Emily kept silence. She had released his hand. There were signs on her face of severe inward conflict.
‘Will you let me go and see your parents?’ he asked. ‘Shall our marriage take place here? To me it is the same; I would only be ruled by your choice. May I go home with you now?’
‘I would say yes if I could make up my mind to a marriage at once,’ she answered. ‘Dear, let me persuade you.’
‘The sound of your words persuades too strongly against their sense, Emily,’ he said tenderly. ‘I will not put off our marriage a day longer than forms make necessary.’
‘Wilfrid, let me say what—’
‘I have scraps of superstition in my nature,’ he broke in with a half laugh. ‘Fate does not often deal so kindly as in giving you to me; I dare not seem even to hesitate before the gift. It is a test of the worth that is in us. We meet by chance, and we recognise each other; here is the end for which we might have sought a lifetime; we are not worthy of it if we hold back from paltry considerations. I dare not leave you, Emily; everything points to one result—the rejection of the scheme for your return, my father’s free surrender of the decision to myself, the irresistible impulse which has brought me here to you. Did I tell you that I rose in the middle of the night and went to Charing Cross to telegraph? It would have done just as well the first thing in the morning, but I could not rest till the message was sent. I will have no appearances come between us; there shall be no pause till you bear my name and have entered my home; after that, let life do with us what it will.’
Emily drank in the vehement flow of words with delight and fear. It was this virile eagerness, this force of personality, which had before charmed her thought into passiveness, and made her senses its subject; but a stronger motive of resistance actuated her now. In her humility she could not deem the instant gain of herself to be an equivalent to him for what he would certainly, and what he might perchance, lose. She feared that he had disguised his father’s real displeasure, and she could not reconcile herself to the abrupt overthrow of all the purposes Wilfrid had entertained before he knew her. She strove with all the energy of her own strong character to withstand him for his good.
‘Wilfrid, let it at least be postponed till your father’s return. If his mind is what you say, he will by then have fully accepted your views. I respect your father. I owe him consideration; he is prejudiced against me now, and I would gain his goodwill. Just because we are perfectly independent let us have regard for others; better, a thousand times better, that he should be reconciled to our marriage before it takes place than perforce afterwards. Is it for my constancy, or your own, that you fear?’
‘I do not doubt your love, and my own is unalterable. I fear circumstances; but what has fear to do with it; I wish to make you my own; the empire of my passion is all-subduing. I will not wait! If you refuse me, I have been mistaken; you do not love me.’
‘Those are only words,’ she answered, a proud smile lighting the trouble of her countenance. ‘You have said that you do not doubt my love, and in your heart you cannot. Answer me one question, Wilfrid: have you made little of your father’s opposition, in order to spare me pain? Is it more serious than you are willing to tell me?’
The temptation was strong to reply with an affirmative. If she believed his father to be utterly irreconcilable, there could be no excuse for lingering; yet his nobler self prevailed, to her no word of falseness.
‘I have told you the truth. His opposition is temporary. When you are my wife he will be to you as to any wife I could have chosen, I am convinced of it.’
‘Then more than ever I entreat you to wait, only till his return to England. If you fail then, I will resist no longer. Show him this much respect, dearest; join him abroad now; let him see that you desire his kindness. Is he not disappointed that you mean to break off your career at Oxford? Why should you do that? You promised me—did you not promise me, Wilfrid, that you would go on to the end?’
‘I cannot! I have no longer the calmness, no longer the old ambitions,—how trivial they were!’
‘And yet there will come a day when you will regret that you left your course unfinished, just because you fell in love with a foolish girl.’
‘Do not speak like that, Emily; I hate that way of regarding love! My passion for you is henceforth my life; if it is trifling, so is my whole being, my whole existence. There is no sacrifice possible for me that I should ever regret. Our love is what we choose to make it. Regard it as a foolish pastime, and we are no better than the vulgar crowd—we know how they speak of it. What detestable thoughts your words brought to my mind! Have you not heard men and women, those who have outlived such glimpses of high things as nature ever sent them, making a jest of love in young lives, treating it, from the height of their wisdom forsooth, as a silly dream of boys and girls? If we ever live to speak or think like that, it will indeed be time to have done with the world. Even as I love you now, my heart’s darling, I shall love you when years of intimacy are like some happy journey behind us, and on into the very portal of death. Regret! How paltry all will seem that was not of the essence of our love! And who knows how short our time may be? When the end comes, will it be easy to bear, the thought that we lost one day, one moment of union, out of respect for idle prejudices which vanish as soon as they find themselves ineffectual? Will not the longest life be all too short for us?’
‘Forgive me the words, dear. Love is no less sacred to me.’
Her senses were playing the traitor; or—which you will—were seconding love’s triumph.
‘I shall come home with you now,’ he said. ‘You will let me?’
Why was he not content to win her promise? This proposal, by reminding her most strongly of the inevitable difficulties her marriage would entail, forced her again into resistance.
‘Not now, Wilfrid. I have not said a word of this; I must prepare them for it.’
‘You have not spoken of me?’
‘I would not do so till I—till everything was more certain.’
‘Certain!’ he cried impatiently. ‘Why do you torture me so, Emily? What uncertainty is there? Everything is uncertain, if you like to make it so. Is there something in your mind that I do not understand?’
‘You must remember, Wilfrid, that this is a strange, new thing in my life. It has come to me so suddenly, that even yet I cannot make it part of my familiar self. It has been impossible to speak of it to others.’
‘Do you think I take it as a matter of course? Is your love less a magic gift to me? I wake in a terror lest I have only dreamed of it; but then the very truth comes back, and shall I make myself miserable with imagining uncertainties, when there need be none?’
Emily hesitated before speaking again.
‘I have told you very little about my home,’ she said. ‘You know that we are very poor.’
She could not say it as simply as she wished; she was angry with herself to recognise how nearly her feeling was one of shame, what a long habit of reason it needed to expel the unintelligent prejudice which the world bestows at birth.
‘I could almost say I am glad of it,’ Wilfrid replied. ‘We shall have it in our power, you and I, to help so much.’
‘There are many reasons,’ she continued, too much occupied with her thoughts to dwell on what he said, ‘why I should have time to prepare my father and mother. You will let me write the things which it is not very easy to say.’
‘Say what you will, and keep silence on what you will, Emily. I cannot give so much consequence to these external things. You and I are living souls, and as such we judge each other. Shall I fret about the circumstances in which chance has cased your life? As reasonable if I withdrew my love from you because one day the colour of your glove did not please me. Time you need. You shall have it; a week, ten days. Then I will come myself and fetch you,—or you shall come to London alone, as you please.’