The Woodlanders - Page 249/314

"Oh God!" said Winterborne within himself. His head was turned askance

as he still resolutely regarded the ground. For the last several

minutes he had seen this great temptation approaching him in regular

siege; and now it had come. The wrong, the social sin, of now taking

advantage of the offer of her lips had a magnitude, in the eyes of one

whose life had been so primitive, so ruled by purest household laws, as

Giles's, which can hardly be explained.

"Did you say anything?" she asked, timidly.

"Oh no--only that--"

"You mean that it must BE settled, since my father is coming home?" she

said, gladly.

Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this

while--though he would have protected Grace's good repute as the apple

of his eye--was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods. In

face of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened

school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a

man's weakness. Since it was so--since it had come to this, that

Grace, deeming herself free to do it, was virtually asking him to

demonstrate that he loved her--since he could demonstrate it only too

truly--since life was short and love was strong--he gave way to the

temptation, notwithstanding that he perfectly well knew her to be

wedded irrevocably to Fitzpiers. Indeed, he cared for nothing past or

future, simply accepting the present and what it brought, desiring once

in his life to clasp in his arms her he had watched over and loved so

long.

She started back suddenly from his embrace, influenced by a sort of

inspiration. "Oh, I suppose," she stammered, "that I am really

free?--that this is right? Is there REALLY a new law? Father cannot

have been too sanguine in saying--"

He did not answer, and a moment afterwards Grace burst into tears in

spite of herself. "Oh, why does not my father come home and explain,"

she sobbed, "and let me know clearly what I am? It is too trying, this,

to ask me to--and then to leave me so long in so vague a state that I

do not know what to do, and perhaps do wrong!"

Winterborne felt like a very Cain, over and above his previous sorrow.

How he had sinned against her in not telling her what he knew. He

turned aside; the feeling of his cruelty mounted higher and higher.

How could he have dreamed of kissing her? He could hardly refrain from

tears. Surely nothing more pitiable had ever been known than the

condition of this poor young thing, now as heretofore the victim of her

father's well-meant but blundering policy.