say any more about it, won’t it, dear Philip? You know we couldn’t even be friends, if our friendship were discovered. I have never felt that I was right in giving way about seeing you, though it has been so precious to me in some ways; and now the fear comes upon me strongly again, that it will lead to evil.”
“But no evil has come, Maggie; and if you had been guided by that fear before, you would only have lived through another dreary, benumbing year, instead of reviving into your real self.”
Maggie shook her head. “It has been very sweet, I know,—all the talking together, and the books, and the feeling that I had the walk to look forward to, when I could tell you the thoughts that had come into my head while I was away from you. But it has made me restless; it has made me think a great deal about the world; and I have impatient thoughts again,—I get weary of my home; and then it cuts me to the heart afterward, that I should ever have felt weary of my father and mother. I think what you call being benumbed was better—better for me—for then my selfish desires were benumbed.”
Philip had risen again, and was walking backward and forward impatiently.
“No, Maggie, you have wrong ideas of self-conquest, as I’ve often told you. What you call self-conquest—binding and deafening yourself to all but one train of impressions—is only the culture of monomania in a nature like yours.”
He had spoken with some irritation, but now he sat down by her again and took her hand.
“Don’t think of the past now, Maggie; think only of our love. If you can really cling to me with all your heart, every obstacle will be overcome in time; we need only wait. I can live on hope. Look at me, Maggie; tell me again it is possible for you to love me. Don’t look away from me to that cloven tree; it is a bad omen.”
She turned her large dark glance upon him with a sad smile.
“Come, Maggie, say one kind word, or else you were better to me at Lorton. You asked me if I should like you to kiss me,—don’t you remember?—and you promised to kiss me when you met me again. You never kept the promise.”
The recollection of that childish time came as a sweet relief to Maggie. It made the present moment less strange to her. She kissed him almost as simply and quietly as she had done when she was twelve years old. Philip’s eyes flashed with delight, but his next words were words of discontent.
“You don’t seem happy enough, Maggie; you are forcing yourself to say you love me, out of pity.”
“No, Philip,” said Maggie, shaking her head, in her old childish way; “I’m telling you the truth. It is all new and strange to me; but I don’t think I could love any one better than I love you. I should like always to live with you—to make you happy. I have always been happy when I have been with you. There is only one thing I will not do for your sake; I will never do anything to wound my father. You must never ask that from me.”
“No, Maggie, I will ask nothing; I will bear everything; I’ll wait another year only for a kiss, if you will only give me the first place in your heart.”
“No,” said Maggie, smiling, “I won’t make you wait so long as that.” But then, looking serious again, she added, as she rose from her seat,—
“But what would your own father say, Philip? Oh, it is quite impossible we can ever be more than friends,—brother and sister in secret, as we have been. Let us give up thinking of everything else.”
“No, Maggie, I can’t give you up,—unless you are deceiving me; unless you really only care for me as if I were your brother. Tell me the truth.”
“Indeed I do, Philip. What happiness have I ever had so great as being with you,—since I was a little girl,—the days Tom was good to me? And your mind is a sort of world to me; you can tell me all I want to know. I think I should never be tired of being with you.”
They were walking hand in hand, looking at each other; Maggie, indeed, was hurrying along, for she felt it time to be gone. But the sense that their parting was near made her more anxious lest she should have unintentionally left some painful impression on Philip’s mind. It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive; when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves floodmarks which are never reached again.
They stopped to part among the Scotch firs.
“Then my life will be filled with hope, Maggie, and I shall be happier than other men, in spite of all? We do belong to each other—for always—whether we are apart or together?”
“Yes, Philip; I should like never to part; I should like to make your life very happy.”
“I am waiting for something else. I wonder whether it will come.”
Maggie smiled, with glistening tears, and then stooped her tall head to kiss the pale face that was full of pleading, timid love,—like a woman’s.
She had a moment of real happiness then,—a moment of belief that, if there were sacrifice in this love, it was all the richer and more satisfying.
She turned away and hurried home, feeling that in the hour since she had trodden this road before, a new era had begun for her. The tissue of vague dreams must now get narrower and narrower, and all the threads of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed in the woof of her actual daily life.
Chapter V.
The Cloven Tree.
Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities against them; and during a year that Maggie had had the burthen of concealment on her mind, the possibility of discovery had continually presented itself under the form of a sudden meeting with her father or Tom when she was walking with Philip in the Red Deeps. She was aware that this was not one of the most likely events; but it was the scene that most completely symbolized her inward dread. Those slight indirect suggestions which are dependent on apparently trivial coincidences and incalculable states of mind, are the favorite machinery of Fact, but are not the stuff in which Imagination is apt to work.
Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie’s fears were furthest from troubling themselves was her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that she did not live in St. Ogg’s, and was neither sharp-eyed nor sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite whimsical of them to fix rather than on aunt Glegg. And yet the channel of fatality—the pathway of the lightning—was no other than aunt Pullet. She did not live at St. Ogg’s, but the road from Garum Firs lay by the Red Deeps, at the end opposite that by which Maggie entered.
The day after Maggie’s last meeting with Philip, being a Sunday on which Mr. Pullet was bound to appear in funeral hatband and scarf at St. Ogg’s church, Mrs. Pullet made this the occasion of dining with sister Glegg, and taking tea with poor sister Tulliver. Sunday was the one day in the week on which Tom was at home in the afternoon; and today the brighter spirits he had been in of late had flowed over in unusually cheerful open chat with his father, and in the invitation, “Come, Magsie, you come too!” when he strolled out with his mother in the garden to see the advancing cherry-blossoms. He had been better pleased with Maggie since she had been less odd and ascetic; he was even getting rather proud of her; several persons had remarked in his hearing that his
