A week was gone since Helen had given her consent to Franklin, and again
she was in her little sitting-room and again waiting, though not for
Franklin. Franklin had been with her all the morning; and he had been
constantly with her through the week, and she had found the closer
companionship, until to-day, strangely easy. Franklin's very lacks
endeared him to her. It was wonderful to see any one so devoid of any
glamour, of any adventitious aid from nature, who yet so beamed. This
beaming quality was, for Helen, his chief characteristic. There was
certainly no brilliancy in Franklin's light; it was hardly a ray and it
emitted never a sparkle; but it was a mild, diffused effulgence, and she
always felt more peaceful and restored for coming within its radius.
It had wrapped her around all the week, and it had remained so unchanged
that their relation, too, had seemed unchanged and her friend only a
little nearer, a little more solicitous. They had gone about together;
they had taken walks in the parks; they had made plans while strolling
beside the banks of the Serpentine or leaning on the bridge in St.
James's Park, to watch the ducks being fed. Already she and Franklin and
the deeply triumphant Aunt Grizel had gone on a journey down to the
country to look at a beautiful old house in order to see if it would do
as one of Helen's 'establishments.' Already Franklin had brought her a
milky string of perfect pearls, saying mildly, as he had said of the box
of sweets, 'I don't approve of them, but I hope you do.' And on her
finger was Franklin's ring, a noble emerald that they had selected
together.
Helen had been pleased to feel in herself a capacity for satisfaction in
these possessions, actual and potential. She liked to look at the great
blot of green on her hand and to see the string of pearls sliding to her
waist. She liked to ponder on the Jacobean house with its splendid rise
of park and fall of sward. She didn't at all dislike it, either, when
Franklin, as calmly possessed as ever with a clear sense of his duties,
discussed with her the larger and more impersonal uses of their fortune.
She found that she had ideas for him there; that the thinking and active
self, so long inert, could be roused to very good purpose; that it was
interesting, and very interesting, to plan, with millions at one's
disposal, for the furtherance of the just and the beautiful. And she
found, too, in spite of her warnings to Franklin, that though she might
be a hard, a selfish, and a broken-hearted woman, she was a woman with a
very definite idea of her own responsibilities. It did not suit her at
all to be the mere passive receiver; it did not suit her to be greedy.
She turned her mind at once, carefully and consistently, to Franklin's
interests. She found atoms and kinetics rather confusing at first, but
Franklin's delighted and deliberate elucidations made a light for her
that promised by degrees to illuminate these dark subjects. Yes;
already life had taken hold of her and, ironically, yet not unwillingly,
she followed it along the appointed path. Yesterday, however, and
to-day, especially, a complication, subtle yet emphatic, had stolen upon
her consciousness.
All the week long, in spite of something mastered and controlled in his
bearing, she had seen that he was happy, and though not imaginative as
to Franklin's past, she had guessed that he had never in all his life
been so happy, and that never had life so taken hold of him. He enjoyed
the pearls, he enjoyed the emerald, he enjoyed the Jacobean house and
going over it with her and Aunt Grizel; above all he enjoyed herself as
a thinking and acting being, the turning of her attention to atoms, her
grave, steady penetration of his life. And in this happiness the
something controlled and mastered had melted more and more; she had
intended that it should melt. She had guessed at the pain, the anxiety
for her that had underlain the dear little man's imperturbability, and
she had determined that as far as in her lay Franklin should think her
happy, should think that, at all events, she was serene and without
qualms or misgivings. And she had accomplished this. It was as if she
saw him breathing more deeply, more easily; as if, with a long sigh of
relief, he smiled at her and said, with a new accent of confidence: 'All
right.' And then, after the sigh of relief, she saw that he became too
happy. It was only yesterday that she began to see it; it was to-day
that she had clearly seen that Franklin had fallen in love with her.
It wasn't that, in any blindness to what she meant, he came nearer and
made mistakes. He did not come a step nearer, and, in his happiness, his
unconscious happiness, he was further from the possibility of mistakes
than before. He did not draw near. He stood and gazed. Men had loved
Helen before, yet, she felt it, no man had loved her as Franklin did.
She could not have analysed the difference between his love and that of
other men, yet she felt it dimly. Franklin stood and gazed; but it was
not at charm or beauty that he gazed; whether he was really deeply aware
of them she could not tell; the only words she could find with which to
express her predicament and its cause sounded silly to her, but she
could find no others. Franklin was gazing at her soul. She couldn't
imagine what he found to fix him in it; he had certainly said that she
was the honestest woman he had known; she gloomily made out that she
was, she supposed, 'straight'; she liked clear, firm things, and she
liked to keep a bargain. It didn't seem to her a very arresting array of
virtues; but then--no, she couldn't settle Franklin's case so glibly as
that; if it wasn't what she might have of charm that he had fallen in
love with, it wasn't what she might have of virtue either. Perhaps one's
soul hadn't much to do with either charm or virtue. And, after all,
whatever it was, he was gazing at it, rapt, smiling, grave, in the
lover's trance. He saw her, and only her. And she saw him, and a great
many other things besides.
The immediate hope that came to her was that Franklin, perhaps, might
really never know just what had happened to him. If he never recognised
it, it might never become explicit; it might be managed; it could of
course be managed in any case; but how she should hate having him made
conscious of pain. If he never said to himself, and far less to her,
that he had fallen in love with her, he might not really suffer in the
strange, ill-adjusted union before them. She did not think that he had
yet said it to himself; but she feared that he was hovering on the verge
of self-recognition. His very guilelessness in the realm of the emotions
exposed him to her, and with her perplexity went a yearning of pity as
she witnessed the soft, the hesitant, the delicate unfolding.
For more had come than the tranced gaze. That morning, writing notes,
with Franklin beside her, her hand had inadvertently touched his once or
twice in taking the papers from him, and Helen then had seen that
Franklin blushed. Twice, also, looking up, she had found his eyes fixed
on her with the lover's dwelling tenderness, and both times he had
quickly averted his glance in a manner very new in him.
Helen had pondered deeply in the moments before his departure. Franklin
had never kissed her; the time would come when he must kiss her. The
time would come when a kiss of farewell or greeting must, however rare,
be a facile, marital custom. How would Franklin--trembling on that verge
of a self-recognition that might make a chaos of his life--how and when
would he initiate that custom? How could it be initiated by him at all
unless with an emotion that would not only reveal him to himself, but
make it known to him that he was revealed to her. The revelation, if it
came, must come gradually; they must both have time to get used to it,
she to having a husband she did not love in love with her; he to loving
a wife who would never love him back. She shrank from the thought of
emotional revelations. It was her part to initiate and to make a kiss an
easy thing. Yet she found, sitting there, writing the last notes, with
Franklin beside her, that it was not an easy thing to contemplate. The
thought of her own cowardice spurred her on. When Franklin rose at last,
gave her his hand, said that he'd come back that evening, Helen rose
too, resolved. 'Good-bye,' she said. 'Don't forget the tickets for that
concert.'
'No, indeed,' said Franklin.
'And I think, don't you? that we might put the announcement in the
papers to-morrow. Aunt Grizel wants, I am sure, to see me safely Morning
Posted.'
'So do I,' smiled Franklin.
Helen was summoning her courage. 'Good-bye,' she repeated, and now she
smiled with a new sweetness. 'I think we ought to kiss each other
good-bye, don't you? We are such an old engaged couple.'
Resolved, and firm in her resolve, though knowing commotion of soul, she
leaned to him and kissed his forehead and turned her cheek to him.
Franklin had kept her hand, and in the pause, where she did not see his
face, she felt his tighten on it; but he did not kiss her. Smiling a
little nervously, she raised her head and looked at him. He was gazing
at her with a shaken, stricken look.
'You must kiss me good-bye,' said Helen, speaking as she would have
spoken to a departing child. 'Why, we have no right to be put in the
_Morning Post_ unless we've given each other a kiss.'
And, really like the child, Franklin said: 'Must I?'
He kissed her then, gently, and spoke no further word. But she knew,
when he had gone, and when thinking over the meaning of his face as it
only came to her when the daze of her own daring faded and left her able
to think, that she had hardly helped Franklin over a difficulty; she had
made him aware of it rather; she had shown him what his task must be.
And it could not reassure her, for Franklin, that his face, after that
stricken moment, and with a wonderful swiftness of delicacy, had
promised her that it should be accomplished. It promised her that there
should be no emotions, or, if there were, that they should be mastered
ones; it promised her that she should see nothing in him to make her
feel that she was refusing anything, nothing to make her feel that she
was giving pain by a refusal. It seemed to say that he knew, now, at
last, what the burden was that he laid upon her and that it should be as
light as he could make it. It did not show her that he saw his own
burden; but Helen saw it for him. She, too, made herself promises as she
stood after his departure, taking a long breath over her discovery; she
was not afraid in looking forward. All that she was afraid of--and it
was of this that she was thinking as she now stood leaning her arm upon
the mantelshelf and looking into the fire,--all that she was afraid of
was of looking back. It was for Gerald that she was waiting and it was
Gerald's note that hung from her hand against her knee, and since that
note had come, not long after Franklin had left her, her thoughts had
been centred on the coming interview. Gerald had not written to her
from the country; she had expected to have an answer to her announcement
that morning, but none had come. This note had been brought by hand, and
it said that if he could not find her at four would she kindly name some
other hour when he might do so. She had answered that he would find her,
and it was now five minutes to the hour.
Gerald's note had not said much more, and yet, in the little it did say,
it had contrived to be tense and cool. It seemed to intimate that he
reserved a great deal to say to her, and that, perhaps more, he reserved
a great deal to think and not to say. It was a note that had startled
her and that then had filled her with a bitterness of heart greater than
any she had ever known. For that she would not accept, not that tone
from Gerald. That it should be Gerald--Gerald of all the people in the
world--to adopt that tone to her! The exceeding irony of it brought a
laugh to her lips. She was on edge. Her strength had only just taken her
through the morning and its revelations, there was none left now for
patience and evasion. Gerald must be careful, was the thought that
followed the laugh.