Idon’t think I like your being here,” Frances remarked to the young man after a brief frowning inspection. She spoke slowly, and with a deliberate gravity and evenness of tone.
Christian’s wide-open eyes continued to gaze up at her with that disconcerting look which had in it both remote abstraction and something very intimately personal. His glance expressed a tender pleasure as it maintained itself against hers.
“Oh, but I like it so very much!” he murmured, with a pleading smile.
Then, by a sudden movement, he sat up, flushing in a novel embarrassment. “I beg you to pardon me,” he urged, faltering over his words. “I was not wholly awake, I think; or I was trying to persuade myself that it was still a dream. Do not think me so rude, I pray you!”
She signified by a gesture and momentary facial relaxation that this particular detail of the situation need not detain them.
“But”—she began, in her stiffest and least amiable voice, and then hesitated. She put her knee again upon the chair, and, resting her hand on its back, looked dubiously at him. “I hardly know what to say,” she started once more, and stopped altogether.
“Oh, but it is I who must say everything,” he broke in, eagerly. “I am quite awake now—I see, of course, it is all absurd, meaningless in your eyes, till I explain it to you.” He rose to his feet and put forth his hand as if to offer it in greeting. No responsive token being visible on her set face, or in her rigid posture, as she confronted him, he waved both hands in a deprecatory movement over the table laden with flowers between them. “These are my peace-offering,” he said, with less confidence. “I hoped they would say some things for me—some things which I feel within me, and cannot easily put into speech. That is what I expected they would surely do. But”—he finished with dejection, after another glance into her face—“evidently they are as tongue-tied as I am. I see it was not a happy thought in me to bring them—or to come myself!”
She had followed his words with rapt attentiveness—but at the end seemed to remember only one of them. “The ‘thought,’” she said, coldly. “Yes, that is what I do not understand. What was the thought?”
He regarded her with some perplexity. “What was the thought—my thought?” he repeated. “Oh—since it does not explain itself, what good is there in talking about it? Let us say that there was no ‘thought’ at all. I will make my compliments and apologies—and say good-morning—and nothing at all will have happened.”
“No,” she answered reflectively. “That would be stupid. You have been to expense, and evidently to some inconvenience as well, to do this thing. On second thoughts,” she went on, with an apparent effort to modify the asperities of her tone and manner, “I dare say that I haven’t behaved quite nicely to you. If you remember, I told you a long time ago that bad manners was a failing of mine.”
“I remember every little word that you spoke,” said Christian softly.
Frances hardened her voice on the instant. “But that doesn’t help me to understand why—what this is all about.”
He responded slowly, searching for his words as he went along. The rattle of machines in the next room for the first time came into the conversation, and forced him to lift his voice. “You were my last friend in France—my first friend in England,” he began. “I said I would not forget you, and you have been always in my mind—always somewhere secure and fresh and sweet in my mind. It was only last night that I learned where I might find you. You will remember that when I begged you to tell me, you laughed and would not. I must not make you believe that I did not very soon find out your name or that I could not have learned your whereabouts much earlier. All I say is that I did not forget—and that last night, when the chance came naturally to me, I asked and learned what I desired to know. And then—why, then—this knowledge spread upward to be of more importance than all the other things I knew. I went home—but never to think of sleeping, but only to change my clothes and hasten out again, to get some new morning flowers for you, and to come to you at the earliest moment. I did not know that London rose so late—I arrived before the time, and, so it seems, waiting for your coming, I fell asleep. That is the entire story. You see it is not very complicated—it is by no means extraordinary.”
Frances had listened with a dreamy gentleness in her gray eyes. She started slightly when he stopped, and gave him a keen, cool glance. “The entire story?” she queried. “I think you have forgotten to mention that it was my sister who told you about me, and gave you my address.”
Her prescience in no wise astonished Christian. Imagination had thrown round the Minerva-like figure which personified her in his thoughts, such a glamour of intellectual radiancy, that it seemed quite a natural thing for her to divine the obscure, and comprehend the mysterious. He smiled at her as he shrugged his shoulders. “It did not occur to me as important,” he exclaimed. “It is true, however, that she told me. She did not know the address when I asked her, but later she procured it for me from her brother. It was at a supper at the Hanover Theater. Afterward there was dancing on the stage. I fear it would have been rather tiresome for me if I had not met your sister. She is a very friendly lady, and she talked a great deal to me.”
“About me?” demanded Frances, sharply.
“Oh, no—about you only a few pleasant words; not more. It seems you do not meet very often.”
He spoke with such evident frankness that she hesitated over the further inquiry her mind had framed. At last she put it in altered form. “Then you would not say that she sent you here—-that she told you to come—and to come by way of Covent Garden, and buy these flowers?” The question, as she uttered it, was full of significant suggestion about the nature of the reply desired. Its tone, too, carried the welcome hint of a softened mood, under the influence of which Christian’s face brightened with joy.
“Why, not at all!” he cried, lifting his voice gaily above the typewriters’ clatter. “She did speak of Covent Garden, and the show of flowers there in the early morning, but it was not in the least with reference to you. It was my own idea long after she had gone. Oh, no one would be more surprised than that good sister of yours to know that I am here!”
Frances, with a puzzling smile which ended in a long breath of relief, took up some of the roses and held them to her face.
“Sit down again,” she bade him, with a pleasant glow in the eyes regarding him over the blossoms; “sit down, and let us talk. Or does that noise bore you?”
“Oh, I am too glad!” he assured her, beamingly. “If it were cannon firing in the next room, it would be nothing to me.” Then, as he continued to gaze with delight at her, an inspiration came to him. “Or is it possible for you to come out? Would you walk a little while, perhaps on the Embankment?”
“I am not particularly busy this morning,” she made indirect answer. Then a digression occurred to her. “But I am rather surprised,” she observed, “to find that England hasn’t made more changes in your speech. I would have expected a perfect Piccadilly accent, but you talk exactly as you did on the train and the boat.”
He laughed and clapped his hands for glee. “It is wholly because I am with you again,” he declared. “Everybody has said for months that the foreign traces had quite vanished from my tongue—but the first glimpse of you—ah! they come instantly back! It is the association of ideas, beyond doubt—that very sweet association,” he added, with trembling softness, “of oh! such fond ideas.”
She had taken up her hat. “We will go out for a little, if you like,” she remarked rather abruptly.
“And I am altogether forgiven?” he demanded in high spirits, as he rose. “You consent to accept the flowers?”
“Heaven only knows what I shall do with them,” she answered, with a grimace of mock despair. “But it was ever so nice of you to get them, and I thank you very much. Oh, I must tell Connie to sprinkle them before I go.”
She moved to the inner door, and as she opened it turned. “Wouldn’t you like to come and see the factory at work?” she inquired, and he joined her with alacrity. “It isn’t much to see at the moment,” she explained, as they entered the large room. “We have nine machines, but only four of them are needed just now. Until after the Jubilee, I’m afraid things will be very dull with publishers and playwrights. However, one must take the lean with the fat.”
Christian looked somewhat nervously about him, while his friend stepped aside to confer with the girl whom he remembered from the early morning. Both this young lady and the three at their machines made a rapid, and as it seemed to him, perfunctory survey of their mistress’s guest, and bent their attention upon their duties again as if his presence signified nothing whatever to them. He suspected that in reality they were plunged in furious speculation concerning him; and this embarrassed him so much that he turned and strolled back toward the open door and even entered the office before Frances rejoined him.
When she came back to him, she took from the table a couple of pale, half-opened tea-rose buds, gave one to him to fix in his lapel and pinned the other to the breast of her fawn-gray frock. “If you are ready,” she said, smilingly, and led the way to the staircase. As she descended before him, he noted the intelligent simplicity of this dress she wore—how it fitted her as gracefully and as artistically as Poole ever fitted Dicky Westland. About her hat, the carriage of her head and shoulders, the free decision of her step, there was something individual which appealed directly to him—a charm which would not be duplicated by any other person in the world. He looked at his watch as he went down, and found with surprise that it was nearly eleven.
He stepped to her side at the street doorway, with a meaning gesture. “Do you remember,” he said, gently—“on the boat you took my arm?”
“I think London is a little different,” she answered, decisively enough, yet with the effect to his ears of unreserved camaraderie.
They walked slowly down to the end of the street. “Do you mind which way we go?” she asked him, and turned eastward. “I haven’t seen the city in an age,” she remarked, as if the choice needed explanation. Sauntering along, they found little to say to each other at the outset. What words they exchanged were about the mild, sunless sky of the London April, and the wonderful pencilings and rubbings of soot upon the silver-gray of London’s stone walls. Learning that he was a stranger to the Temple, she led the way through the gate and lane, and then, by turnings which it surprised him to find her knowing so well, to the curious little church. The door in the sunken porch was ajar, and they went in. She pointed to the circle of freestone Crusaders looking complacently up from the floor at the Oriental dome which had caught their traveled fancy ages before, and it occurred to her to say: “Is it not interesting to you to think that there were Torrs who were friends and companions of these very Magnavilles and Mareschalls, six hundred years ago?”
He thrust out his lips a little. “I have not much interest in anything concerning the Torrs,” he answered.
She looked up at him with curiosity, but offered no comment. They left the church, and she led him round to the spot where, amid the cracked old flags from forgotten graves, Oliver Goldsmith’s tomb now finds itself. A crumbling wreath of natural flowers showed that some kindly soul had remembered the date of the poet’s death, three weeks before.
Christian displayed scarcely more interest here. “I have not read his ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’” he confessed to her. “I had always the intention to do so, but it—it never came off.”
“That brings me to one thing I wanted to ask you,” she said, as they retraced their steps. “What books have you been reading—since you came to England? I am anxious to know?”
“Not many,” he admitted with an attempted laugh which ended rather shamefacedly. “Reading did not fit itself very readily into my time. At Lord Chobham’s I read in some old books, and at Emanuel’s too, but it was all about our own people—the Barons’ War, and the Wars of the Roses, and the Civil War. I know something about these and about the old families of the West, but not much else. I should have read more, I know, but there was really not much opportunity. But you—I saw at your office what serious books you read. It is what I should like to do, too—sometimes. But there has been no one to talk with about any kind of books.”
They had come out again to the Embankment, and made their pace now even more deliberate. “I have been thinking a great deal about you, and your future, since we met,” she remarked, after a pause. “It has made me wonder what you would do, when the opportunity came to you—and what it would be open for you to do. That is why I began reading the books that I take it you have in mind—but afterward I read them for their own value. At the beginning”—she went on slowly, studying the sky-line in an abstracted way as she walked—“at the beginning I thought I should see you again sometime, and I had the idea that I wanted to be able to advise—or no, not that, but to talk to you, and try to interest you in the right sort of things. But it did not take me long to see how foolish that was.”
“No, no!” urged Christian; without, however, any convincing display of enthusiasm. “There is no one in the world from whom I will so gladly take advice as you.”
She smiled fleetingly at him. “And there is no one in the world,” she replied, “more firmly resolved not to offer you any.”
“Ah, but if I beg it! You may not offer—but will you refuse to give?”
“What is the good?” she broke forth in a louder tone, speaking as if in annoyed reproof to herself. “No person can think or feel or decide for another! It is nonsense to pretend otherwise. A man must think his own thoughts, follow his own nature! We can ask nothing finer of a man than to honestly be himself. I get so angry at all these ceaseless attempts to run people all into one mold, to make everybody like everybody else—and then, here I was, solemnly starting out to do the very trick myself!” She laughed in ironical self-depreciation at the thought.
Christian drew closer to her side. “I have very many things to say to you,” he began gravely. “But I am in one way sorry that we went into the churchyard, because it has made us melancholy, and I was going to tell it all to you in the highest good spirits. We were both laughing like merry children when we left your place—and now we are sad. I like Emanuel’s idea—he will have no tombs to be seen upon his estate. Death will come there as elsewhere, without doubt, but he will not be allowed to remain hanging about, thrusting his ugly presence upon happy people each time they walk in the street. At Emanuel’s there is cremation—and that is the end of it. That is the portion of his System which pleases me most. It is the best thing in it.”
She looked into his face. “Then you are not wildly in love with his whole System?” she asked.
“Me? I grieve to say not. It is no doubt very admirable indeed—but—how shall I say?—it does not appeal to me. You are displeased with me for confessing it—but—”
“Displeased?” she interrupted him, with a meaning laugh. “Nothing could displease me less!”
“Oh, you do not love the System?” he cried, with dancing eyes.
“I hate it!” she answered, briefly.
“Capital!” He halted, to shake her by the hand with gay effusion. “Let us abuse it together! You shall say it all, however, because I only dislike it, and cannot give any reasons why—but you will know them every one. Oh, this is splendid! I had the right instinct when I came to you! I have a great deal to tell you—but first you must tell me: what do you say about my cousin’s System? I am burning to hear that.”
It was impossible to evade the contagion of his sparkling face. She laughed in turn.
“Oh, it would be too long a story,” she half protested. “But to put it briefly, this is my idea. Emanuel seems to me to be a magnificent character, with one extraordinary limitation. I think it must be a Jewish limitation—for I have seen it pointed out that they do not invent things. That is Emanuel’s flaw; he has not an original thought in his head. He merely carries to a mathematical point of expansion and development the ready-made ideas which he finds accepted all about him. What you see in him is a triumph of the Semitic passion for working a problem out to its ultimate conclusion. When you consider it, what has he done? Merely discovered, by tremendous labor and energy, the smoothest possible working arrangement of the social system which his class regards as best for itself, and hence for all mankind—the system which exalts a chosen few, and keeps all the rest in subjection. My dear sir, things do not rise higher than their source! How did the Torrs come by their estates? By stealing the birthright of thousands of dumb human beasts of burden, and riveting the family collar round their necks with no more regard for their wishes or their rights than as if they had been so many puppies or colts. And what was the origin of the Ascarel fortune? The most frightful and bloodstained human slavery in the poisonous jungles of the Dutch East Indies—that, and an ancient family business of international usury, every dirty penny in which if you followed it far enough, meant the flaying alive of a peasant, or the starvation of his little children. These are the things which your cousin inherits. He is fine enough to be ashamed of them, but he is not broad enough to repudiate them. He makes himself believe that they were wrong only in degree. He will admit that the Torrs were too brutal toward their serfs, the Ascarels too selfish with their millions. That is all. And he sets himself to proving that with the right kind of chief at their head these systems of theirs can be made not only respectable, but even profitable to the slaves as well as the master. He does not see that the systems themselves are crimes! ”
“Yes, I am glad that I came to you,” said Christian, in low, earnest tones, in the pause which followed. The girl, breathing deeply under the fervor of her mood, looked fixedly before her toward the copper-haze above Paul’s dome. He watched the noble immobility of her profile and thrilled at its suggestion of strength.
“To do him justice,” she went on, musingly, “he does not pretend that it is progress. He is honest, and he describes it as reaction—a long step backward. It is just that kind of honesty and devotion, plus wrong-headedness, which keeps us all at sixes and sevens. If we agree that there is no better-intentioned man alive than Emanuel—still he would do more harm than the most atrocious blackguard, if he had his way with the world. But fortunately, he will not have it. A vastly greater and loftier Jew has said that you cannot pour new wine into old bottles.”
They walked on for a little in silence. “Have you been to Emanuel’s place then?” Christian asked at last.
“No; I know it only from hearsay, and from his books. A woman novelist for whom I do work has been there, and she has told me a good deal about it. She is going to use it in a book, and would you believe it? she is crazy with enthusiasm about the whole thing. I tried to point out to her what she was doing, but you might as well talk to the east wind. The way women run after the hand that smites them, and beslaver it with kisses—that is the thing that enrages me most of all. Why, the very corner-stone of Emanuel’s System is the perpetual enslavement of women. I am always surprised, when I hear about his mediæval arrangements, that he hasn’t set up a ducking-stool for his women-folk. I’m sure it’s a pure oversight on his part. Well, what are you to expect when cultivated women like Mrs. Sessyl-Trant turn up as frantic admirers of that sort of thing? However, thank goodness, women are not forever to be sold out by the fools of their own sex. It is impossible not to see that the tide has turned at last. Thereisa change—and I think something genuine and lasting is going to come out of it. I really think it!”
“Ah, that is what I feel,” put in Christian, with confused eagerness. “I have no clear thoughts about it, but it is my deep feeling that—that—what shall I say?—we are most at fault in the matter of the women.”
Frances pursued her thought, in frowning meditation. “It is the new professional class, who earn their own living, who will help us out. These women, who have come through the mill of self-responsibility, will not accept the old nonsense invented for them, and imposed upon them by the women parasites. The younger women who take care of themselves have all begun to ask questions: ‘Why should I do this?’ ‘Why shouldn’t I do that?’ ‘And whose business but my own is it if I do the other?’ Unfortunately, they are too ready to accept the first answer that comes to them. Oh, that is the woeful trouble! Men have slowly built up for themselves a good deal of machinery by which they can find out what is true. I don’t say they are not continually deceived, or that they invariably recognize the truth when they see it, but still they have certain facilities for protecting themselves against falsehoods. But women have practically none at all. They are systematically lied to from their cradle to their grave. They read so hard!—they aretheconsumers of novels, religious books, weekly newspapers, magazines, and the rest of it—but never a word of actual truth is allowed to reach them out of it all. Wherever they turn to inquire about themselves, about their rights and their duties in this world that they have been born into, they encounter this vast, unbroken conspiracy of liars. That is the gravest of all the disadvantages they labor under. Why, take even the ‘New Woman’ fiction of a few years ago. There was a great hullabaloo raised over certain novels; at last, they cried, the truth was being-revealed by women, for women, of women. But what nonsense! It turned out not to be the truth at all, but only the old falsehood, disguised in hysterics and some shocking bad manners. There seems no escape for women anywhere. They are lied to by their parents, their parsons, their doctors, their authors—and of course they lie to one another. They have a whole debased currency of insincerities and flattering falsehoods which they pass among themselves, keeping straight faces all the while as if it were honest money.—But as I said, I think a change is coming. However, don’t let’s talk any more about it. I get too angry!”
“I like you to be angry—only not with me,” commented Christian with a sprightly smile. Then he added, more gravely, “Oh, I can see how the women who work will make a change. It was very curious to me to see those girls at the machines in your office. It was one of them who let me in, before you came. She was quite different from any of the English women I have been meeting. One saw that she had thoughts of her own—an atmosphere of her own. I should not like to tell lies to her; I think she would detect them more rapidly than I could get them out.”
“Oh, Connie,” laughed Frances. “Yes, she has a head on her shoulders. They are all fairly bright girls, and they get on together extremely well. It’s quite their own idea to divide up the work equally among the lot, and when there is not much doing to take turns in working alternate days. I think it was rather fine of them.”
“Ah, that is the class of women one would like to help,” he declared. “That is what I will devote myself to.”
“But it is the class which prefers to help itself,” she explained quietly. “I see no way in which you could ‘help’ them, as you call it. They don’t want any help. Men in their position might take tips, but these girls won’t.” As he received the rebuff in silence, she changed the subject. “I am meeting now some other young women who would interest you. They are doing newspaper work—and doing it on its merits, too, and not by the favoritism of editors and proprietors—and one or two evenings a week we all get together at my office and talk things over. Sometimes there are as many as twenty of us, including my girls. In a year or two, perhaps it will run to a club-room of our own. I don’t know that I told you—I am getting into newspaper work myself. If I saw how to combine it with my office business, I could have a place on a regular daily staff. I’m puzzling a good deal to find some way of making the two things go together.”
“Oh, I envy you!” broke in Christian, impulsively. “You have work to do! You are interested in your work! You find in it not only occupation, but the opportunities of being useful to others, and of making your life, and other people’s lives, worth living. But think of me! I have nothing in the wide world to do, except wait for a very strong old man to die. And when he dies, then still I have nothing to do worth doing. Don’t you see that it is the most miserable of existences? I am filled with disgust for it. I cannot bear it another day. And that is what I was going to tell you. I have decided to leave it all—and go away.”
Frances paused for a moment to scrutinize, with slightly narrowed eyes, the excited face he turned to her. “How will going away improve matters?” she asked him, upon reflection.
He put out his lips, and shrugged his shoulders. “At least I shall be a free man,” he affirmed.
Unconsciously she imitated his gesture in turn: “It does not follow that a deserter is necessarily a free man.”
He pushed and winced visibly under the words, and turned away biting his lips. Then, the vexation clearing from his face, he wheeled again, and regarded her with calm gravity.
“There is no one else who could say that to me and not injure me,” he answered, simply. “But that is the characteristic of you—when you say such a thing to me, then it becomes a thing that should have been said. Yet perhaps it is not the final word, after all. Ask yourself what it is that I am deserting! Consider whether I should give up or gain something. Here in England it is possible for me to be one of two things—the conventional person of position like all the others, or the exceptional kind of being which Emanuel desires to make of me. I have been at school for half a year learning what it is that society in general expects a man in my situation to do. Now that I have learned it, frankly it makes me sick at heart. But then I have been at another school for a month, observing and studying what it is that Emanuel wishes me to undertake. We have agreed that that is not to be thought of, either. Then what am I to do?”
“But how does running away solve the difficulty?” She put the question to him with gentle persistency.
“Ah, but, you see,” he rejoined, argumentatively, “it is not alone a moral difficulty. There are practical questions, too. When I announce to Emanuel that I reject his plans for my future, then I am left to myself to be that most ridiculous of objects—a man with a great station and no money to keep it up. That is what I must be here in England. But in other countries, that will not be the case. There will always be enough money for me to live like a prince upon—so long as I travel about, in my own yacht if I like, or reside simply and happily in the beautiful places of the earth, here and there, as the fancy possesses me. Thus I can put to use the prestige of my title, when it is of advantage to do so—but only in so far as it is needful at the moment—and at the same time it does not become a burden to me in any degree. Now think carefully of this—is it not the wisest course for me?” She seemed not to pause for thought at all. “Oh, that depends upon how you define wisdom,” she replied, promptly. “There is the wisdom of the serpent, but fortunately there are many other kinds. No, I must say, you haven’t convinced me in the least. However, you mustn’t think that is of importance. You are under no obligation to convince me, surely!”
“Ah, but that is everything to me,” he insisted. “There are reasons—which I wish to explain to you.”
He could not keep a new meaning out of the glance with which he enforced this assurance. They had strolled round to Ludgate Circus, and come to a halt on the corner, with their backs turned upon a window full of droll phrenological charts and symbols. He consulted his watch once more. “I breakfasted so lightly, and so early,” he said—“it is not luncheon time quite, but that will give us a table to ourselves. You will come across with me, will you not? There are truly important things which have not been said—which I much wish to say.”
After a moment’s reflection she nodded her assent.
Christian and Frances ate their luncheon in an upper chamber, close to a kind of balcony window, which gave upon one of the city’s most crowded thoroughfares. An unceasing and uniform uproar—overridden from time to time by the superior tumult of a passing railway train on a bridge near by—rose from this indefatigable street. They had the room to themselves; the portentous din magnified the effect of the solitude in which they regarded each other, crumbling the bread on the table absent-mindedly, and waiting for the inspiration of speech.
“When I get back,” the girl said at last with a smile, “the racket of my typewriters will seem like the murmur of a gentle breeze down a leafy country lane.”
They laughed—but they had discovered it was not so hard to make oneself heard as they had supposed. Their voices intuitively found a level which served their personal needs, yet did not incommode the waiters yawning at the head of the stairway outside.
“Have you taken to the bicycle?” she was moved in sheer irrelevance to ask him. When he shook his head, she went on: “It is a wonderful thing for women. It has done more for them in three years, than all the progressive intellectual movements of civilization did in three hundred. We all use them, coming to and from the office. We have to store them down in the area, now—but I am going to find a better place.”
Christian rolled his bread crumbs into balls and stared at them in a brown study, from which this topic was powerless to arouse him.
“I wish,” he said, finally—“I wish very much that I knew how to convince you. But I seem never to produce any impression upon you. You are unyielding to the touch. It is I who get molded and kneaded about whenever I come close to you. And I don’t say that it is not for the best. Only—only now, you will not accept my own ideas of what I should do, and you will not tell me what your ideas are.”
“I am not sure that I have any ideas,” she assured him. “It is merely that, on general principles, I don’t care for the people who settle difficulties by turning tail and running away from them.”
“Very well,” he began, as if an important premise had been accepted. “But as to my special case, I have stated what must be my position if I remain in England. To me it seems that it must be impossible—intolerable. But you have some different view, evidently. That is what I beg you to explain to me. If I am to remain in England, what is it your idea that I should do?” She knitted her brows a little, and took time to her reply. “You seem to think so entirely of yourself,” she said, slowly, “it is very hard to know what to say to you. I cannot put myself, you see, so completely in your place, as you are always able to do.” He opened his eyes wide, and informed their gaze with a surprised reproach. “There you are surely unjust to me,” he urged, pleadingly. “I do not know anyone who thinks more about other people than I do. One hesitates to say these things about oneself—but truly you are mistaken in this matter. In fact, I wonder sometimes if it is not a fault, a weakness in my nature, that I am so readily moved by the sufferings and wrongs of unhappy people. Whenever I see injustice, I am beside myself with a passion to set it right. I grow almost sick with indignation, and pity, when these things come before me. Last night, for example, at the Empire——”
Christian stopped abruptly, with the sudden consciousness that the ground was not clear before him. He saw that he was entirely without a clue as to what his companion’s views on the subject might be. That was her peculiarity: he knew concerning her thoughts and inclinations only what she chose to reveal to him. It was beyond his power to predict what her attitude would be on any new topic. Looking at her thoughtful, serene-eyed face, it decidedly seemed to him that the Empire, as an ethical problem, might with advantage be passed by. He hesitated for a moment, in the friendly shelter of the street noise, and then gave another termination to his speech: “It puzzles me that you should have that view of my temperament.”
“Ah, that is just it—you have put the word into my mouth. It is ‘temperament’ that you are thinking of—and about that you are perfectly right. Your temperament is as open to the impulses of the moment—kindly, generous, compassionate and all that—as a flower is to the bees. But character is another matter. What good do your fine momentary sentiments, these rapid noble emotions of yours, do you or anybody else? You experience them—and forget them. The only thing that abides permanently with you is consideration for your own personal affairs.”
“This is all very unjust,” he said, disconsolately. “I come to you for solace and friendship, and you turn upon me with beak and claws.” He sighed, with the beginning of tears in his bright eyes, as he added: “There is more reason than ever, it seems to me, why I should go away from England! It is not kind to me!”
His doleful tone and mien drove her to swift repentance. “Oh, I have only been saying the disagreeable things first, to get them out of the way,” she sought to reassure him. “There isn’t another unpleasant word for you to hear, not one, I promise you.”
“It is my opinion that there have been enough,” he ventured to comment, with a rueful little smile. A measure of composure returned to him. “But if they must be said, I would rather they come from you than from any one else, for I think that you have also some pleasant thoughts about me.”
She nodded her head several times in assent, regarding him with an amused twinkle in her eyes meanwhile. “Yes—the right kind of editor could make very interesting stuff indeed out of you,” she said, and smiled almost gaily at his visible failure to comprehend her figure. “What I mean is—you are too much sail, and too little boat. You drift before every new wind that blows. There is lacking that kind of balance—proportion—which gives stability. But, dear me, it is a thousand times better to be like that, than to have an excess of the other thing. The man of the solid qualities, without the imagination, simply sticks in the mud where he was born. But with you—if the right person chances to get hold of you, and brings the right influences steadily to bear upon you, then there is no telling what fine things you may not rise to.”
“You are that right person!”
He lifted his voice to utter these words, with the air of feeling them to be momentous. His eyes glowed as they reaffirmed the declaration to her inquiring glance. But she seemed to miss the gravity of both words and look.
“Oh, there you’re wrong,” she said, half jestingly. “I’m too bad tempered and quarrelsome to exert any proper influence over any one. Why, I should nag all the joy and high spirits out of you in no time at all. No—you need an equable and happy person, really very wise and strong and sensible, but above all with an easy, smooth disposition—such a person, for example, as Emanuel’s wife is described to be.”
“No—I need no one but you!” he repeated with accentuated deliberation.
This time she appeared to feel something of his intention. She looked into the gaze he was bending upon her and then withdrew her eyes precipitately, and made a show of active interest in her food.
“I am asking you to think of joining your life to mine,” he went on, in low, yet very distinct tones. “You cannot know a hundredth part as well as I do, how profoundly I need such help as you can give. You are the one woman in the world who means strength as well as happiness to me. If you could only dream with what yearning I long always to lean upon you—to be supported by your fine, calm, sweet wisdom! To be upheld by you—to be nourished and guided by you—oh, that is the vision which I tremble with joy to think of! I am my own master for the first time to-day—I have taken my life into my own hands—and I lay it at your feet—dear lady—at your feet.”
She rose abruptly while his last words were in the air, and turning, moved to the window. She had contrived by a gesture to bid him not to follow, and he could only gaze in mingled apprehension and hope at her back, the while she stood professing to scrutinize the shifting throng below.
The waiter brought in another dish, methodically rearranged the plates and went away again. To Christian’s bitter disgust, two men entered and took seats at a table at the other end of the small room—and still she did not turn. He meditated calling her, or joining her on the pretense of announcing the cutlets—and only stared in nervous excitement instead.
Then, as suddenly as she had left him she returned, and resumed her chair as if nothing unusual had happened. His strenuous gaze swept her face for tokens of her mood—of her inclination or decision—but beyond a spot of vivid red on each smooth cheek, there was no sign of any sort. Her frank, calm gray eyes met his with unruffled directness; they had in them that suggestion of benignant tolerance which he had discerned there more than once before.
“You do not answer me!” he pleaded, after a few mouthfuls. As his back shielded the action from the strangers, he put forth a cautious hand to touch the nearest of hers, but she drew it gently away beyond his reach. They automatically adjusted their voices to the conditions created by the newcomers.
“There could be only one possible answer,” she told him, softly, almost tenderly. “It is a very flattering dream—? to me—but it is a mere empty dream, none the less. I hope you will not want to talk about it any more.”
“But I swear that it is not empty at all!” he urged, in earnest tones. “Who has a right to say that it is a dream? I am my own master—so are you. We are of age—we are intelligent people. I deliberately come to you, and say to you that you are the one woman on earth whom I desire with all my heart for my wife. I open my mind to you. There is only the image of you inside it. You know my sincerity. You must feel how supreme is the place you have in my thoughts. It is the logical end toward which I have been walking ever since I first saw you! You are all that there is of true friendship, of true womanhood, for me! I put out my hands to you, I pray to you! And why will you not come to me, dear, dear Frank?” There was a touch of pathos in the smile she gave him. “It isn’t the least bit of good, I assure you,” she made answer, in the confidential murmur that was necessary. “One can’t talk here—but please let us speak of something else. Or can we not go now?” He went on as if she had not spoken, his big, dark eyes challenging hers to an encounter which she evaded. “Do not think we need go away from England, if you want to stay; there will always be money enough—with your wisdom in controlling it. Perhaps we may even be able to restore Caermere. But if we are not, still it can be one of the noblest and most beautiful residences in England, when we learn together to understand its charm, and make it our home. Oh, when you see the magnificent hills and forests shutting it in on all sides—and the grim, fine old walls and towers of the castle itself! But there we need live only when we choose to do so—and whenever the mood comes to us, off we can roam to the Alps or Algiers, or the wonderful India which one always dreams of. And we shall sail in our own yacht and you shall be the queen there, as everywhere else. And all our lives we will spend in doing good to others: do you not see what extraordinary opportunities for helping those who need help you will have? Where now you are of service to one person, then you can assist a hundred! An army of grateful people will give thanks because of you—and I will always be the chief of them—your foremost slave, your most reverent worshiper! And then—think of the joy of a life in which no one has a share who is not pleasant and welcome to us! We will have no one near us who is not our friend. Oh, I have not told you: that is why, this very morning, I decided to leave it all, and to make a new life for myself, and to spend it wholly with my real friends. It is loneliness, heart and soul loneliness, that has driven me to revolt. And in my despair I come to you—and I say to you that it is friendship that I cannot live without, and you are my oldest friend, my dearest, truest, most precious friend, and I beg you to come with me and we will go through the world together, hand in hand——”
She interrupted him by pushing back her chair and half rising. “If you will excuse me now,” she said, nervously, “I think I must go. You mustn’t trouble to come—I will say good-bye here.”
He had risen as well, and now in trembling earnestness protested against her proposal. At the risk of attracting the attention of the strangers, he displayed such resentful opposition that she yielded. The waiter was summoned—and remained bowing in dazed meditation upon the magnitude of the change he had been bidden to keep for himself, after they had passed out and down the staircase.
She led the way at a hurried pace back across the Circus and to Blackfriars. At the rounded beginning of the Embankment she paused, and for the first time spoke. “Really I would rather go back by myself,” she told him. “It is only unhappiness to both of us—what you insist on talking about.”
“But I do not think it is to be treated in this way,” he declared with dignity. “If we speak of nothing else it is the highest and most solemn honor that a man can pay to any woman, that I have paid to you. I have the feeling that it should be more courteously dealt with.”
“Yes, I know,” she admitted, nodding her ready compunction. She tightened her lips and looked away from him toward the bridge, her brows drawn together in troubled lines. “I don’t say the right thing to you—I know that better even than you do. You must not think I fail to appreciate it all—the honor, and the immense confidence, and all the rest of it. But when I have said that much—then I don’t know in the least how to say the rest. Why can’t we leave it unsaid altogether? I assure you, in all seriousness, that it can’t be—and mayn’t we leave it like that? Please!”
He regarded her with a patient yet proud sadness, waiting to speak till she had turned, and his glance caught hers. “I do not wish to become a nuisance to you,” he said, his voice choking a little, “but I think it would be better if you said everything to me. Then I shall not put my mind on the rack, to try and imagine your reasons.” He let his lip curl with a lingering ironical perception of the fantastic with which his tragedy was veined. “It is very sweet,” he went on—“your consideration for my feelings. But I have heard so many plain truths to-day, I think my sensibilities are in good training now—they will not suffer for a few more.” Suddenly, as if the sound of his voice had unnerved him, he seized her arm, and confronted her surprised gaze with a reddened and scowling face. “What are you afraid of?” he demanded hoarsely. “Why not say it? I heard it only last night! It is forty years old, it is true, but they have wonderful memories in England. You are the one whom I have held to be my dearest friend—but go on! Say it to me! A little thing like friendship does not prevent you from thinking it! Why, then, you should have the courage to speak it out!”
Dimly, while she stared in his distracted countenance, the meaning, of the wild talk dawned upon her. With a startled exclamation, she dragged her arm from his clutch, and drew back a step. Trembling in her agitation, her gray eyes distended themselves out of all likeness to their tranquil habit.
“Oh-h-h!” she murmured in dismay at him, and wrung her hands. “Oh-h! Stop! Stop! That is too horrible for you to think!”
Gaining coherence of thought and purpose, she moved impulsively to him, and in turn clasped her hand upon his arm. “Put that out of your mind!” she adjured him. “I could not look anybody in the face if you thoughtthatof me. Oh, it is too terrible of you! How could you suppose that I could harbor such a thought? To blame you for something years before you were born!—to throw it into your face. Andmeof all people! Why, I have cried to myself at remembering what you said about your father when we first met—how your little-boy memory clung affectionately to the soldier-figure of him in the door-way! Look at me—I cry now to think of it! Why, it is the one thing about you that is sacred to me!—the one thing that you are perfect in—and then you imagine that I am capable of insulting you about it! Oh, heavens, why wouldn’t you leave me when I told you to?”
She threw his arm from her in a gust of physical impatience, but the glance with which, on the instant, she corrected this demonstration, was full of honest compassion. He groveled before this benign gaze, with bowed head and outstretched, pleading hands.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” he groaned, brokenly. “I could not—at all—know what it was I said. I am too unhappy!”
“Well,” she began, with a vehement effort at calmness, “let us say good-bye here. There are some Germans watching us from the hotel windows. Or it is better perhaps—will you walk on past the school?” As they moved forward, she recovered more of her self-possession. “I hope you will be able to remember something pleasant out of our morning,” she said, and with a joyless laugh added, “but for the life of me, I don’t know what it can be. Or yes, you can remember when you woke up, and I stood and scolded you, from above the flowers. I pretended to bully you, but really all the while I was thinking how sweet of you the entire thing was. And later, too—oh, there were several intervals in which I behaved civilly to you for whole minutes at a time.”
He looked wistfully at her. Beneath the forced playfulness of her tone it seemed to him that something hopeful sounded. “Ah, dear friend,” he murmured, drawing close to her—“think!—think tenderly in my behalf! Ask yourself—your kindest self—if I must be really driven away. Why is it that I may not stay? I plead with you as if it were for my life—and is it not indeed for my life?—my very life?”
“No—Christian,” she said, gravely, “it is not your life, nor anything like your life. You give big labels to your emotions, but in good time you will see that the things themselves are not so big, or so vital. And you mustn’t yield so readily to all these impulses to mope and despair and to think yourself ill used. You must try to make for yourself a thicker skin—and to view things more calmly. And I don’t want you to go away thinking hard things of me. Is it true that I always nag you—there is something in you which calls out all the bully in me—but I wish you would think of me as your friend. It gives me great pleasure when you speak of me as your oldest friend in England—for I have always liked you, and I am interested in you, and—”
“And why will you not marry me?” He interposed the question bluntly, and with a directness which gave it the effect of an obstacle in her path, isolated but impassable.
She halted, and studied the pavement in consideration of her reply. When she looked up, it was with the veiled elation of a disputant who has his counter-stroke well in hand. “You said to-day that you had become your own master, and that you were a free man, with your life in your own hands. Very well. I also am my own master, and I am a free woman. My life is exclusively my own personal property, to live as I choose to live it. I value my liberty quite as highly as if I were a man. It does not suit me to merge any part of it in something else. There could be many other reasons given, no doubt, but they would be merely individual variations of this one chief reason—that I am a free woman, and intend to remain a free woman. I know what I want to do in the world, and I am going to try to do it, always my own way, always my own master.”
He regarded her thoughtfully, bowing his head in token of comprehension. “But if——” he began, and then checked himself, with a gesture of pained submission.
“There are no ‘ifs,’” she said, with resolute calmness, and held out her hand to him. Her control of the situation was undisputed. “We say good-bye, now—and we are friends—good friends. I—I thank you—for everything!”
He stood looking at her as she walked away—a sedately graceful figure, erect and light of step, receding from him under the pallid green shelter of the young trees. Musingly, he held up the hand which still preserved the sense of that farewell contact with hers—and upon a sudden impulse put it to his lips and kissed it. Something in the action wrought an instantaneous change in his thoughts. All at once it was apparent to him that many things which should have been said to her he had left unsaid. In truth, it seemed upon reflection that he had said and done everything wrong. The notion of running after her flamed up in him for a moment. She was still in sight—he could distinguish her in the distance, stopping to buy a paper from a boy near the Temple station. But then the memory of her unanswerable, irrevocable “No” swept back upon him—and with a long sigh he turned and strode in the other direction.
Frances, hastening mechanically toward her office, found relief from the oppressive confusion of her thoughts in the fortuitous spectacle of two small newsboys fighting in the gutter just at the end of the Temple Gardens. For the first time in her life, the sight aroused nothing within her save a pleased if unscientific interest. She paused, and almost smilingly observed the contest. She found something amusingly grotesque in the pseudo-Titanic rage on these baby faces. The dramatic fury of the embattled infants was in such ridiculous disproportion to the feather-weight blows they exchanged! She found herself chuckling aloud at some incongruous comparison which rose in her mind.
Then, as the combatants parted, apparently for no better reason than the general volatility of youth, she remembered that she had it in mind to look at the “Star.” One of her friends, Mary Leach, had sent to that paper some days before an article on “Shopgirls’ Dormitories,” and she was interested in watching for its appearance. It happened that one of the boys had a “Star.” Acting upon some obscure whim, she gave them each a penny, quite in the manner of a distributor of prizes for conspicuous merit—and grinned to herself at the thought when she had turned her back on them and moved on.
There was no sign of what she sought on the front page. Opening the sheet, her eye fell, as it were, upon a news paragraph in a middle column:
“Death of the Oldest Duke.—The Shrewsbury correspondent of the ‘Exchange Telegraph’ announces the death at Caermere Castle, at an early hour this morning, of the Duke of Glastonbury. His Grace, who was in his ninetieth year, had until last summer enjoyed the most vigorous health, and only now succumbs to the prostration then occasioned by the group of domestic bereavements which at the time created such a sensation. The deceased nobleman, who for the great part of his prolonged life, was one of the best known sportsmen in Shropshire, succeeded his father as eighth duke in his minority, and had been in possession of the title for no less than seventeen years when Her Majesty ascended the throne, thus constituting a record which is believed to be without parallel in the annals of the peerage. His successor is stated by Whitaker’s Almanac to be his grandson, Mr. Christian Tower, but the current editions of Burke, Debrett and others do not mention this gentleman, whose claims, it would appear, have but recently been admitted by the family.”
Frances read it all, as she stood at the corner, with a curious sense of mental sluggishness. Her attention failing to follow one of the sentences, she went back, and laboriously traced its entire tortuous course, only to find that it meant no more than it had at first.
It seemed a long time before she connected the intelligence on the printed page with the realities of actual life. Then she turned swiftly, and strained her eyes in the wild hope of discovering Christian still on the Embankment. She even took a few hurried steps, as if to follow and overtake him—but stopped short, confronted by the utter futility of such an enterprise.
Then, walking slowly, her mind a maze of wondering thoughts, she went her way.