BURTON DECLINES
The professor cleared his throat.
"In the first place, Mr. Burton," he said, "I feel that I owe you an
apology. I have taken a great liberty. Mr. Bomford here is one of my
oldest and most intimate friends. I have spoken to him of the
manuscript you brought me to translate. I have told him your story."
Mr. Bomford scratched his side whiskers and nodded patronizingly.
"It is a very remarkable story," he declared, "a very remarkable story
indeed. I can assure you, Mr.--Mr. Burton, that I never listened to
anything so amazing. If any one else except my old friend here had told
me of it, I should have laughed. I should have dismissed the whole
thing at once as incredible and preposterous. Even now, I must admit
that I find it almost impossible to accept the story in its entirety."
Burton looked him coldly in the eyes. Mr. Bomford did not please him.
"The story is perfectly true," he said. "There is not the slightest
necessity for you to believe it--in fact, so far as I am concerned, it
does not matter in the least whether you do or not."
"Mr. Burton," the professor interposed, "I beg that you will not
misunderstand Mr. Bomford. His is not a militant disbelief, it is
simply a case of suspended judgment. In the meantime, assuming the
truth of what you have told us--and I for one, you must remember, Mr.
Burton, have every faith in your story--assuming its truth, Mr. Bomford
has made a most interesting proposition."
Burton, with half-closed eyes, was listening to the singing of a thrush
and watching the sunshine creep through the dark foliage of the cedar
trees. He was only slightly interested.
"A proposition?" he murmured.
"Precisely," Mr. Cowper assented. "We have an appeal to make to you,
an appeal on behalf of science, an appeal on behalf of your
fellow-creatures, an appeal on behalf of yourself. Your amazing
experience is one which should be analyzed and given to the world."
"What you want, I suppose," Burton remarked, "is one of my beans."
"Exactly," the professor admitted, eagerly.
"I have already," Burton said, "done my best to make you understand my
feelings in this matter. Those beans represent everything to me.
Nothing would induce me to part with a single one."
"We can understand that," the professor agreed. "We are approaching you
with regard to them in an altogether different manner. Mr. Bomford is
a man of business. It is our wish to make you an offer."
"You mean that you would like to buy one?"
"Precisely," the professor replied. "We are prepared to give you,
between us, a thousand pounds for one of those beans."
Burton shook his head. The conversation appeared to be totally devoid
of interest to him.
"A thousand pounds," he said, "is, I suppose, a great deal of money. I
have never owned so much in my life. But money, after all, is only
valuable for what it can buy. Each one of my beans means two months,
perhaps more, of real life. No money could buy that."
"My young friend," the professor insisted solemnly, "you are looking at
this matter from a selfish point of view. Experiences such as you have
passed through, belong to the world. You are merely the agent, the
fortunate medium, through which they have materialized."
Burton shrugged his shoulders.
"So far," he replied, "I owe no debt to humanity. The longer I live and
the wiser I get, the more I realize the absolute importance of
self-care. Individualism is the only real and logical creed. No one
else looks after your interests. No one else in the world save yourself
is of any real account."
"A thousand pounds," Mr. Bomford interposed, "is a great deal of money
for a young man in your position."
"It is a very great deal," Burton admitted. "But what you and Mr.
Cowper both seem to forget is the very small part that money plays in
the acquisition of real happiness. Money will not buy the joy which
makes life worth living, it will not buy the power to appreciate, the
power to discriminate. It will not buy taste or the finer feelings,
without the possession of which one becomes a dolt, a thing that creeps
about the face of the world. I thank you for your offer, professor, and
Mr. Bomford, but I have nothing to sell. If you would excuse me!"
He half rose from his chair but Mr. Cowper thrust him back again.
"We have not finished yet, my dear Mr. Burton," he said eagerly. "You
are making up your mind too hastily."
"A thousand pounds," Mr. Bomford repeated, condescendingly, "is a very
useful sum. Those peculiar gifts of yours may vanish. Take the advice
of a business man. Remember that you will still have two or three beans
left. It is only one we ask for. I want to put the matter on as broad
a basis as possible. We make our appeal on behalf of the cause of
science. You must not refuse us." Burton rose to his feet determinedly.
"Not only do I refuse," he said, "but it is not a matter which I am
inclined to discuss any longer. I am sorry if you are disappointed, but
my story was really told to Mr. Cowper here in confidence." He left
them both sitting there. He found Edith in a corner of the long
drawing-room. She was pretending to read.
"Whatever is the matter?" she asked. "I did not expect you so soon. I
thought that Mr. Bomford and father wanted to talk to you." "So they
did," he replied. "They made me a foolish offer. It was Mr. Bomford's
idea, I am sure, not your father's. I am tired, Edith. Come and walk
with me."--She glanced out of the window.
"I think," she said demurely, "that I am expected to go for a ride with
Mr. Bomford."
"Then please disappoint him," he pleaded. "I do not like your friend
Mr. Bomford. He is an egotistical and ignorant person. We will go
across the moors, we will climb our little hill. Perhaps we might even
wait there until the sunset."
"I am quite sure," she said decidedly, "that Mr. Bomford would not like
that."
"What does it matter?" he answered. "A man like Mr. Bomford has no
right to have any authority over you at all. You are of a different
clay. I am sure that you will never marry him. If you will not walk
with me, I shall work, and I am not in the humor for work. I shall
probably spoil one of my best chapters."
She rose to her feet.
"In the interests of your novel!" she murmured. "Come! Only we had
better go out by the back door."
Like children they stole out of the house. They climbed the rolling
moorland till they reached the hill on the further side of the valley.
She sat down, breathless, with her back against the trunk of a small
Scotch fir. Burton threw himself on to the ground by her side.
"We think too much always of consequences," he said "After this evening,
what does anything matter? The gorse is a flaming yellow; do you see
how it looks like a field of gold there in the distance? Only the haze
separates it from the blue sky. Look down where I am pointing, Edith.
It was there by the side of the road that I first looked into the garden
and saw you."
"It was not you who looked," she objected, shaking her head. "It was
the other man."
"What part is it that survives?" he asked, a little bitterly. "Why
should the new man be cursed with memory? Don't you think that even
then there must have been two of me, one struggling against the
other--one seeking for the big things, one laying hold of the lower? We
are all like that, Edith! Even now I sometimes feel the tug, although
it leads in other directions."
"To Garden Green?" she murmured.
"Never that," he answered fiercely, "and you know it. There are lower
heights, though, in the most cultured of lives. There are moments of
madness, moments that carry one off one's feet, which come alike to the
slave and his master. Dear Edith, up here one can talk. It is such a
beautiful world. One can open one's eyes, one can breathe, one can look
around him. It is the joy of simple things, the real true joy of life
which beats in our veins. Do you think that we were made for
unhappiness in such a world, Edith?"
"No!" she whispered, faintly.
"There isn't anything so beautiful to me upon God's earth," he
continued, "as the love in my heart for you. I wanted to tell you so
this evening. I have brought you here to tell you so--to this
particular spot. Something tells me that it may be almost our last
chance. I left those two whispering upon the lawn. What is it they are
planning, I wonder? That man Bomford is no companion for your father.
He has given him an idea about me and my story. What is it, I wonder?
To rob me, to throw me out, to take my treasure from me by force?"
"You are my father's guest," she reminded him softly. "He will not
forget it."
"There are greater things in the world," he went on, "than the
obligations of hospitality. There are tides which sweep away the
landmarks of nature herself. Your father is thirsty for knowledge.
This man Bomford is his friend. There have been more crimes committed
in the world for lofty motives than one hears of."
He leaned a little forward. They could see the smoke curling up from
the house below, its gardens laid out like patchwork, the low house
itself covered with creepers.
"It was an idyll, that," he went on. "Bomford's trail is about the
place now, the trail of some poisonous creature. Nothing will ever be
the same. I want to remember this last evening. I have looked upon
life from the hill tops and I have looked at it along the level ways,
but I have seen nothing in it so beautiful, I have felt nothing in it so
wonderful, as my love for you. You were a dream to me before, half
hidden, only partly realized. Soon you will be a dream to me again.
But never, never, dear, since the magic brush painted the blue into the
skies, the purple on to the heather, the green on to the grass, the
yellow into the gorse, the blue into your eyes, was there any love like
mine!"
She leaned towards him. Her fingers were cold and her voice trembled.
"You must not!" she begged.
He smiled as he passed his arm around her.
"Are we not on the hill top, dear?" he said. "You need have no fear.
Only to-night I felt that I must say these things to you, even though
the passion which they represent remains as ineffective forever as the
words themselves. I have a feeling, you know, that after to-day things
will be different."
"Why should they be?" she asked. "In any case, your time cannot come
yet."
Once more he looked downward into the valley. Like a little speck along
the road a motor-car was crawling along.
"It is Mr. Bomford," he said. "He is coming to look for you."
She rose to her feet. Together they stood, for a moment, hand in hand,
looking down upon the flaming landscape. The fields at their feet were
brilliant with color; in the far distance the haze of the sea. Their
fingers were locked.
"Mr. Bomford," he sighed, "is coming up the hill."
"Then I think," she said quietly, "that we had better go down!"