PAGE 27
Fellow-Townsmen
by
Her face assumed an aspect of gentle reflection, and she looked up and down his form with great interest in her eyes. ‘I never thought of it!’ she said. ‘I knew, of course, that you had once implied some warmth of feeling towards me, but I concluded that it passed off. And I have always been under the impression that your wife was alive at the time of my marriage. Was it not stupid of me!–But you will have some tea or something? I have never dined late, you know, since my husband’s death. I have got into the way of making a regular meal of tea. You will have some tea with me, will you not?’
The travelled man assented quite readily, and tea was brought in. They sat and chatted over the meal, regardless of the flying hour. ‘Well, well!’ said Barnet presently, as for the first time he leisurely surveyed the room; ‘how like it all is, and yet how different! Just where your piano stands was a board on a couple of trestles, bearing the patterns of wall-papers, when I was last here. I was choosing them–standing in this way, as it might be. Then my servant came in at the door, and handed me a note, so. It was from Downe, and announced that you were just going to be married to him. I chose no more wall-papers–tore up all those I had selected, and left the house. I never entered it again till now.’
‘Ah, at last I understand it all,’ she murmured.
They had both risen and gone to the fireplace. The mantel came almost on a level with her shoulder, which gently rested against it, and Barnet laid his hand upon the shelf close beside her shoulder. ‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘better late than never. Will you marry me now?’
She started back, and the surprise which was so obvious in her wrought even greater surprise in him that it should be so. It was difficult to believe that she had been quite blind to the situation, and yet all reason and common sense went to prove that she was not acting.
‘You take me quite unawares by such a question!’ she said, with a forced laugh of uneasiness. It was the first time she had shown any embarrassment at all. ‘Why,’ she added, ‘I couldn’t marry you for the world.’
‘Not after all this! Why not?’
‘It is–I would–I really think I may say it–I would upon the whole rather marry you, Mr. Barnet, than any other man I have ever met, if I ever dreamed of marriage again. But I don’t dream of it–it is quite out of my thoughts; I have not the least intention of marrying again.’
‘But–on my account–couldn’t you alter your plans a little? Come!’
‘Dear Mr. Barnet,’ she said with a little flutter, ‘I would on your account if on anybody’s in existence. But you don’t know in the least what it is you are asking–such an impracticable thing–I won’t say ridiculous, of course, because I see that you are really in earnest, and earnestness is never ridiculous to my mind.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Barnet more slowly, dropping her hand, which he had taken at the moment of pleading, ‘I am in earnest. The resolve, two months ago, at the Cape, to come back once more was, it is true, rather sudden, and as I see now, not well considered. But I am in earnest in asking.’
‘And I in declining. With all good feeling and all kindness, let me say that I am quite opposed to the idea of marrying a second time.’
‘Well, no harm has been done,’ he answered, with the same subdued and tender humorousness that he had shown on such occasions in early life. ‘If you really won’t accept me, I must put up with it, I suppose.’ His eye fell on the clock as he spoke. ‘Had you any notion that it was so late?’ he asked. ‘How absorbed I have been!’