It was almost with the coldness and detachment of the dead that she now answered him, and her voice went sighing across the wet fields with a desolation that would have struck a more normal mind than Andersen’s as the incarnation of tragedy. He was himself, however, strung up to such a tragic note, that the despair in her tone affected him less than it would have affected another.
“I have come to feel,” said she, “that I have no heart, and I feel as though this country of yours had no heart. It ought to be always cloudy and dark in this place. Sunshine here is a kind of bitter mockery.”
“You do not know — you do not know what you say,” cried the poor stone-carver, quickening his pace in his excitement so that it became difficult for her to keep up with him. “I have loved you, since I first saw you — that day — down at our works — when the hawthorn was out. My heart at any rate is deep enough, deep enough to be hurt more than you would believe, Lacrima. Oh, if things were only different! If you could only bring yourself to care for me a little — just a little! Lacrima, listen to me.”
He stopped abruptly in the middle of a field and made her turn and face him. He laid his hand solemnly and imploringly upon her wrist. “Why need you put yourself under this frightful yoke? I know something of what you have had to go through. I know something, though it may be only a little, of what this horrible marriage means to you. Lacrima, for your own sake — as well as mine — for the sake of everyone who has ever cared for you — don’t let them drag you into this atrocious trap.
“Trust me, give yourself boldly into my care. Let’s go away together and try our fortune in some new place! All places are not like Nevilton. I am a strong man, I know my trade, I could earn money easily to keep us both. Lacrima, don’t turn away, don’t look so helpless! After all, things might be worse, you might be already married to that man, and be buried alive forever! It is not yet too late. You are still free. I beg and implore you, by everything you hold sacred, to stop and escape before it is too late. It doesn’t matter that you don’t love me now. As long as you don’t utterly hate me all can be put right. I don’t ask you to return what I feel for you. I won’t ask it if you agree to marry me. I’ll make any contract with you you please, and swear any vow. I won’t come near you when we are together. We can live under one roof as brother and sister. The wedding-ring will be nothing between us. It will only protect you from the rest of the world. I won’t interfere with your life at all, when once I have freed you from this devil’s hole. It will only be a marriage in form, in name; everything else will be just as you please. I will obey your least wish, your least fancy. If you want to go back to your own country and to go alone, I will save up money enough to make that possible. In fact, I have now got money enough to pay your journey and I would send out more to you. Lacrima, let me help you to break away from all this. You must, Lacrima, you must and you shall! If you prefer it, we needn’t ever be married. I don’t want to take advantage of you. I’ll give you every penny I have and help you out of the country and then send you more as I earn it. It is madness, this devilish marriage they are driving you into. It is madness and folly to submit to it. It is monstrous. It is ridiculous. You are free to go, they have no hold upon you. Lacrima, Lacrima! why are you so cruel to yourself, to me, to everyone who cares for you?”
He drew breath at last, but continued to clutch her wrist with a trembling hand, glancing anxiously, as he waited, at the lessening distance that separated them from the others.
Lacrima looked at him with a pale troubled face, but her large eyes were full of tears and when she spoke her voice quivered.
“I was wrong, my friend, to say that none of you here had any heart. Your heart is large and noble. I shall never — never forget what you have now said to me. But James — but James, dear,” and her voice shook still more, “I cannot, I cannot do it. There are more reasons than I can explain to you, why this thing must happen. It has to happen, and we must bow our heads and submit. After all, life is not very long, or very happy, at the best. Probably,”—and she smiled a sad little smile, — “I should disappoint you frightfully if we did go together. I am not such a nice person as you suppose. I have queer moods — oh, such strange, strange moods! — and I know for certain that I should not make you happy.
“Shall I tell you a horrible secret, James?” Here her voice sank into a curious whisper and she laughed a low distressing laugh. “I have really got the soul, the soul I say, not the nerves or sense, of a girl who has lost everything, — I wish I could make you understand — who has lost self-respect and everything, — I have thought myself into this state. I don’t care now — I really don’t—what happens to me. James, dear — you wouldn’t want to marry a person like that, a person who feels herself already dead and buried? Yes, and worse than dead! A person who has lost all pity, all feeling, even for herself. A person who is past even caring for the difference between right and wrong! You wouldn’t want to be kind to a person like that, James, would you?”
She stopped and gazed into his face, smiling a woeful little smile. Andersen mechanically noticed that their companions had observed their long pause, and had delayed to advance, resting beneath the shelter of a wind-tossed ash-tree. The stone-carver began to realize the extraordinary and terrible loneliness of every human soul. Here he was, face to face with the one being of all beings whose least look or word thrilled him with intolerable excitement, and yet he could not as much as touch the outer margin of her real consciousness.
He had not the least idea, even at that fatal moment, what her inner spirit was feeling; what thoughts, what sensations, were passing through her soul. Nor could he ever have. They might stand together thus, isolated from all the world, through an eternity of physical contact, and he would never attain such knowledge. She would always remain aloof, mysterious, evasive. He resolved that at all events as far as he himself was concerned, there should be no barrier between them. He would lay open to her the deepest recesses of his heart.
He began a hurried incoherent history of his passion, of its growth, its subtleties, its intensity. He tried to make her realize what she had become for him, how she filled every hour of every day with her image. He explained to her how clearly and fully he understood the difficulty, the impossibility, of his ever bringing her to care for him as he cared for her.
He even went so far as to allude to Mr. Quincunx, and implored her to believe that he would be well content if she would let him earn money enough to support both her and Maurice, either in Nevilton or elsewhere, if it would cut the tragic knot of her fate to join her destiny to that of the forlorn recluse.
It almost seemed as though this final stroke of self-abnegation excited more eloquence in him than all the rest. He begged and conjured her to cut boldly loose from the Romer bonds, and marry her queer friend, if he, rather than any other, were the choice she made. His language became so vehement, his tone so impassioned and exalted, that the girl began to look apprehensively at him. Even this apprehension, however, was a thing strangely removed from reality. His reckless words rose and fell upon the air and mixed with the rising wind as if they were words remembered from some previous existence. The man’s whole figure, his gaunt frame, his stooping shoulders, his long arms and lean fingers, seemed to her like something only half-tangible, something felt and seen through a dim medium of obscuring mist.