The Footbridge

He came back to Ashford alone on the second Saturday of November, and he found her where he must have known she would be, because she had told him a year ago in a Berkshire rose garden that she walked the creek at six and nobody in the family had ever walked with her.

It had rained in the night. The creek was up and brown and going fast, and the footbridge was slick, and he came down the bank in a coat with the collar up and said, "Your mother said you had gone out. I told her I would carry a message to you about the Spy block, which is true, and which I will do after, if you would rather I did it after."

"If you would say it now," she said, "I could decide whether to push you in."

He smiled. He had a smile she had never seen, one-sided and unwilling, and it made him look twenty-two, which was the age of the portrait over the mantel.

"My aunt came to see me on Thursday."

"I know."

"She told me that you had refused to promise her that you would never have me."

"I did refuse."

"She told me that you said you had been wrong about me in every particular for a year, and that you would not be wrong a second time in the opposite direction."

"I said it."

He was quiet for a moment, looking down at the water going under the bridge. "I have been," he said, "trying for two months to think how to say this in a way that does not offend you, and I have concluded that there is no such way, and that I would rather offend you than not say it."

"Then say it."

"I love you. I have loved you since the fifth of May, when you came into a room at Bellwood with mud up to your thighs and stood dripping on my sister's rug and would not be ashamed of it. I have loved you in every particular that I told you I had overcome, and I had not overcome any of them, and you were right about that and you were right to refuse me." He looked at her. "If your feelings are what they were in April, tell me so now. I will not speak of it again. But if they have changed, if you have any wish at all to have me, I will take it as the greatest thing that has ever happened to me and I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve the fact that you changed your mind."

She had thought, for two months, that if this happened she would have something ready, something witty and cool and proportionate. She had nothing, unless you counted the sentence about the tank gauge, which she had been turning over in her head since October and which was not, as it turned out, going to be any use to anybody. She stood on a wet footbridge with her hands in her pockets and the creek going under her, and the rail wet under her palms, and his shoes muddy from the bank, and said, in a voice that came out small and unlike her own:

"You were right about Cray. I was wrong. I was wrong about everything and I have known it since April and I have not said it to you once, because I could not bear to, and I am saying it now." She said, "My feelings are entirely changed. I have been in love with you since a rose garden in June, and I have been walking this creek every morning since October telling myself I was not."

He did not move. Then he took one step and put his hands on the rail on either side of hers and said, "Say it again."

She said it again.

They walked back up the hill in the mud in the dark, and he asked her father's permission at nine o'clock in the kitchen with Faye standing behind Gil's chair making a noise like a kettle, and Gil said, "You want to marry her."

"I do."

"She has no money. Her mother is a fool and her sister is married to a man I would not trust with a lawnmower and the land goes to a cousin in White Plains."

"I am aware of all of it."

"She is difficult."

"I am counting on it."

Gil looked at him for a long moment with the expression he had worn for twenty-six years at his wife's lamentations, and then he stood up and shook his hand and said, "Then God help you, and welcome to it." And Faye went into a state of transports which lasted, on and off, for six weeks, and which included, on the second day, a telephone call to the woman at the egg stall.