"West was simply deceived--hoodwinked by men infinitely cleverer than he
at that sort of thing. It was a manly thing--his coming to you now and
telling you; much harder than never to--have made the mistake in the
beginning. Of course--it wipes the slate clean. It makes everything all
right now. You appreciate that."
Behemoth yawned.
The young man turned, and came a step or two forward, both face and
voice under complete control again.
"I received a note from you this morning," he began briskly, "asking me
to come in--"
The girl's voice interrupted him. Standing beside the little
typewriter-table, exactly where her caller had surprised her, she had
watched with a mortifying dumbness the second meeting between the
pleasure-dog and the little Doctor that was. But now pride sprang to her
aid, stinging her into speech. For it was an unendurable thing that she
should thus tamely surrender to him the mastery of her situation, and
suffer her own fault to be glossed over so ingloriously.
"Won't you let me tell you," she began hurriedly, "how sorry I am--how
ashamed--that I misjudged--"
"No! No! I beg you to stop. There is not the smallest occasion for
anything of that sort--"
"Don't you see my dreadful position? I suspect you, misjudge you--wrong
you at every step--and all the time you are doing a thing so fine--so
generous and splendid--that I am humiliated--to--"
Once again she saw that painful transformation in his face: a difficult
dull-red flood sweeping over it, only to recede instantly, leaving him
white from neck to brow.
"What is the use of talking in this way?" he asked peremptorily. "What
is the good of it, I say? The matter is over and done with. Everything
is all right--his telling you wipes it all from the slate, just as I
said. Don't you see that? Well, can't you dismiss the whole incident
from your mind and forget that it ever happened?"
"I will try--if that is what you wish."
She turned away, utterly disappointed and disconcerted by his summary
disposal of the burning topic over which she had planned such a long and
satisfying discussion. He started to say something, checked himself, and
said something entirely different.
"I have received your note," he began directly, "asking me to come in
and see you about the matter of difference between the estates. That is
why I have called. I trust that this means that you are going to be
sensible and take your money."
"In a way--yes. I will tell you--what I have thought."
"Well, sit down to tell me please. You look tired; not well at all. Not
in the least. Take this comfortable chair."
Obediently she sat down in Mr. Dayne's high-backed swivel-chair, which,
when she leaned back, let her neat-shod little feet swing clear of the
floor. The chair was a happy thought; it steadied her; so did his
unexampled solicitousness, which showed, she thought, that her emotion
had not escaped him.
"I have decided that I would take it," said she, "with a--a--sort of
condition."
Sitting in the chair placed for Mr. Dayne's callers, the young man
showed instant signs of disapprobation.
"No, no! You are big enough to accept your own without conditions."
"Oh--you won't argue with me about that, will you? Perhaps it is
unreasonable, but I could never be satisfied to take it--and spend it
for myself. I could never have any pleasure in it--never feel that it
was really mine. So," she hurried on, "I thought that it would be nice
to take it--and give it away."
"Give it away!" he echoed, astonished and displeased.
"Yes--give it to the State. I thought I should like to give it
to--establish a reformatory."
Their eyes met. Upon his candid face she could watch the subtler
meanings of her idea slowly sinking into and taking hold of his
consciousness.
"No--no!" came from him, explosively. "No! You must not think of such a
thing."
"Yes--I have quite made up my mind. When the idea came to me it was like
an inspiration. It seemed to me the perfect use to make of this money.
Don't you see?... And--"
"No, I don't see," he said sharply. "Why will you persist in thinking
that there is something peculiar and unclean about this money?--some
imagined taint upon your title to it? Don't you understand that it is
yours in precisely the same definite and honest way that the money this
office pays you--"
"Oh--surely it is all a question of feeling. And if I feel--"
"It is a question of fact," said Mr. Surface. "Listen to me. Suppose
your father had put this money away for you somewhere, so that you knew
nothing about it, hidden it, say, in a secret drawer somewhere about
your house"--didn't he know exactly the sort of places which fathers
used to hide away money?--"and that now, after all these years, you had
suddenly found it, together with a note from him saying that it was for
you. You follow me perfectly? Well? Would it ever occur to you to give
that money to the State--for a _reformatory_?"
"Oh--perhaps not. How can I tell? But that case would--"
"Would be exactly like this one," he finished for her crisply. "The sole
difference is that it happens to be my father who hid the money away
instead of yours."
There was a silence.
"I am sorry," said she, constrainedly, "that you take this--this view. I
had hoped so much that you might agree with me. Nevertheless, I think
my mind is quite made up. I--"
"Then why on earth have you gone through the formality of consulting me,
only to tell me--"
"Oh--because I thought it would be so nice if you would agree with me!"
"But I do not agree with you," he said, looking at her with frowning
steadiness. "I do not. Nobody on earth would agree with you. Have you
talked with your friends about this mad proposal? Have you--"
"None of them but you. I did not care to."
The little speech affected him beyond all expectation; in full flight as
he was, it stopped him dead. He lost first the thread of his argument;
then his steadiness of eye and manner; and when he spoke, it was to
follow up, not his own thought, but her implication, with those
evidences of embarrassment which he could never hide.
"So we are friends again," he stated, in rather a strained voice.
"If you are willing--to take me back."
He sat silent, drumming a tattoo on his chair-arm with long, strong
fingers; and when he resumed his argument, it was with an entire absence
of his usual air of authority.
"On every score, you ought to keep your money--to make yourself
comfortable--to stop working--to bring yourself more pleasures, trips,
whatever you want--all exactly as your father intended."
"Oh! don't argue with me, please! I asked you not. I must either take it
for that or not at all."
"It--it is not my part," he said reluctantly, "to dictate what you shall
do with your own. I cannot sympathize in the least with your--your mad
proposal. Not in the least. However, I must assume that you know your
own mind. If it is quite made up--"
"Oh, it is! I have thought it all over so carefully--and with so much
pleasure."
He rose decisively. "Very well, I will go to my lawyers at once--this
morning. They will arrange it as you wish."
"Oh--will you? How can I thank you? And oh," she added hastily, "there
was--another point that I--I wished to speak to you about."
He gazed down at her, looking so small and sorrowful-eyed in her great
chair, and all at once his knees ran to water, and the terrible fear
clutched at him that his manhood would not last him out of the room.
This was the reason, perhaps, that his voice was the little Doctor's at
its brusquest as he said:--
"Well? What is it?"
"The question," she said nervously, "of a--a name for this reformatory
that I want to found. I have thought a great deal about that. It is
a--large part of my idea. And I have decided that my reformatory shall
be called--that is, that I should like to call it--the Henry G. Surface
Home."
He stared at her through a flash like a man stupefied; and then,
wheeling abruptly, walked away from her to the windows which overlooked
the park. For some time he stood there, back determinedly toward her,
staring with great fixity at nothing. But when he returned to her, she
had never seen his face so stern.
"You must be mad to suggest such a thing. Mad! Of course I shall not
allow you to do it. I shall not give you the money for any such
purpose."
"But if it is mine, as you wrote?" said Sharlee, looking up at him from
the back of her big chair.
Her point manifestly was unanswerable. With characteristic swiftness, he
abandoned it, and fell back to far stronger ground.
"Yes, the money is yours," he said stormily. "But that is all. My
father's name is mine."
That silenced her, for the moment at least, and he swept rapidly on.
"I do not in the least approve of your giving your money to establish a
foundation at all. That, however, is a matter with which, unfortunately,
I have nothing to do. But with my father's name I have everything to do.
I shall not permit you to--"
"Surely--oh, surely, you will not refuse me so small a thing which would
give me so much happiness."
"Happiness?" He flung the word back at her impatiently, but his
intention of demolishing it was suddenly checked by a flashing
remembrance of Fifi's definition of it. "Will you kindly explain how you
would get happiness from that?"
"Oh--if you don't see, I am afraid I--could never explain--"
"It is a display of just the same sort of unthinking Quixotism which has
led you hitherto to refuse to accept your own money. What you propose is
utterly irrational in every way. Can you deny it? Can you defend your
proposal by any reasonable argument? I cannot imagine how so--so mad an
idea ever came into your mind."
She sat still, her fingers playing with the frayed edges of Mr. Dayne's
blotting-pad, and allowed the silence to enfold them once more.
"Your foundation," he went on, with still further loss of motive power,
"would--gain nothing by bearing the name of my father. He was not
worthy.... No one knows that better than you. Will you tell me what
impulse put it into your mind to--to do this?"
"I--had many reasons," said she, speaking with some difficulty. "I will
tell you one. My father loved him once. I know he would like me to do
something--to make the name honorable again."
"That," he said, in a hard voice, "is beyond your power."
She showed no disposition to contradict him, or even to maintain the
conversation. Presently he went on:--
"I cannot let you injure your foundation by--branding it with his
notoriety, in an impulsive and--and fruitless generosity. For it would
be fruitless. You, of all people, must understand that the burden on
the other side is--impossibly heavy. You know that, don't you?"
She raised her head and looked at him.
Again, her pride had been plucking at her heartstrings, burning her with
the remembrance that he, when he gave her everything that a man could
give, had done it in a manner perfect and without flaw. And now she,
with her infinitely smaller offering, sat tongue-tied and ineffectual,
unable to give with a show of the purple, too poor-spirited even to
yield him the truth for his truth which alone made the gift worth the
offering.
Her blood, her spirit, and all her inheritance rallied at the call of
her pride. She looked at him, and made her gaze be steady: though this
seemed to her the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.
"I must not let you think that I wanted to do this only for your
father's sake. That would not be honest. Part of my pleasure in planning
it--most of it, perhaps--was because I--I should so much like to do
something for your father's son."
She rose, trying to give the movement a casual air, and went over to her
little desk, pretending to busy herself straightening out the litter of
papers upon it. From this safe distance, her back toward him, she forced
herself to add:--
"This reformatory will take the place of the one you--would have won for
us. Don't you see? Half-my happiness in giving it is gone, unless you
will lend me the name."
Behind her the silence was impenetrable.
She stood at her desk, methodically sorting papers which she did not
see, and wildly guessing at the meaning of that look of turbulent
consciousness which she had seen break startled into his eyes. More even
than in their last meeting, she had found that the sight of his face,
wonderfully changed yet even more wonderfully the same, deeply affected
her to-day. Its new sadness and premature age moved her strangely; with
a peculiar stab of compassion and pain she had seen for the first time
the gray in the nondescript hair about his temples. For his face, she
had seen that the smooth sheath of satisfied self-absorption, which had
once overlain it like the hard veneer on a table-top, had been scorched
away as in a baptism by fire; from which all that was best in it had
come out at once strengthened and chastened. And she thought that the
shining quality of honesty in his face must be such as to strike
strangers on the street.
And now, behind her on the office floor, she heard his footsteps, and in
one breath was suddenly cold with the fear that her hour had come, and
hot with the fear that it had not.
Engrossed with her papers, she moved so as to keep her back toward him;
but he, with a directness which would not flinch even in this untried
emergency, deliberately intruded himself between her and the table; and
so once more they stood face to face.
"I don't understand you," he began, his manner at its quietest. "Why do
you want to do this for me?"
At this close range, she glanced once at him and instantly looked away.
His face was as white as paper; and when she saw that her heart first
stopped beating, and then pounded off in a wild frightened pæan.
"I--cannot tell you--I don't know--exactly."
"What do you mean?"
She hardly recognized his voice; instinctively she began backing away.
"I don't think I--can explain. You--rather terrify me this morning."
"Are you in love with ME?" he demanded in a terrible voice, beginning at
the wrong end, as he would be sure to do.
Finger at her lip, her blue eyes, bright with unshed tears, resting upon
his in a gaze as direct as a child's, Sharlee nodded her head up and
down.
And that was all the hint required by clever Mr. Surface, the famous
social scientist. He advanced somehow, and took her in his arms. On the
whole, it was rather surprising how satisfactorily he did it,
considering that she was the first woman he had ever touched in all his
days.
So they stood through a time that might have been a minute and might
have been an age, since all of them that mattered had soared away to the
sunlit spaces where no time is. After awhile, driven by a strange fierce
desire to see her face in the light of this new glory, he made a gentle
effort to hold her off from him, but she clung to him, crying, "No, no!
I don't want you to see me yet."