第36章 Chapter 5(3)

What she gave touched him, as she faced him, for it was the full tune of her renouncing. She really renounced--renounced everything, and without even insisting now on what it had all been for her. Her only insistence was her insistence on the small matter of their keeping their appointment to themselves. That, in exchange for "everything," everything she gave up, WAS verily but a trifle. He let himself accordingly be guided; he so soon assented, for enlightened indulgence, to any particular turn she might wish the occasion to take, that the stamp of her preference had been well applied to it even while they were still in the Park. The application (96) in fact presently required that they should sit down a little, really to see where they were; in obedience to which propriety they had some ten minutes, of a quality quite distinct, in a couple of penny-chairs under one of the larger trees. They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom. They helped Charlotte thus to make her position--her temporary position--still more clear, and it for this purpose could have been but that, abruptly, on seeing her opportunity, she sat down. He stood for a little before her as if to mark the importance of not wasting time, the importance she herself had previously insisted on; but after she had said a few words it was impossible for him not to resort again to good nature. He marked as he could, by this concession, that if he had finally met her first proposal for what would be "amusing" in it, so any idea she might have would contribute to that effect. He had as a consequence--in all consistency--to take it for amusing that she reaffirmed, and reaffirmed again, the truth that was HER truth.

"I don't care what you make of it, and I don't ask anything whatever of you--anything but this. I want to have said it--that's all; I want not to have failed to say it. To see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour--or say for two--that's what I've had for weeks in my head. I mean, of course, to get it BEFORE--(97) before what you're going to do. So, all the while, you see," she went on with her eyes on him, "it was a question for me if I should be able to manage it in time. If I could n't have come now I probably should n't have come at all--perhaps even ever. Now that I'm here I shall stay, but there were moments over there when I despaired. It was n't easy--there were reasons; but it was either this or nothing. So I did n't struggle, you see, in vain.

AFTER--oh I did n't want that! I don't mean," she smiled, "that it would n't have been delightful to see you even then--to see you at any time; but I would never have come for it. This is different. This is what I wanted.

This is what I've got. This is what I shall always have. This is what I should have missed, of course," she pursued, "if you had chosen to make me miss it. If you had thought me horrid, had refused to come, I should, naturally, have been immensely ' sold.' I had to take the risk. Well, you're all I could have hoped. That's what I was to have said. I did n't want simply to get my time with you, but I wanted you to know. I wanted you"--she kept it up, slowly, softly, with a small tremor of voice but without the least failure of sense or sequence--"I wanted you to understand. I wanted you, that is, to hear. I don't care, I think, whether you understand or not. If I ask nothing of you I don't--I may n't--ask even so much as that.

What you may think of me--that does n't in the least matter. What I want is that it shall always be with you--so that you'll never be able quite to get rid of it--that I DID. I won't say that YOU did--you may make as little of that as you like. But that I was (98) here with you where we are and AS we are--I just saying this. Giving myself, in other words, away--and perfectly willing to do it for nothing. That's all."