"And I didn"t hear you coming," said Mr. Kane. "I beg your pardon. I"m afraid you hurt your foot."
"Not at all," Helen a.s.sured him. She had stepped into the light from the windows and, Mr. Kane being beside her, she could see his face clearly and see that he looked very tired. She had been aware, in these days of somnolent retirement, that one other member of the party seemed, though not in her sense retired from it, to wander rather aimlessly on its outskirts. That his removal to this ambiguous limbo had been the result of her own arrival Helen had no means of knowing, since she had never seen Mr. Kane in his brief moment of hope when he and Althea had been centre and everybody else outskirts. She had found him, during her few conversations with him, so tamely funny as to be hardly odd, though his manner of speaking and the way in which his hair was cut struck her as expressing oddity to an unfortunate degree; but though only dimly aware of him, and aware mainly in this sense of amus.e.m.e.nt, she had, since Althea had informed her of his status, seen him with some compa.s.sionateness. It didn"t make him less funny to her that he should have been in love with Althea for fifteen years, rather it made him more so. Helen found it difficult to take either the devotion or its object very seriously. She thought hopeless pa.s.sions rather ridiculous, her own included, but Gerald she did consider a possible object of pa.s.sion; and how Althea could be an object of pa.s.sion for anybody, even for funny little Mr. Kane, surpa.s.sed her comprehension, so that the only way to understand the situation was to decide that Mr. Kane was incapable of pa.s.sion altogether. But to-night she received a new impression; looking at Mr. Kane"s face, thin, jaded, and kindly attentive to herself, it suddenly became apparent to her that whatever his feeling might be it was serious. He might not know pa.s.sion, but his heart was aching, perhaps quite as fiercely as her own. She felt sorry for Mr. Kane, and her step lingered on her way to the house.
"Isn"t it a lovely night," she said, in order to say something. "Do you like sitting in the dark? It"s very restful, isn"t it?"
Franklin saw the alien Miss Buchanan"s eyes bent kindly and observantly upon him.
"Yes, it"s very restful," he said. "It smooths you out and straightens you out when you get crumpled, you know, and impatient."
"I should not imagine you as ever very impatient," smiled Helen.
"Perhaps you do sit a great deal in the dark."
He took her whimsical suggestion with careful humour. "Why, no, it"s not a habit of mine; and it"s not a recipe that it would be a good thing to overdo, is it?"
"Why not?" she asked.
"There are worse things than impatience, aren"t there?" said Franklin.
"Gloominess, for instance. You might get gloomy if you sat out in the dark a great deal."
It amused her a little to wonder, as they went in together, whether Mr.
Kane disciplined his emotions and withdrew from restful influences before they had time to become discouraging ones. She imagined that he would have a recipe for everything.
CHAPTER XII.
It was after this little nocturnal encounter that Helen found herself watching Mr. Kane with a dim, speculative sympathy. There was nothing else of much interest to watch, as far as she was aware, for Helen"s powers of observation were not sharpened by much imaginativeness. Her sympathy must be aroused for her to care to see, and just now she felt no sympathy for any one but Mr. Kane.
Gerald, flirting far less flagrantly and sketching a.s.siduously, was in no need of sympathy; nor Althea, despite the fact that Helen felt her to be a little reserved and melancholy. Althea, on the whole, seemed placidly enough absorbed in her duties of hostess, and her state of mind, at no time much preoccupying Helen, preoccupied her now less than ever. The person who really interested her, now that she had come to look at him and to realise that he was suffering, was Mr. Kane. He was puzzling to her, not mystifying; there was no element of depth or shadow about him; even his suffering--it was odd to think that a person with such a small, flat nose should suffer--even his suffering was pellucid.
He puzzled her because he was different from anything she had ever encountered, and he made her think of a page of trite phrases printed in a half-comprehended dialect. If it was puzzling that any man should be sufficiently in love with Althea to suffer over it, it was yet more puzzling that, neglected as he so obviously was by his beloved, he should show no dejection or consciousness of diminution. He seemed a little aimless, it is true, but not in the least injured; and Helen, as she watched him, found herself liking Mr. Kane.
He had an air, pleasant to her, of finding no one beneath him, and at the same time he seemed as unaware of superiority--unless it were definitely moral or intellectual. A general indiscriminating goodwill was expressed in his manner towards everybody, and when he did discriminate--which was always on moral issues--his goodwill seemed unperturbed by any amount of reprobation. He remained blandly humane under the most disconcerting circ.u.mstances. She overtook him one day in a lane holding a drunkard by the shoulder and endeavouring to steer him homeward, while he expounded to him in scientific tones the ill effects of alcohol on the system, and the remarkable results to be attained by steady self-suggestion. Mr. Kane"s collar was awry and his coat dusty, almost as dusty as the drunkard"s, with whom he had evidently had to grapple in raising him from the highway; and Helen, as she paused at the turning of the road which brought her upon them, heard Franklin"s words:
"I"ve tried it myself for insomnia. I"m a nervous man, and I was in a bad way at the time; over-pressure, you know, and worry. I guess it"s like that with you, too, isn"t it? You get on edge. Well, there"s nothing better than self-suggestion, and if you"ll give it a try you"ll be surprised by the results, I"m sure of it."
Helen joined them and offered her a.s.sistance, for the bewildered proselyte seemed unable to move forward now that he was upon his feet.
"Well, if you would be so kind. Just your hand on his other shoulder, you know," said Franklin, turning a grateful glance upon her. "Our friend here is in trouble, you see. It"s not far to the village, and what he wants is to get to bed, have a good sleep and then a wash. He"ll feel a different man then."
Helen, her hand at "our friend"s" left shoulder, helped to propel him forward, and ten minutes took them to his door, where, surrounded by a staring crowd of women and children, they delivered him into the keeping of his wife, a thin and weary person, who looked upon his benefactors with almost as much resentment as upon him.
"What he really needs, I"m afraid I think," Helen said, as she and Mr.
Kane walked away, "is a good whipping." She said it in order to see the effect of the ruthlessness upon her humanitarian companion.
Mr. Kane did not look shocked or grieved; he turned a cogitating glance upon her, and she saw that he diagnosed the state of mind that could make such a suggestion and could not take it seriously. He smiled, though a little gravely, in answering: "Why, no, I don"t think so; and I don"t believe you think so, Miss Buchanan. What you want to give him is a hold on himself, hope, and self-respect; it wouldn"t give you self-respect to be whipped, would it?"
"It might give me discretion," said Helen, smiling back.
"We don"t want human beings to have the discretion of animals; we want them to have the discretion of men," said Franklin; "that is, self-mastery and wisdom."
Helen did not feel able to argue the point; indeed, it did not interest her; but she asked Mr. Kane, some days later, how his roadside friend was progressing towards the discretion of a man.
"Oh, he"ll be all right," said Franklin. "He"ll pull round.
Self-suggestion will do it. It"s not a bad case. He couldn"t get hold of the idea at first--he"s not very bright; but I found out that he"d got some very useful religious notions, and I work it in on these."
From the housekeeper, a friend of her youth, Helen learned that in the village Mr. Kane"s ministrations to Jim Betts were regarded with surprise, yet not without admiration. He was supposed to be some strange sort of foreign clergyman, not to be placed in any recognisable category. "He"s a very kind gentleman, I"m sure," said Mrs. Fielding.
Mr. Kane was fond, Helen also observed, of entering into conversation with the servants. The butler"s political views--which were guarded--he determinedly pursued, undeterred by Baines"s cautious and deferential retreats. He considered the footman as a potential friend, whatever the footman might consider him. Their common manhood, in Franklin"s eyes, entirely outweighed the slight, extraneous accidents of fortune--nay, these differences gave an additional interest. The footman had, no doubt, a point of view novel and valuable, if one could get at it.
Franklin did not attempt to get at it by any method subversive of order or interfering with Thomas"s duties; he observed all the conventions demanded by varying function. But Helen, strolling one morning before breakfast outside the dining-room windows, heard within and paused to listen to Mr. Kane"s monotonous and slightly nasal tones as he shared the morning news with Thomas, who, with an air of bewildered if obedient attention, continued his avocations between the sideboard and the breakfast-table.
"Now I should say," Franklin remarked, "that something of that sort--Germany"s doing wonders with it--could be worked here in England if you set yourselves to it."
"Yes, sir," said Thomas.
"Berlin has eliminated the slums, you know," said Franklin, looking thoughtfully at Thomas over the top of the paper. "What do you feel about it, all of you over here? It"s a big question, you know, that of the housing of the poor."
"Well, I can"t say, sir," said Thomas, compelled to a guarded opinion.
"Things do look black for the lower horders."
"You"re right, Thomas; and things will go on looking black for helpless people until they determine to help themselves, or until people who aren"t helpless--like you and me--determine they shan"t be so black."
"Yes, sir."
"Talk it over, you know. Get your friends interested in it. It"s a mighty big subject, of course, that of the State and its poor, but it"s wonderful what can be done by personal initiative."
Helen entered at this point, and Thomas turned a furtive eye upon her, perhaps in appeal for protection against these unprovoked and inexplicable attacks. "One might think the gentleman thought I had a vote and was canva.s.sing me," he said to Baines, condescending in this their common perplexity. And Baines replied: "I"m sure I don"t know what he"s up to."
Meanwhile Franklin, in the dining-room, folded his paper and said: "You know, Miss Buchanan, that Thomas, though a nice fellow, is remarkably ignorant. I can"t make out that there"s anything of a civic or national nature that he"s interested in. He doesn"t seem to read anything in the papers except the racing and betting news. He doesn"t seem to feel that he has any stake in this great country of yours, or any responsibility towards it. It makes me believe in manhood suffrage as I"ve never believed before. Our people may be politically corrupt, but at least they"re interested; they"re alive--alive enough to want to understand how to get the best of things--as they see best. I"ve rarely met an American that I couldn"t get to talk; now it"s almost impossible to get Thomas to talk. Yet he"s a nice young fellow; he has a nice, open, intelligent face."
"Oh yes, has he?" said Helen, who was looking over the envelopes at her place. "I hadn"t noticed his face; very pink, isn"t it?"
"Yes, he has a healthy colour," said Franklin, still meditating on Thomas"s impenetrability. "It"s not that I don"t perfectly understand his being uncommunicative when he"s engaged in his work--it was rather tactless of me to talk to him just now, only the subject came up. I"d been talking to Baines about the Old Age Pensions yesterday. That"s one of my objections to domestic service; it creates an artificial barrier between man and man; but I know that the barrier is part of the business, while the business is going on, and I"ve no quarrel with social convention, as such. But even when they are alone with me--and I"m referring to Baines now as much as to Thomas--they are very uncommunicative. I met Thomas on the road to the village the other day and could hardly get a word out of him till I began to talk about cricket and ask him about it."
"He is probably a stupid boy," said Helen, "and you frighten him."
"If you say that, it"s an indictment on the whole system, you know,"
said Franklin very gravely.
"What system?" Helen asked, opening her letters, but looking at Mr.
Kane.
"The system that makes some people afraid of others," said Franklin.
"It will always frighten inferior people to be talked to by their superiors as if they were on a level. You probably talk to Thomas about things he doesn"t understand, and it bewilders him." Helen, willing to enlighten his idealism, smiled mildly at him, glancing down at her letters as she spoke.
Mr. Kane surveyed her with his bright, steady gaze. Her simple elucidation evidently left him far from satisfied, either with her or the system. "In essentials, Miss Buchanan," he said, "in the power of effort, endurance, devotion, I"ve no doubt that Thomas and I are equals, and that"s all that ought to matter."