Christian and Frances ate their luncheon in an upper chamber, close to a kind of balcony window, which gave upon one of the city’s most crowded thoroughfares. An unceasing and uniform uproar—overridden from time to time by the superior tumult of a passing railway train on a bridge near by—rose from this indefatigable street. They had the room to themselves; the portentous din magnified the effect of the solitude in which they regarded each other, crumbling the bread on the table absent-mindedly, and waiting for the inspiration of speech.
“When I get back,” the girl said at last with a smile, “the racket of my typewriters will seem like the murmur of a gentle breeze down a leafy country lane.”
They laughed—but they had discovered it was not so hard to make oneself heard as they had supposed. Their voices intuitively found a level which served their personal needs, yet did not incommode the waiters yawning at the head of the stairway outside.
“Have you taken to the bicycle?” she was moved in sheer irrelevance to ask him. When he shook his head, she went on: “It is a wonderful thing for women. It has done more for them in three years, than all the progressive intellectual movements of civilization did in three hundred. We all use them, coming to and from the office. We have to store them down in the area, now—but I am going to find a better place.”
Christian rolled his bread crumbs into balls and stared at them in a brown study, from which this topic was powerless to arouse him.
“I wish,” he said, finally—“I wish very much that I knew how to convince you. But I seem never to produce any impression upon you. You are unyielding to the touch. It is I who get molded and kneaded about whenever I come close to you. And I don’t say that it is not for the best. Only—only now, you will not accept my own ideas of what I should do, and you will not tell me what your ideas are.”
“I am not sure that I have any ideas,” she assured him. “It is merely that, on general principles, I don’t care for the people who settle difficulties by turning tail and running away from them.”
“Very well,” he began, as if an important premise had been accepted. “But as to my special case, I have stated what must be my position if I remain in England. To me it seems that it must be impossible—intolerable. But you have some different view, evidently. That is what I beg you to explain to me. If I am to remain in England, what is it your idea that I should do?” She knitted her brows a little, and took time to her reply. “You seem to think so entirely of yourself,” she said, slowly, “it is very hard to know what to say to you. I cannot put myself, you see, so completely in your place, as you are always able to do.” He opened his eyes wide, and informed their gaze with a surprised reproach. “There you are surely unjust to me,” he urged, pleadingly. “I do not know anyone who thinks more about other people than I do. One hesitates to say these things about oneself—but truly you are mistaken in this matter. In fact, I wonder sometimes if it is not a fault, a weakness in my nature, that I am so readily moved by the sufferings and wrongs of unhappy people. Whenever I see injustice, I am beside myself with a passion to set it right. I grow almost sick with indignation, and pity, when these things come before me. Last night, for example, at the Empire——”
Christian stopped abruptly, with the sudden consciousness that the ground was not clear before him. He saw that he was entirely without a clue as to what his companion’s views on the subject might be. That was her peculiarity: he knew concerning her thoughts and inclinations only what she chose to reveal to him. It was beyond his power to predict what her attitude would be on any new topic. Looking at her thoughtful, serene-eyed face, it decidedly seemed to him that the Empire, as an ethical problem, might with advantage be passed by. He hesitated for a moment, in the friendly shelter of the street noise, and then gave another termination to his speech: “It puzzles me that you should have that view of my temperament.”
“Ah, that is just it—you have put the word into my mouth. It is ‘temperament’ that you are thinking of—and about that you are perfectly right. Your temperament is as open to the impulses of the moment—kindly, generous, compassionate and all that—as a flower is to the bees. But character is another matter. What good do your fine momentary sentiments, these rapid noble emotions of yours, do you or anybody else? You experience them—and forget them. The only thing that abides permanently with you is consideration for your own personal affairs.”
“This is all very unjust,” he said, disconsolately. “I come to you for solace and friendship, and you turn upon me with beak and claws.” He sighed, with the beginning of tears in his bright eyes, as he added: “There is more reason than ever, it seems to me, why I should go away from England! It is not kind to me!”
His doleful tone and mien drove her to swift repentance. “Oh, I have only been saying the disagreeable things first, to get them out of the way,” she sought to reassure him. “There isn’t another unpleasant word for you to hear, not one, I promise you.”
“It is my opinion that there have been enough,” he ventured to comment, with a rueful little smile. A measure of composure returned to him. “But if they must be said, I would rather they come from you than from any one else, for I think that you have also some pleasant thoughts about me.”
She nodded her head several times in assent, regarding him with an amused twinkle in her eyes meanwhile. “Yes—the right kind of editor could make very interesting stuff indeed out of you,” she said, and smiled almost gaily at his visible failure to comprehend her figure. “What I mean is—you are too much sail, and too little boat. You drift before every new wind that blows. There is lacking that kind of balance—proportion—which gives stability. But, dear me, it is a thousand times better to be like that, than to have an excess of the other thing. The man of the solid qualities, without the imagination, simply sticks in the mud where he was born. But with you—if the right person chances to get hold of you, and brings the right influences steadily to bear upon you, then there is no telling what fine things you may not rise to.”
“You are that right person!”
He lifted his voice to utter these words, with the air of feeling them to be momentous. His eyes glowed as they reaffirmed the declaration to her inquiring glance. But she seemed to miss the gravity of both words and look.
“Oh, there you’re wrong,” she said, half jestingly. “I’m too bad tempered and quarrelsome to exert any proper influence over any one. Why, I should nag all the joy and high spirits out of you in no time at all. No—you need an equable and happy person, really very wise and strong and sensible, but above all with an easy, smooth disposition—such a person, for example, as Emanuel’s wife is described to be.”
“No—I need no one but you!” he repeated with accentuated deliberation.
This time she appeared to feel something of his intention. She looked into the gaze he was bending upon her and then withdrew her eyes precipitately, and made a show of active interest in her food.
“I am asking you to think of joining your life to mine,” he went on, in low, yet very distinct tones. “You cannot know a hundredth part as well as I do, how profoundly I need such help as you can give. You are the one woman in the world who means strength as well as happiness to me. If you could only dream with what yearning I long always to lean upon you—to be supported by your fine, calm, sweet wisdom! To be upheld by you—to be nourished and guided by you—oh, that is the vision which I tremble with joy to think of! I am my own master for the first time to-day—I have taken my life into my own hands—and I lay it at your feet—dear lady—at your feet.”
She rose abruptly while his last words were in the air, and turning, moved to the window. She had contrived by a gesture to bid him not to follow, and he could only gaze in mingled apprehension and hope at her back, the while she stood professing to scrutinize the shifting throng below.
The waiter brought in another dish, methodically rearranged the plates and went away again. To Christian’s bitter disgust, two men entered and took seats at a table at the other end of the small room—and still she did not turn. He meditated calling her, or joining her on the pretense of announcing the cutlets—and only stared in nervous excitement instead.
Then, as suddenly as she had left him she returned, and resumed her chair as if nothing unusual had happened. His strenuous gaze swept her face for tokens of her mood—of her inclination or decision—but beyond a spot of vivid red on each smooth cheek, there was no sign of any sort. Her frank, calm gray eyes met his with unruffled directness; they had in them that suggestion of benignant tolerance which he had discerned there more than once before.
“You do not answer me!” he pleaded, after a few mouthfuls. As his back shielded the action from the strangers, he put forth a cautious hand to touch the nearest of hers, but she drew it gently away beyond his reach. They automatically adjusted their voices to the conditions created by the newcomers.
“There could be only one possible answer,” she told him, softly, almost tenderly. “It is a very flattering dream—? to me—but it is a mere empty dream, none the less. I hope you will not want to talk about it any more.”
“But I swear that it is not empty at all!” he urged, in earnest tones. “Who has a right to say that it is a dream? I am my own master—so are you. We are of age—we are intelligent people. I deliberately come to you, and say to you that you are the one woman on earth whom I desire with all my heart for my wife. I open my mind to you. There is only the image of you inside it. You know my sincerity. You must feel how supreme is the place you have in my thoughts. It is the logical end toward which I have been walking ever since I first saw you! You are all that there is of true friendship, of true womanhood, for me! I put out my hands to you, I pray to you! And why will you not come to me, dear, dear Frank?” There was a touch of pathos in the smile she gave him. “It isn’t the least bit of good, I assure you,” she made answer, in the confidential murmur that was necessary. “One can’t talk here—but please let us speak of something else. Or can we not go now?” He went on as if she had not spoken, his big, dark eyes challenging hers to an encounter which she evaded. “Do not think we need go away from England, if you want to stay; there will always be money enough—with your wisdom in controlling it. Perhaps we may even be able to restore Caermere. But if we are not, still it can be one of the noblest and most beautiful residences in England, when we learn together to understand its charm, and make it our home. Oh, when you see the magnificent hills and forests shutting it in on all sides—and the grim, fine old walls and towers of the castle itself! But there we need live only when we choose to do so—and whenever the mood comes to us, off we can roam to the Alps or Algiers, or the wonderful India which one always dreams of. And we shall sail in our own yacht and you shall be the queen there, as everywhere else. And all our lives we will spend in doing good to others: do you not see what extraordinary opportunities for helping those who need help you will have? Where now you are of service to one person, then you can assist a hundred! An army of grateful people will give thanks because of you—and I will always be the chief of them—your foremost slave, your most reverent worshiper! And then—think of the joy of a life in which no one has a share who is not pleasant and welcome to us! We will have no one near us who is not our friend. Oh, I have not told you: that is why, this very morning, I decided to leave it all, and to make a new life for myself, and to spend it wholly with my real friends. It is loneliness, heart and soul loneliness, that has driven me to revolt. And in my despair I come to you—and I say to you that it is friendship that I cannot live without, and you............