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at all to be supplicating here; but I do supplicate to you. I wish
you knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible,
that. In bare human mercy to a lonely man, don't throw me off now!"
"I don't throw you off--indeed, how can I? I never had you." In her
noon-clear sense that she had never loved him she forgot for a moment
her thoughtless angle on that day in February.
"But there was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you!
I don't reproach you, for even now I feel that the ignorant and cold
darkness that I should have lived in if you had not attracted me by
that letter--valentine you call it--would have been worse than my
knowledge of you, though it has brought this misery. But, I say,
there was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing
for you, and yet you drew me on. And if you say you gave me no
encouragement, I cannot but contradict you."
"What you call encouragement was the childish game of an idle minute.
I have bitterly repented of it--ay, bitterly, and in tears. Can you
still go on reminding me?"
"I don't accuse you of it--I deplore it. I took for earnest what
you insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is
awful, wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. I wish
your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh,
could I but have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going
to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been
able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well! But
it is weak, idle drivelling to go on like this.... Bathsheba, you
are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at
to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own
that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me!
But I don't speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because
of my pain; it is no use, that. I must bear it; my pain would get no
less by paining you."
"But I do pity you--deeply--O, so deeply!" she earnestly said.
"Do no such thing--do no such thing. Your dear love, Bathsheba, is
such a vast thing beside your pity, that the loss of your pity as
well as your love is no great addition to my sorrow, nor does the
gain of your pity make it sensibly less. O sweet--how dearly you
spoke to me behind the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn
at the shearing, and that dearest last time in the evening at your
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