The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories by Edith Wharton

Author:Edith Wharton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, classic, classics, edith wharton, short stories, collection, pack
ISBN: 9781781668535
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

"Not to tell you - ?"

"Anything - anything - just to leave our ... our friendship ... as it has been - as - as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave a picture - not quite finished, perhaps ... but all the more exquisite...."

She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her own, which had flashed out of reach in the same instant - felt the start that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and turned about by the shoulders.

"You - you - ?" he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and tenderness; but she held fast, so centred in her inexorable resolve that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be producing.

"Don't you see," she hurried on, "don't you feel how much safer it is - yes, I'm willing to put it so! - how much safer to leave everything undisturbed ... just as ... as it has grown of itself ... without trying to say: 'It's this or that'...? It's what we each choose to call it to ourselves, after all, isn't it? Don't let us try to find a name that ... that we should both agree upon ... we probably shouldn't succeed." She laughed abruptly. "And ghosts vanish when one names them!" she ended with a break in her voice.

When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never dreamed herself capable. And then, suddenly, strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her throat, and she had to stop.

Her companion remained motionless. He had not tried to regain her hand, and his eyes were away from her, on the river. But his nearness had become something formidable and exquisite - something she had never before imagined. A flush of guilt swept over her - vague reminiscences of French novels and of opera plots. This was what such women felt, then ... this was "shame." Phrases of the newspaper and the pulpit danced before her.... She dared not speak, and his silence began to frighten her. Had ever a heart beat so wildly before in Wentworth?

He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed them one after the other.

"I shall never forget - " he said in a confused voice, unlike his own.

A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes meet his for a moment.

"Thank you," she said, simply also.

She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to the college buildings, and he walked beside her in silence.

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