are--and I--oh! how can I say it even to you?
I am so ashamed. I have been thrown at your head from the very
first--no, I have no right to say that. How I hate everything I say! You
must understand; I am sure you do. Well, in the beginning I couldn't
bear to speak to you, because I knew--what was hoped--and I seemed to
see and hear it in every look and word. It hurt me more than I ever can
tell you. The same sort of thing had happened before, but I had never
minded it then. I suppose all mothers are like that; it's natural
enough, when you come to think, and I'm sure I never resented it before.
I wouldn't have minded it in your case either; I wouldn't have minded
anything if I hadn't----"
The words would not come.
"Hadn't what?" he said.
"If I hadn't liked you--off my own bat!"
"But if you really do, my glorious girl, surely that fixes it? We have
nothing to do with anybody else. What does it matter how they take it?"
"It matters to my pride."
"I don't see where your pride comes in."
"Of course you don't; you are not behind the scenes. And I can't make
you see. I'm not going to give my own people away to that extent, not
even to you. But--I can just picture my mother's face if we went in this
very minute and told her we were engaged! She would fall upon both our
necks!"
"That wouldn't matter," said Jack stolidly. "That would be all right."
"It would be dreadful--dreadful. I couldn't bear it when I know that
yesterday----"
She checked herself firmly.
"Well, what of yesterday?"
"It would have been quite a different thing."
"What! if I'd spoken then?"
"I--think so."
"You would have said----"
"I should have found out what your trouble was. You would have told me
everything. And then--and then----"
He leant still further forward.
"If you had wanted me very much----"
"I _do_ want you very much."
"I should have found it easier to say 'yes'"--the word was hardly
audible--"than I ever shall now!"
"But why, Olivia? Tell me why!"
"You force it from me, word by word," complained the girl.
"Then let me see. I think I begin to see. You like me in myself almost
well enough to marry me. Well, thank God for that much! But you don't
want to marry the Duke of St. Osmund's, because you're mortally afraid
of what people will say. You think they'll say you're doing it for the
main chance. And so they will--and so they may! They wouldn't say it,
and you wouldn't think it, of any other man in my position; no, it's
because I'm not fit for my billet, that's how it is! Not fit for it, and
not fit for you; so they'd naturally think you were marrying me for what
I'd got, and that you couldn't bear. Ah, yes, I see hard enough; it's as
plain as a pikestaff now!"
The girl saw, too; with the unconscious bluntness of a singularly direct
nature, he had stripped her scruples bare, and their littleness
horrified Olivia. The moral cowardice of her hesitation came home to her
with an insupportable pang, and her mind was made up before his last
sentences put her face in flames.
"You are wrong," she could only murmur; "oh, you are dreadfully wrong!"
"I am right," he answered bitterly, "and _you_ are right. No wonder you
dread the hard things that would be said of you! Take away the name and
the money, and what am I? A back-block larrikin--a common stockman!"
"The man for me," said Olivia hoarsely.
"Ah, yes, if I were not such a public match!"
"Whatever you are--whatever you may be--if you want me still----"
"Want you! I have wanted you from the first. I shall want you till the
last!"
Her reply was indistinct; her tears were falling fast; he took her two
white hands, but even them he did not touch with his lips. A great
silence held them both, and all the world; the island willows kissed the
stream; in the sheet of gold beyond, a fish leapt, and the ripple
reached the boat in one long thin fold. The girl spoke first.
"We need not be in a hurry to tell everybody," she began; but the words
were retracted in the same breath. "What am I saying? Of course we will
tell. Oh, what a contempt you must have for me!"
"I love you," he answered simply. "I am too happy to live. It's all too
good to be true. Me of all men--the old bushman!"
She looked lovingly on his bearded and sunburnt face, shining as she had
never seen it shine before.
"No; it's the other way about," she said. "I am not half good enough for
you--you who were so brave yesterday in your trouble--who have been so
simple always in your prosperity. It was enough to turn any one's head,
but you--ah, I don't only love you. I admire you, dear; may God help me
to make you happy!"
They stayed much longer on the lake, finally disembarking on its
uttermost shore, because Olivia was curious to see how the hut would
look in the first rosy light of her incredible happiness. And when they
came to it, the sunlight glinted on the new iron roofing; the pine-trees
exhaled their resin in the noon-day heat following the midnight rain;
and the shadows were shot with golden shafts, where all was golden to
the lovers' eyes.
Jack made a diffident swain; it was the girl who slipped her hand into
his.
"You will never pull it down?" she said. "We will use it for a
summer-house, and to remind you of your old life. And one day you will
take me out to the Riverina, and show me the hut you really lived in,
and all your old haunts. Oh, I shouldn't mind if we had both to go out
there for good! A hut would take far less looking after than the Towers,
and I should have you much more to myself. What fun it would be!"
Jack thought this a pretty speech, but the girl herself was made
presently aware of its insincerity. They had retraced their steps, and
there in front of them, cool and grey in the mellow August sunshine,
with every buttress thrown up by its shadow, and the very spires
perfectly reflected in the sleeping lake, stood the stately home which
would be theirs for ever. Olivia saw it with a decidedly new thrill. She
was looking on her future home, and yet her husband would be this simple
fellow! Wealth could not cloy, nor grandeur overpower, with such a mate;
that was perhaps the substance of her thought. It simplified itself next
moment. What had she done to deserve such happiness? What could she ever
do? And a possible tabernacle in the bush entered into neither question,
nor engaged her fancy any more.