Part 58 (1/2)
”It seems impossible that I could care for you more deeply than I do.”
”If you could only respond with a little tenderness--”
”I _do_ respond--as well as I know how,” she said piteously.
He drew her nearer and touched her cheek with his lips:
”I know, dear. I don't mean to complain.”
”Oh, Clive! I have let you fall in love with me and it is making you miserable! And now it's making me miserable, too, because you are disappointed in me.”
”No--”
”You are! I'm not what you expected--not what you wanted--”
”You are everything I want!--if I could only wake your heart!” he said in a low tense voice.
”It isn't my heart that is asleep.... I know what you miss in me....
And I can't help it. I--I don't wish to help it--or to be different.”
She dropped her head against his shoulder. After a few moments she spoke from there in a m.u.f.fled, childish voice:
”What can I do about it? I don't want to be your mistress, Clive.... I never wanted to do--anything--like that.”
A deeper colour burnt his face. He said: ”Could you love me enough to marry me if I managed to free myself?”
”I have never thought of marrying you, Clive. It isn't that I couldn't love you--that way. I suppose I could. Probably I could. Only--I don't know anything about it--”
”Let me try to free myself, anyway.”
”How is it possible?”
He said, exasperated: ”Do you suppose I can endure this sort of existence forever?”
The swift tears sprang to her eyes. ”I don't know--I don't know,” she faltered. ”I thought this existence of ours ideal. I thought you were going to be happy; I supposed that our being together again would bring happiness to us both. It doesn't! It is making us wretched. You are not contented with our friends.h.i.+p!” She turned on him pa.s.sionately: ”I don't wish to be your mistress. I don't want you to make me wish to be. No girl naturally desires less than she is ent.i.tled to, or more than the law permits--unless some man teaches her to wish for it. Don't make such a girl of me, Clive! You--you are beginning to do it. And I don't wish it! Truly I don't!”
In that fierce flash of candour,--of guiltless pa.s.sion, she had revealed herself. Never, until that moment, had he supposed himself so absolutely dominant, invested with such power for good or evil. That he could sway her one way or the other through her pure loyalty, devotion, and sympathy he had not understood.
To do him justice he desired no such responsibility. He had meant to be honest and generous and unselfish even when the outlook seemed most hopeless,--when he was convinced that he had no chance of freedom.
But a man with the girl he loves in his arms might as well set a net to catch the wind as to set boundaries to his desires. Perhaps he could not so ardently have desired his freedom to marry her had he not as ardently desired her love.
Love he had of her, but it was an affection utterly innocent of pa.s.sion. He knew it; she realised it; realised too that the capacity for pa.s.sion was in her. And had asked him not awaken her to it, instinctively recoiling from it. Generous, unsullied, proudly ignorant, she desired to remain so. Yet knew her peril; and candidly revealed it to him in the most honest appeal ever made to him.
For if the girl herself suspected and dreaded whither her loyalty and deep devotion to him might lead her, he had realised very suddenly what his leaders.h.i.+p meant in such a companions.h.i.+p.
Now it sobered him, awed him,--and chilled him a trifle.
Himself, his own love for her, his own pa.s.sion he could control and in a measure subdue. But, once awakened, could he control such an ally as she might be to his own lesser, impatient and hot-headed self?
Where her disposition was to deny, he could still fetter self and acquiesce. But he began to understand that half his strength lay in her unwillingness; half of their safety in her inexperience, her undisturbed tranquillity, her aloofness from physical emotion and her ignorance of the mastery of the lesser pa.s.sions.