"You see, I haven't been able to help it. He's loomed up so tremendously
above everything--"
"And every one."
"Yes," she admitted, with apologetic frankness, "and every one--that is,
in the past few days--that it's as if I couldn't see anything but him."
"Oh, I'm not jealous," he exclaimed, pacing up and down the length of
the room.
"Of course not," she agreed, seating herself in one of the
straight-backed chairs. Her clasped hands rested on the small round
table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to
the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.
Ashley, who had flung his panama on a sofa, continued to pace up and
down the room, his head bent and his fingers clasped tightly under his
jacket behind his back. He moved jerkily, like a man preserving outward
self-control in spite of extreme nervous tension.
He listened almost without interruption while she gave him a precise
account of Davenant's intervention in her father's troubles. She spared
no detail of her own opposition and eventual capitulation. She spoke
simply and easily, as though repeating something learned by heart, just
as she had narrated the story of Guion's defaulting in the morning.
Apart from the fact that she toyed with a paper-knife lying on the
table, she sat rigidly still, her eyes never wandering from the line of
autumn flowers on the far side of the lawn.
"So you see," she concluded, in her quiet voice, "I came to understand
that it was a choice between taking it from him and taking it from the
poor women papa had ruined; and I thought that as he was young--and
strong--and a man--he'd be better able to bear it. That was the reason."
He came to a standstill on the other side of the table, where he could
see her in profile.
"You're extraordinary, by Jove!" he muttered. "You're not a bit like
what you look. You look so fragile and tender; and yet you could have
let that old man--"
"I could only have done it if it was right. Nothing that's right is very
hard, you know."
"And what about the suffering?"
She half smiled, faintly shrugging her shoulders. "Don't you think we
make more of suffering than there's any need for? Suffering is nothing
much--except, I suppose, the suffering that comes from want. That's
tragic. But physical pain--and the things we call trials--are nothing so
terrible if you know the right way to bear them."
The abstract question didn't interest him. He resumed his restless
pacing.
"So," he began again, in his tone of conducting a court-martial--"so you
refused the money in the first place, because you thought the fellow was
trying to get you into his power. Have you had any reason to change your
opinion since?"
"None, except that he makes no effort to do it."
He stopped again beside the table. "And do you suppose he would? When
you've prepared your ambush cleverly enough you don't have to go out and
drag your victim into it. You've only to lie still and he'll walk in of
his own accord."
"Of course I see that."
"Well, what then?"
She threw him a glance over her shoulder. To do so it was necessary for
her to turn her head both sidewise and upward, so that he got the
exquisite lines of the neck and profile, the mysterious gray-green tint
of the eyes, and the coppery gleam of her hair. The appeal to his senses
and to something beyond his senses made him gasp. It made him tremble.
"My God, what a wife for _me_!" he was saying to himself. "She's got the
pluck of a Jeanne d'Arc and the nerve of a Christian martyr."
"Well, then," she said, in answer to his words--"then I don't have to
walk into the ambush--unless I want to."
"Does that mean that there are conceivable conditions in which you might
want to?"
She turned completely round in her chair. Both hands, with fingers
interlaced, rested on the table as she looked up at him.
"I shall have to let you find your own reply to that."
"But you know he's in love with you."
"I know he was in love with me once. I've no absolute reason to think
that he is so still."
"But supposing he was? Would it make any difference to you?"
"Would it make any difference to _you?_"
"It would make the difference--"
He stopped in confusion. While he was not clear as to what he was going
to say, he was startled by the possibilities before him. The one thing
plain was that her question, simple as it seemed, gave an entirely new
turn to the conversation. It called on him to take the lead, and put
him, neatly and skilfully, in the one place of all others which--had he
descried it in advance--he would have been eager to avoid. Would it make
any difference to him? What difference _could_ it make? What difference
_must_ it make?
It was one of those moments which occur from time to time when a man of
honor must speak first and reflect afterward--just as at the heights of
Dargal he had had to risk his life for Private Vickerson's, without
debating as to which of them, in the general economy of lives, could the
more easily be spared.
"It would make the difference--"
He stopped again. It was a great deal to say. Once he had said it there
could be no reconsideration. Reconsideration would be worse than not
saying it at all, on the principle that not to stand by one's guns might
be a greater cowardice than not to mount them. Fear, destruction, and
the pit might come upon him; the service, the country, Heneage, home,
honors, ambitions, promotions, high posts of command, all might be swept
into the abyss, and yet one imperative duty would survive the wreck, the
duty to be Rupert Ashley at his finest. The eyes of England were on him.
There was always that conviction, that incentive. Let his heroism be
never so secret, sooner or later those eyes would find him out.
He was silent so long that she asked, not impatiently: "It would make
what difference, Rupert?"
It was clear that she had no idea as to what was passing in his mind.
There had been an instant--just an instant--no more--when he had almost
doubted her, when her strategy in putting him where he was had seemed
too deft to be the result of chance. But, with her pure face turned
upward and her honest eyes on his, that suspicion couldn't last.
"It would make the difference--"
If he paused again, it was only because his throat swelled with a
choking sensation that made it difficult to speak; he felt, too, that
his face was congested. Nevertheless the space, which was not longer
than a few seconds by the clock, gave him time to remember that as his
mother's and his sisters' incomes were inalienable he was by so much
the more free. He was by so much the more free to do the mad, romantic,
quixotic thing, which might seem to be a contradiction of his past, but
was not so much a contradiction of _himself_ as people who knew him
imperfectly might suppose. He was taken to be ambitious, calculating,
shrewd; when all the while he knew himself to be--as most Englishmen are
at heart--quixotic, romantic, and even a little mad, when madness can be
sublime.
He was able at last to get his sentence out.
"It would make the difference that ... before we are married ... or
after ... probably after ... I should have to square him."
"Square him?" She echoed the words as though she had no idea what they
meant.
"I'm worth ... I _must_ be worth ... a hundred thousand pounds ...
perhaps more."
"Oh, you mean, square him in that way."
"I must be a man of honor before everything, by Jove!"
"You couldn't be anything else. You don't need to go to extremes like
that to prove it."
Her lack of emotion, of glad enthusiasm, chilled him. She even ceased to
look at him, turning her profile toward him and gazing again
abstractedly across the lawn. A sudden fear took hold of him, the fear
that his hesitations, his evident difficulty in getting the thing out,
had enabled her to follow the processes by which he whipped himself up
to an act that should have been spontaneous. He had a suspicion, too,
that in this respect he had fallen short of the American--the cowboy,
as he had called him. "I must do better than him," he said, in his
English idiom. The thought that he might not have done as well was
rather sickening. If he had so failed it was through inadvertence, but
the effect on Olivia would be as great as if it was from fear. To
counteract it he felt the need of being more emphatic. His emphasis took
the form of simple common sense.
"It isn't going to extremes to take up one's own responsibilities. I
can't let a fellow like that do things for your father any more than for
mine, by Jove! It's not only doing things for my father, but for--my
wife."
Drawing up a small chair, he sat down on the other side of the table. He
sat down with the air of a man who means to stay and take possession.
"Oh, but I'm not your wife, Rupert."
"You're my wife already," he declared, "to all intents and purposes.
We've published our intention to become man and wife to the world.
Neither of us can go back on that. The mere fact that certain words
haven't been mumbled over us is secondary. For everything that
constitutes duty I'm your husband now."
"Oh no, you're not. You're the noblest man in the world, Rupert. I never
dreamed that there could be any one like you. But I couldn't let you--I
couldn't--"
He crushed her hands in both of his own, leaning toward her across the
table. "Oh, my darling, if you only knew how easy it is--"
"No, it isn't easy. It can't be easy. I couldn't let you do it for me--"
"But what about _him?_ You let--_him!_"
"Oh, but that's different."
"How is it different?"
"I don't know, Rupert; but it is. Or rather," she went on, rapidly, "I
do know, but I can't explain. If you were an American you'd understand
it."
"Oh, American--be blowed!" The accent was all tenderness, the protest
all beseeching.
"I can't explain it," she hurried on, "because you don't understand us.
It's one of the ways in which an Englishman never _can_ understand us.
But the truth is that money doesn't mean as much to us as it does to
you. I know you think the contrary, but that's where you make your
primary mistake. It's light come and light go with most of us, for the
simple reason that money is outside our real life; whereas with you
English it's the warp and woof of it."
"Oh, bosh, darling!"
"No, it isn't bosh. In your civilization it's as the blood; in ours it's
only as the clothing. That's something like the difference. In accepting
it from Peter Davenant--which is hard enough!--I take only what he can
do without; whereas--"
"I can do without it, too."
"Whereas," she persisted, "if I were to let you do this I should be
robbing you of the essence of what you are."
He drew back slightly. "You mean that your Yankee is a strong man, while
I'm--"
"I don't mean anything invidious or unkind. But isn't it self-evident,
or nearly, that we're individuals, while you're parts of an intricate
social system? The minute you fall out of your place in the system you
come to grief; but vicissitudes don't affect us much more than a change
of coats."
"I don't care a button for my place in the system."
"But I do. I care for it _for_ you. I should have married you and shared
it if I could. But I'd rather not marry you than that you should lose
it."
"That is," he said, coldly, "you'd rather use _his_ money than--"
She withdrew her hands, her brows contracting and her eyes clouding in
her effort to make him understand the position from her point of view.
"You see, it's this way. For one thing, we've taken the money already.
That's past. We may have taken it temporarily, or for good and all, as
things turn out; but in any case it's done. And yet even if it weren't
done it would be easier for us to draw on him rather than on you,
because he's one of ourselves."
"One of yourselves? I thought that's just what he wasn't. I thought he
was a jolly outsider."
"You mean socially. But that again hasn't much significance in a country
where socially we're all of one class. Where there's only one class
there can't be any outsiders."
"Oh, that's all very fine. But look at you with your extremes of rich
and poor!"
"That's the most superficial difference among us. It's the easiest
possible thing to transcend. I'm transcending it now in feeling that
I've a right--yes, a kind of right--to take Peter Davenant's money,
because as Americans we've a claim on each other."
He threw himself against the straight back of the chair, his arms flung
out with a gesture that brought his hands nearly to the floor. "You're
the last people in the world to feel anything of the kind. Every one
knows that you're a set of ruthless, predatory--"
"I know that's the way it seems; and I'm not defending anything that may
be wrong. And yet, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we
_have_ a sense of brotherhood--I don't know any other name for it--among
ourselves which isn't to be found anywhere else in the world. You
English haven't got it. That's why the thing I'm saying seems mere
sentiment to you, and even mawkish. You're so afraid of sentiment. But
it's true. It may be only a rudimentary sense of brotherhood; and it's
certainly not universal, as it ought to be, because we feel it only
among ourselves. We don't really include the foreigner--not at least
till he becomes one of us. I'm an instance of that limitation myself,
because I can't feel it toward you, and I do--"
"You do feel it toward the big chap," he said, scornfully.
She made a renewed effort to explain herself. "You see, it's something
like this. If my aunt de Melcourt, who's very well off, were to come
forward and help us, I'd let her do it without scruple. Not that there's
any particular reason why she should! But if she did--well, you can see
for yourself that it wouldn't be as if she were a stranger."
"Of course! She's one of your own people--and all that."
"Well, he's one of our own people--Mr. Davenant. Not to the degree that
she is--but the same sort of thing--even if more distant. It's very
distant, I admit--"