"For twenty-five years," he went on, "that dear woman has lived on her
love for me. It has coloured her whole life. I know what I know. It has
been her support in all the endless years she nursed that cruel old
egoist her father, who would not let her marry me, when we _could_ have
married, seventeen years ago. But it is not _me_ that she wants now,
though she did want me for many years; it is the thought of me--if you
can't understand without my saying it, I can't make you--it's her
romance which is important to her, and which I want her to keep, at all
costs."
"My darling Emmy," he said, and there were tears in his hawk eyes, "the
most unselfish and devoted, the sweetest, the humblest, and the most
beautiful creature I have ever known. And she has given up everything
out of constancy to me, home, children, everything; no, not for me
exactly, but for a dream, for an ideal, for something of which I was to
her the symbol, but which I no more resemble than I resemble that frond
of bracken."
He turned his face away.
"It would have been all right if they would have let us marry when we
were both still young, and I had got a home together," he went on; "but
now it would be inhuman to root her out of her little home and drag her
across the world, and try to transplant her into my rough place. How
rough it is I see, now that I have been back in England. I did not know
it was so uncouth when I lived in it. It's the only life I'm accustomed
to, the only life I'm fit for now, though it was sorely against the
grain at first. I don't think I could have stuck to it, except for the
hope of marrying her some day. But I see now the only life I'm fit for
is not fit for her. And I can't give it up. I can't desert my poor old
uncle, who is growing infirm and depends on me entirely."
"Why did you come back?" I groaned.
"I came back," he said, "because I have cared for her and worked for her
all my life. And because I heard that her beast of a father had left her
almost penniless, and that fat Tom had married and turned her out. And
until I saw her again from day to day I did not realise the nature of
her feeling for me. I came back to offer her what I had, not that it
was much, hoping to marry her and take her back with me.... But that is
not what would make my Emmy happy _now_. What she needs is to go on in
this perfect little doll's house, this little haven, thinking of me, and
praying for me, and tending her flowers, and mourning like a dove in its
tree because we are parted."
It was exactly what Aunt Emmy needed. I could not have put it into
words, but this strange man had done so.
"You will not speak," he said, "but you agree with me for all that. I
had to make sure you agreed. Your confirmation is all I wanted, and now
I have it."
It was not that I would not speak. I could not speak. I was thinking of
the room in that horrid wooden house which he had built for her.
After a few minutes he went on quietly:
"I think the thing for me to do is to be ruined, only partially, of
course, not enough to make her miserable, and to hurry back to Australia
without her at once for the time being, and from there to write
regularly by every mail, nice letters (they cannot be forbidden now);
but never to come back any more. A bank has just failed in Australia in
which I had money. The situation can be arranged."