Anna Lombard | Page 8

along in the tide of anger and resentment that came surging through my brain. "What! On one evening's acquaintance, ask for a girl's love and faithful waiting for five years, and such a girl as Anna!" Conceited fool though passion will make a man, still it had not blinded me so far as that. I sat on like a statue, thinking hard, and a thousand mad plans, all equally impossible, for evading my duty came before me and were dismissed.
As far as I myself was concerned, I felt no hesitation. I would have gone to her and spoken freely, gladly oh, how gladly if I had allowed myself to be swayed by my own impulses, though I had known her but a few hours. It is not in the nature of things that a great passion, or even that embryo which is to become a great passion, should admit of hesitation. These feelings sweep over the human being resistlessly. They do not permit him to argue or reason with them; they dictate. And, moreover, they carry with them a conviction to his mind which renders argument unnecessary. Lesser emotions, I admit, allow of reasoning this way and that, and weighing and considering; and doubtless more than half the men in the world have long periods of oscillation before they say those irrevocable words I would have said so willingly now, without a tremor; but this vacillation only proves that the woman they are so considering is not the one of all this life for them, and she will never be the object of the intensest passion they are capable of. The case is much the same as that of a man waiting in the street to meet some friend of whose appearance long absence or other causes have made him not quite sure. How anxiously he scans each one of the passers-by, and fifty times imagines he sees a resemblance about which he debates in his mind is that he or is it not? And only hesitates thus because each of these is not the man. When the friend appears, his glance lights on him, he recognizes him. That is the man; there is no question, no doubt, no hesitation. And he walks up to him with outstretched hand. Similarly my mind instinctively and unconsciously had been waiting, as the mind of every man not occupied with passion is practically waiting, for the woman to pass by me in the way of life that was the fulfillment of the indefinite standard in my thoughts. Others who were not such women might come and go, and, moved by resemblances, I might have hesitated and looked and hesitated again; but Anna had stepped up to me in the stream of human traffic that goes up and down the Way, and my mind had instantly recognized her, and my hand was outstretched, and there was no hesitation and no doubt.
Doubtless, if more time had been allowed me, I should have used it, out of a sense of the fitness of things, decorum, and, above all, deference to the girl herself; but even then it would have been the shortest time I could have set. Indeed, I knew that the impulse to caress her, to clasp her in my arms and know her to be my own would be a difficult one to hold down by the throat for long. So that the prospect of being forced to speak at once would not have been terrifying in the least to me, if only and I groaned out loud. Circumstances seemed so willfully and needlessly to have arrayed themselves against me. Had I been ordered to a hill station, one with even a moderately good climate and where white life was not wholly excluded, I might have had courage enough to ask her to occupy a large, cool, rose-covered bungalow, situated somewhere where the breezes came, and to continue her gay, brilliant life of dances and dinners and idle amusements as the wife of an assistant commissioner instead of the daughter of a general; but I could not take a girl, straight from England, to share with me a fever- and cholera-haunted swamp, even if she would come. Somehow I did not feel who/ly certain that she would not come, and her smiling eyes, as they had looked at me last night, swam before me. I lifted my head and glanced involuntarily down the breakfast-table to where, at the end, a large and brilliant mirror in my sideboard gave me back a reflection of myself. It recurred to me suddenly, then, that I was usually considered good-looking, and my heart gave a beat of pleasure. I had never thought of nor valued the fact before; but just as last night, for the first time, I