A Life's Morning

by George Gissing

  Dagworthy drew near to her; when close enough to hold out his hand, he could no longer keep his eyes upon her face; they fell, and his visage showed an embarrassment which, even in her confusion—her all but dread—Emily noticed as a strange thing. She was struggling to command herself, to overcome by reason the fear which always attacked her in this man’s presence. She felt it as a relief to be spared the steady gaze which, on former meetings, he had never removed from her.

  ‘You are surprised to see me here?’ he began, taking hold of the chair which Emily had risen from and swaying it backwards and forwards. Even his voice was more subdued than she had ever known it. ‘I have come to apologise to you for sending Miss Cartwright to meet her father at the station. I met her by chance just out there in the road, and as I wanted a messenger very badly I took advantage of her good-nature. But she wouldn’t go unless I promised to come here and explain her absence.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Emily replied, as naturally as she could. ‘Will she still come back for her lesson, do you think?’

  ‘I’m afraid not; she said I had better ask you to excuse her this morning.’

  Emily gathered up two or three books which lay on the other chair.

  ‘You find her rather troublesome to teach, I should be afraid,’ Dagworthy pursued, watching her every moment. ‘Jessie isn’t much for study, is she?’

  ‘Perhaps she is a little absent now and then,’ replied Emily, saying the first thing that occurred to her.

  She had collected her books and was about to fasten a strap round them.

  ‘Do let me do that for you,’ said Dagworthy, and he forestalled her assent, which she would probably not have given, by taking the books from her hands. He put up his foot on the chair, as if for the convenience of doing the strapping on his knee, but before he had finished it he spoke again.

  ‘You are fond of teaching, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, I like it.’

  She stood in expectant waiting, her hands held together before her, her head just bent. The attitude was grace itself. Dagworthy raised his eyes slowly from her feet to her face.

  ‘But you wouldn’t care to go on with it always?’

  ‘I—I don’t think about it,’ she replied, nervousness again seizing her. There was a new look in his eyes, a vehemence, a fervour, which she dared not meet after the first glance. He would not finish the strapping of the books, and she could not bid him do so. Had she obeyed her instinct, she would have hastened away, heedless of anything but the desire to quit his presence.

  ‘How long will your holidays be?’ he asked, letting the books fall to the chair, as if by accident.

  ‘Till the end of September, I think.’

  ‘So long? I’m glad to hear that. You will come again some day to my house with your father, won’t you?’

  The words trembled upon his lips; it was not like his own voice, he could not control it.

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Dagworthy,’ she replied.

  He bent to the books again, and this time succeeded in binding them together. As he fastened the buckle, drops of perspiration fell from his forehead.

  Emily thanked him, and held forth her hand for the books. He took it in his own.

  ‘Miss Hood—’

  She drew her hand away, almost by force, and retreated a step; his face terrified her.

  ‘I sent Jessie off on purpose,’ he continued. ‘I knew you were here, and wanted to speak to you alone. Since I met you that day on the Heath, I have had no rest—I’ve wanted so to see you again. The other morning at the Cartwrights’ it was almost more than I could do to go away. I don’t know what’s come to me; I can’t put you out of my thoughts for one minute; I can’t give my attention to business, to anything. I meant to have gone away before now, but I’ve put it off, day after day; once or twice I’ve all but come to your house, to ask to see you—’

  He spoke in a hurried, breathless way, almost with violence; passion was forcing the words from him, in spite of a shame which kept his face on fire. There was something boyish in the simplicity of his phrases; he seemed to be making a confession that was compelled by fear, and at length his speech lost itself in incoherence. He stood with his eyes fixed on the ground; perspiration covered his face.

  ‘Mr. Dagworthy—’

  Emily tried to break the intolerable silence. Her strength was answering now to the demand upon it; his utter abashment before her could not but help her to calmness. But the sound of her first word gave him voice again.

  ‘Let me speak first,’ he broke forth, now looking full at her. ‘That’s nothing of what I wanted to say; it sounds as if I wasn’t man enough to know my own mind. I know it well enough, and I must say all I have to say, whilst you’re here to listen to me. After all, you’re only a girl; but if you’d come here straight from heaven, I couldn’t find it harder to speak to you.’

  ‘Mr. Dagworthy, don’t speak like this—don’t say more—I beg you not to! I cannot listen as you would wish me to.’

  ‘You can’t listen? But you don’t know what I have to say still,’ he urged, with hasty entreaty, his voice softer. ‘I’m asking nothing yet; I only want you to know how you’ve made me feel towards you. No feeling will ever come to you like this that’s come to me, but I want you to know of it, to try and understand what it means—to try and think of me. I don’t ask for yes or no, it wouldn’t be reasonable; you haven’t had to think of me in this way. But God knows how I shall live without you; it would be the cruelest word woman ever said if you refused even to give me a hope.’

  ‘I cannot—do hear me—it is not in my power to give you hope.’

  ‘Oh, you say that because you think you must, because I have come to you so suddenly; I have offended you by talking in this way when we scarcely know each other even as friends, and you have to keep me at a distance; I see it on your face. Do you think there is a danger that I should be less respectful to you than I ought? That’s because you don’t understand me. I’ve spoken in rough, hasty words, because to be near you takes all sense from me. Look, I’m quieter now. What I ought to have said at first is this. You’re prejudiced against me; you’ve heard all sorts of tales; I know well enough what people say about me—well, I want you to know me better. We’ll leave all other feelings aside. We’ll say I just wish you to think of me in a just way, a friendly way, nothing more. It’s impossible for you to do more than that at first. No doubt even your father has told you that I have a hasty temper, which leads me to say and do things I’m soon sorry for. It’s true enough, but that doesn’t prove that I am a brute, and that I can’t mend myself. You’ve heard things laid to my charge that are false—about my doings in my own home—you know what I mean. Get to know me better, and some day I’ll tell you the whole truth. Now it’s only this I ask of you—be just to me. You’re not a woman like these in Dunfield who talk and talk behind one’s back; though I have seen so little of you, don’t I know the difference between you and them? I’m ignorant enough, compared with you, but I can feel what it is that puts you above all other women. It must be that that makes me mad to gain a kind word from you. One word—that you’ll try to think of me; and I’ll live on that as long as I can.’

  The mere utterances help little to an understanding of the terrible force of entreaty he put into this speech. His face, his hands, the posture of his body, all joined in pleading. He had cast off all shamefacedness, and spoke as if his life depended on the answer she would return; the very lack of refinement in his tone, in his pronunciation of certain words, made his appeal the more pathetic. With the quickness of jealousy, he had guessed at the meaning there might lie in Emily’s reluctance to hear him, but he dared not entertain the thought; it was his passionate instinct to plead it down. Whatever it might be that she had in mind, she must first hear him. As he spoke, he watched her features with the eagerness of desire, of fear; to do so was but to inflame his passion. It was an extraordinary struggle between the force of violent appetite and the constraint of love in the
higher sense. How the former had been excited, it would be hard to explain. Wilfrid Athel had submitted to the same influence. Her beauty was of the kind which, leaving the ordinary man untouched, addressed itself with the strangest potency to an especially vehement nature here and there. Her mind, uttering itself in the simplest phrases, laid a spell upon certain other minds set apart and chosen. She could not speak but the soul of this rude mill-owner was exalted beyond his own intelligence.

  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, th
ere 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?…

  When Mr. Hood returned from business on the following day, he brought news that Dagworthy had at last gone for his holiday. It was time, he said; Dagworthy was not looking himself; at the mill they had been in mortal fear of one of his outbreaks.

  ‘Did he speak harshly to you, father?’ Emily was driven to ask, with very slight emphasis on the ‘you.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ was the reply, with the sad abortive laugh which was Mr. Hood’s nearest approach to mirth, ‘fortunately he left me alone, and spoke neither well nor ill. He didn’t look angry, I thought, so much as put out about something.’

  Emily was relieved from one fear at least, and felt grateful to Dagworthy. Moreover, by observation, she had concluded that Jessie could not possibly be aware of what had taken place in the garden. And now Dagworthy was likely to be away for three weeks. Her heart was lighter again.

  CHAPTER IX

  CIRCUMSTANCE

  Dagworthy was absent not quite a fortnight, and he returned looking anything but the better for his holiday. The wholesome colour of his cheeks had changed almost to sallowness those who met him in Dunfield looked at him with surprise and asked what illness he had been suffering. At the mill, they did not welcome his reappearance; his temper was worse than it had been since the ever-memorable week which witnessed his prosecution for assault and battery. At home, the servants did their best to keep out of his way, warned by Mrs. Jenkins. She, good woman, had been rash enough to bring the child into the dining-room whilst Dagworthy was refreshing himself with a biscuit and a glass of wine upon his arrival; in a minute or two she retreated in high wrath.