"My fingers are not accustomed to such treatment," said Dolly, half laughing, and trying hard to strike into an ordinary tone of conversation, though she left him the hand. "I do not think they ever were kissed before."
"They have got to learn!" said her companion.
Dolly was silent again. It was with a great joy at her heart that she felt her hand so clasped and held, and knew that Mr. Shubrick had got his answer and the thing was done; but she did not show it, unless to a nice observer. And a nice observer was by her side. Yet he kept silence too for a while. It was one of those full, blessed silences that are the very reverse of a blank or a void; when the heart's big treasure is too much to be immediately unpacked, and words when they come are quite likely enough not to touch it and to go to something comparatively indifferent. However, words did not just that on the present occasion.
"Dolly, I am in a sort of amazement at my own happiness," Mr. Shubrick said.
Dolly could have answered, so was she! but she did not. She only dimpled a little, and flushed.
"I have been waiting for you all these years," he went on; "and now I have got you!"
Dolly's dimples came out a little more. "I thought you did not wait,"
she remarked.
Mr. Shubrick laughed. "My heart waited," he said. "I made a boy's mistake; and I might have paid a man's penalty for it. But I had always known that you and no other would be my wife, if I could find you. That is, if I could persuade you; and somehow I never allowed myself to doubt of that. I did not take such a chance into consideration."
"But I was such a little child," said Dolly.
"Ay," said he; "that was it. You were _such_ a little child."
"But you must have been a very extraordinary midshipman, it seems to me."
"By the same rule you must have been a very extraordinary little girl."
They both laughed at that.
"I suppose we were both extraordinary," said Dolly; "but, really, Mr.
Shubrick, you know very little about me!"
His answer to that was to kiss again the hand he held.
"What do you know of me?"
"I think I know a great deal about you," said Dolly softly.
"You have a great deal to learn. Wouldn't you like to begin by hearing how Miss Thayer and I came to an understanding?"
"Oh, yes, yes! if you please," said Dolly, extremely glad to get upon a more abstract subject of conversation.
"I owe that to myself, perhaps," Mr. Shubrick went on; "and I certainly owe it to you. I told you how I got into my engagement with her. It was a boyish fancy; but all the same, I was bound by it; and I should have been legally bound before now, only that Christina always put off that whenever I proposed it. I found too that the putting it off did not make me miserable. Dolly, the case is going to be different this time!"
"You mean," said Dolly doubtfully, "it _is_ going to make you miserable?"
"No! I mean, you are not going to put me off."
"Oh, but!"----said Dolly flushing, and stopped.
"I have settled that point in my own mind," he said, smiling; "it is as well you should know it at once.--So time went by, until I went to spend that Christmas Day in Rome. After that day I knew nearly all that I know now. Of course it followed, that I could not accept the invitation to Sorrento, when you were expected to be there. I could not venture to see you again while I was bound in honour to another woman.
I stayed on board ship, those hot summer days, when all the officers that could went ashore. I stayed and worked at my problem--what I was to do."
He paused and Dolly said nothing. She was listening intently, and entirely forgetting that the sunlight was coming very slant and would soon be gone, and that home and supper were waiting for her managing hand. Dolly's eyes were fixed upon another hand, which held hers, and her ears were strained to catch every word. She rarely dared glance at Mr. Shubrick's face.
"I wonder what counsel you would have given me?" he went on,--"if I could have asked it of you as an indifferent person,--which you were."
"I don't know," said Dolly. "I know what people think"----
"Yes, I knew what people think, too; and it a little embarrassed my considerations. However, Dolly, I made up my mind at last to this;--that to marry Christina would be acting a lie; that I could not do that; and that if I could, a lie to be acted all my life long would be too heavy for me. Negatively, I made up my mind. Positively, I did not know exactly how I should work it. But I must see Christina. And as soon as affairs on board ship permitted, I got a furlough of a few days and went to Sorrento. I got there one lovely afternoon, about three weeks after you had gone. Sea and sky and the world generally were flooded with light and colour, so as I have never seen them anywhere else, it seems to me. You know how it is."
"Yes, I know Sorrento," said Dolly. But just then, an English bank under English oaks seemed as good to the girl as ever an Italian paradise. That, naturally, she did not show. "I know Sorrento," she said quietly.
"And you know the Thayers' villa. I found Christina and Mr. St. Leger sitting on the green near the house, under an orange tree--symbolical; and the air was sweet with a thousand other things. I felt it with a kind of oppression, for the mental prospect was by no means so delicious."
"No," said Dolly. "And sometimes that feeling of contrast makes one very keen to see all the lovely things outside of one."
"Do _you_ know that?" said Mr. Shubrick.
"Yes. I know it"
"One can only know it by experience. What experience can you have had, my Dolly, to let you feel it?"
Dolly turned her eyes on him without speaking. She was thinking of Venice at midnight under the moon, and a sail, and a wine-shop. Tell him? No, indeed, never!
"You are not ready to let me know?" said he, smiling. "How long first must it be?"
"It isn't anything you need know," said Dolly, looking away. But with that the question flashed upon her, would he not have to know? had he not a right? "Please go on," she said hurriedly.
"I can go on now easier than I could then," he said with a half laugh.
"I sat down with them, and purposely brought the conversation upon the theme of my trouble. It came quite naturally, _apropos_ of a case of a broken engagement which was much talked of just then; and I started my question. Suppose one or the other of the parties had discovered that the engagement was a mistake? They gave it dead against me; all of them; Mrs. Thayer had come out by that time. They were unanimous in deciding that pledges made must be kept, at all hazards."
"I think that is the general view," said Dolly.
"It is not yours?"
"I never thought much about it. But I think people ought always and everywhere to be true.--That is nothing to kiss my hand for," Dolly added with the pretty flush which was coming and going so often this afternoon.
"You will let me judge of that."
"I didn't think you were that sort of person."
"What sort of person?"
"One of those that kiss hands."
"Shall I choose something else to kiss, next time?"
But Dolly looked so frightened that Mr. Shubrick, laughing, went back to his story.
"We were at Sorrento," he said. "You can suppose my state of mind. I thought at least I would take disapprobation piecemeal, and I asked Christina to go out on the bay with me. You have been on the bay of Sorrento about sun-setting?"