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 thought
_that_ of 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. And _me_ of 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.