I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together.
I lift my eyes to the low, dark sky.
“Am I glad?” I say, hazily.
“I do not know!—I do not think I am!—I
do not think I care one way or another!”
“Nancy!” he says, presently, in a tone
no longer of counterfeit mirth, but of deep and serious
earnestness, “I do not know why I told you just
now that I had come to bid them all good-by—it
was not true—you know it was not.
What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came—”
“For what did you come, then?” cry I,
interrupting him, pantingly, while my eyes wide and
aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is
going to say? He—from whose clasp
Barbara’s dead hand was freed!
“Do not look at me like that!” he cries,
wildly, putting up his hands before his eyes.
“It reminds me—great God! it reminds
me—”
He breaks off; then goes on a little more calmly:
“You need not be afraid! Brute and blackguard
as I am, I am not quite brute and blackguard enough
for that!—that would be past even
me! I have come to ask you once again to forgive
me for that—that old offense” (with
a shamed red flush on the pallor of his cheeks); “I
asked you once before, you may remember, and you answered”—(my
words with a resentful accuracy)—“that
you ’would not, and by God’s help, you
never would!’”
“Did I?” say I, with that same hazy feeling.
Those old emotions seem grown so distant and dim,
“I dare say!—I did not recollect!”
“And so I have come to ask you once again,”
he goes on, with a heavy emphasis—“it
will do me no great harm if you say ‘No’
again!—it will do me small good if you
say ‘Yes.’ And yet, before I go away
forever— yes”—(a bitter
smile)—“cheer up!—_-forever!_—I
must have one more try!”
I am silent.
“You may as well forgive me!” he says,
taking my cold and passive hand, and speaking with
an intense though composed mournfulness. “After
all, I have not done you much harm, have I?—that
is no credit to me, I know. I would have done,
if I could, but I could not! You may as well forgive
me, may not you? God forgives!—at least”—(with
a sigh of heavy and apathetic despair)—“so
they say!—would you be less clement
than He?”
I am looking back at him, with a quiet fixedness.
I no longer feel the slightest embarrassment in his
presence; it no longer disquiets me, that he should
hold my hand.
“Yes,” say I, speaking slowly, and still
with my sunk and tear-dimmed eyes calmly resting on
the dull despair of his, “yes—if you
wish—it is all so long ago—and
she liked you!—yes!—I
forgive you!”
“Love is enough.”
And so, as the days go by, the short and silent days,
it comes to pass that a sort of peace falls upon my
soul; born of a slow yet deep assurance that with
Barbara it is well.
