Hinkle came back in the afternoon to make a hopeful report of his failure
to learn anything more of Belsky, but Gregory did not come with him. He
came the next morning long before Clementina expected visitors, and he
was walking nervously up and down the room when she appeared. As if he
could not speak, he held toward her without speaking a telegram in
English, dated that day in Rome:
"Deny report of my death. Have written.
"Belsky."
She looked up at Gregory from the paper, when she had read it, with
joyful eyes. "Oh, I am so glad for you! I am so glad he is alive."
He took the dispatch from her hand. "I brought it to you as soon as it
came."
"Yes, yes! Of cou'se!"
"I must go now and do what he says--I don't know how yet." He stopped,
and then went on from a different impulse. "Clementina, it isn't a
question now of that wretch's life and death, and I wish I need never
speak of him again. But what he told you was true." He looked steadfastly
at her, and she realized how handsome he was, and how well dressed. His
thick red hair seemed to have grown darker above his forehead; his
moustache was heavier, and it curved in at the corners of his mouth; he
bore himself with a sort of self-disdain that enhanced his splendor. "I
have never changed toward you; I don't say it to make favor with you; I
don't expect to do that now; but it is true. That night, there at
Middlemount, I tried to take back what I said, because I believed that I
ought."
"Oh, yes, I knew that," said Clementina, in the pause he made.
"We were both too young; I had no prospect in life; I saw, the instant
after I had spoken, that I had no right to let you promise anything. I
tried to forget you; I couldn't. I tried to make you forget me." He
faltered, and she did not speak, but her head drooped a little. "I won't
ask how far I succeeded. I always hoped that the time would come when I
could speak to you again. When I heard from Fane that you were at
Woodlake, I wished to come out and see you, but I hadn't the courage, I
hadn't the right. I've had to come to you without either, now. Did he
speak to you about me?"
"I thought he was beginning to, once; but he neva did."
"It didn't matter; it could only have made bad worse. It can't help me to
say that somehow I was wishing and trying to do what was right; but I
was."
"Oh, I know that, Mr. Gregory," said Clementina, generously.
"Then you didn't doubt me, in spite of all?"
"I thought you would know what to do. No, I didn't doubt you, exactly."
"I didn't deserve your trust!" he cried. "How came that man to mention
me?" he demanded, abruptly, after a moment's silence.
"Mr. Belsky? It was the first night I saw him, and we were talking about
Americans, and he began to tell me about an American friend of his, who
was very conscientious. I thought it must be you the fust moment," said
Clementina, smiling with an impersonal pleasure in the fact.
"From the conscientiousness?" he asked, in bitter self-irony.
"Why, yes," she returned, simply. "That was what made me think of you.
And the last time when he began to talk about you, I couldn't stop him,
although I knew he had no right to."
"He had no right. But I gave him the power to do it! He meant no harm,
but I enabled him to do all the harm."
"Oh, if he's only alive, now, there is no harm!"
He looked into her eyes with a misgiving from which he burst impetuously.
"Then you do care for me still, after all that I have done to make you
detest me?" He started toward her, but she shrank back.
"I didn't mean that," she hesitated.
"You know that I love you,--that I have always loved you?"
"Yes," she assented. "But you might be sorry again that you had said it."
It sounded like coquetry, but he knew it was not coquetry.
"Never! I've wished to say it again, ever since that night at
Middlemount; I have always felt bound by what I said then, though I took
back my words for your sake. But the promise was always there, and my
life was in it. You believe that?"
"Why, I always believed what you said, Mr. Gregory."
"Well?"
Clementina paused, with her head seriously on one side. "I should want to
think about it before I said anything."
"You are right," he submitted, dropping his outstretched arms to his
side. "I have been thinking only of myself, as usual."
"No," she protested, compassionately. "But doesn't it seem as if we ought
to be su'a, this time? I did ca'e for you then, but I was very young, and
I don't know yet--I thought I had always felt just as you did, but
now--Don't you think we had both betta wait a little while till we ah'
moa suttain?"
They stood looking at each other, and he said, with a kind of passionate
self-denial, "Yes, think it over for me, too. I will come back, if you
will let me."
"Oh, thank you!" she cried after him, gratefully, as if his forbearance
were the greatest favor.
When he was gone she tried to release herself from the kind of abeyance
in which she seemed to have gone back and been as subject to him as in
the first days when he had awed her and charmed her with his superiority
at Middlemount, and he again older and freer as she had grown since.
He came back late in the afternoon, looking jaded and distraught. Hinkle,
who looked neither, was with him. "Well," he began, "this is the greatest
thing in my experience. Belsky's not only alive and well, but Mr. Gregory
and I are both at large. I did think, one time, that the police would
take us into custody on account of our morbid interest in the thing, and
I don't believe we should have got off, if the Consul hadn't gone bail
for us, so to speak. I thought we had better take the Consul in, on our
way, and it was lucky we did."
Clementina did not understand all the implications, but she was willing
to take Mr. Hinkle's fun on trust. "I don't believe you'll convince Mrs.
Landa that Mr. Belsky's alive and well, till you bring him back to say
so."
"Is that so!" said Hinkle. "Well, we must have him brought back by the
authorities, then. Perhaps they'll bring him, anyway. They can't try him
for suicide, but as I understand the police, here, a man can't lose his
hat over a bridge in Florence with impunity, especially in a time of high
water. Anyway, they're identifying Belsky by due process of law in Rome,
now, and I guess Mr. Gregory"--he nodded toward Gregory, who sat silent
and absent "will be kept under surveillance till the whole mystery is
cleared up."
Clementina responded gayly still, but with less and less sincerity, and
she let Hinkle go at last with the feeling that he knew she wished him to
go. He made a brave show of not seeing this, and when he was gone, she
remembered that she had not thanked him for the trouble he had taken on
her account, and her heart ached after him with a sense of his sweetness
and goodness, which she had felt from the first through his quaint
drolling. It was as if the door which closed upon him shut her out of the
life she had been living of late, and into the life of the past where she
was subject again to the spell of Gregory's mood; it was hardly his will.
He began at once: "I wished to make you say something this morning that I
have no right to hear you say, yet; and I have been trying ever since to
think how I could ask you whether you could share my life with me, and
yet not ask you to do it. But I can't do anything without knowing--You
may not care for what my life is to be, at all!"
Clementina's head drooped a little, but she answered distinctly, "I do
ca'e, Mr. Gregory."
"Thank you for that much; I don't count upon more than you have said.
Clementina, I am going to be a missionary. I think I shall ask to be sent
to China; I've not decided yet. My life will be hard; it will be full of
danger and privation; it will be exile. You will have to think of sharing
such a life if you think--"
He stopped; the time had come for her to speak, and she said, "I knew you
wanted to be a missionary--"
"And--and--you would go with me? You would"--He started toward her, and
she did not shrink from him, now; but he checked himself. "But you
mustn't, you know, for my sake."
"I don't believe I quite undastand," she faltered.
"You must not do it for me, but for what makes me do it. Without that our
life, our work, could have no consecration."
She gazed at him in patient, faintly smiling bewilderment, as if it were
something he would unriddle for her when he chose.
"We mustn't err in this; it would be worse than error; it would be sin."
He took a turn about the room, and then stopped before her. "Will
you--will you join me in a prayer for guidance, Clementina?"
"I--I don't know," she hesitated. "I will, but--do you think I had
betta?"
He began, "Why, surely"--After a moment he asked gravely, "You believe
that our actions will be guided aright, if we seek help?"
"Oh, yes--yes--"
"And that if we do not, we shall stumble in our ignorance?"
"I don't know. I never thought of that."
"Never thought of it--"
"We never did it in our family. Father always said that if we really
wanted to do right we could find the way." Gregory looked daunted, and
then he frowned darkly. "Are you provoked with me? Do you think what I
have said is wrong?"
"No, no! You must say what you believe. It would be double hypocrisy in
me if I prevented you."
"But I would do it, if you wanted me to," she said.
"Oh, for me, for ME!" he protested. "I will try to tell you what I mean,
and why you must not, for that very reason." But he had to speak of
himself, of the miracle of finding her again by the means which should
have lost her to him forever; and of the significance of this. Then it
appeared to him that he could not reject such a leading without error,
without sin. "Such a thing could not have merely happened."
It seemed so to Clementina, too; she eagerly consented that this was
something they must think of, as well. But the light waned, the dark
thickened in the room before he left her to do so. Then he said
fervently, "We must not doubt that everything will come right," and his
words seemed an effect of inspiration to them both.