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?…