Here, at last, was beauty. The light, among the fanlike branches, looked like sea-water streaked with gold; the tall boles of the beeches were like the pillars of a temple sunken in the sea. Helen lay back, folded her arms behind her head, and stared up at the c.h.i.n.ks of far brightness in the green roof overhead. It was like being drowned, deep beneath the surface of things. If only she could be at peace, like a drowned thing.
Lying there, she longed to die, to dissolve away into the moss, the earth, the cool, green air. And feeling this, in the sudden beauty, tears, for the first time, came to her eyes. She turned over on her face, burying it in her arms and muttering in childish language, "I"m sick of it; sick to death of it."
As she spoke she was aware that some one was near her. A sudden footfall, a sudden pause, followed her words. She lifted her head, then she sat up. The tears had flowed and her cheeks were wet with them, but of that she was not conscious, so great was her surprise at finding Franklin Winslow Kane standing before her on the mossy path.
Mr. Kane carried his straw hat in his hand. He was very warm, his hair was untidy on his moist brow, his boots were white with dust, his trousers were turned up from them and displayed an inch or so of thin ankle encased in oatmeal-coloured socks. His tie--Helen noted the one salient detail among the many dull ones that made up a whole so incongruous with the magic scene--was of a peculiarly harsh and ugly shade of blue. He had only just climbed over a low wall near by and that was why he had come upon her so inaudibly and had, so inadvertently, been a witness of her grief.
He did not, however, show embarra.s.sment, but looked at her with the hesitant yet sympathetic attentiveness of a vagrant dog.
Helen sat on the moss, her feet extended before her, and she returned his look from her tearful eyes, making no attempt to soften the oddity of the situation. She found, indeed, a gloomy amus.e.m.e.nt in it, and was aware of wondering what Mr. Kane, who made so much of everything, would make of their mutual predicament.
"Have you been having a long walk, too?" she asked.
He looked at her, smiling now a little, as if he wagged a responsive tail; but he was not an ingratiating dog, only a friendly and a troubled one.
"Yes, I have," he said. "We have got rather a long way off, Miss Buchanan."
"That"s a comfort sometimes, isn"t it," said Helen. She took out her handkerchief and dried her eyes, drawing herself, then, into a more comfortable position against the trunk of a beech-tree.
"You"d rather I went away, wouldn"t you," said Mr. Kane; "but let me say first that I"m very sorry to have intruded, and very sorry indeed to see that you"re unhappy."
She now felt that she did not want him to go, indeed she felt that she would rather he stayed. After the loneliness of her despair, she liked the presence of the friendly, wandering dog. It would be comforting to have it sit down beside you and to have it thud its tail when you chanced to look at it. Mr. Kane would not intrude, he would be a consolation.
"No, don"t go," she said. "Do sit down and rest. It"s frightfully hot, isn"t it."
He sat down in front of her, clasping his knees about, as was his wont, and exposing thereby not only the entire oatmeal sock, but a section of leg nearly matching it in tint.
"Well, I am rather tired," he said. "I"ve lost my way, I guess." And, looking about him, he went on: "Very peaceful things aren"t they, the woods. Trees are very peaceful things, pacifying things, I mean."
Helen looked up at them. "Yes, they are peaceful. I don"t know that I find them pacifying."
His eyes came back to her and he considered her again for a moment before he said, smiling gently, "I"ve been crying too."
In the little pause that followed this announcement they continued to look at each other, and it was not so much that their eyes sounded the other"s eyes as that they deepened for each other and, without effort or surprise, granted to each other the quiet avowal of complete sincerity.
"I"m very sorry that you are unhappy, too," said Helen. She noticed now that his eyes were jaded and that all his clear, terse little face was softened and relaxed.
"Yes, I"m unhappy," said Franklin. "It"s queer, isn"t it, that we should find each other like this. I"m glad I"ve found you: two unhappy people are better together, I think, than alone. It eases things a little, don"t you think so?"
"Perhaps it does," said Helen. "That is, it does if one of them is so kind and so pacifying as you are; you do remind me of the trees," she smiled.
"Ah, well, that"s very sweet of you, very sweet indeed," said Franklin, looking about him at the limpid green. "It makes me feel I"m not intruding, to have you say that to me. It didn"t follow, of course, because I"m glad to find you that you would be glad I"d come. You don"t show it much, Miss Buchanan"--he was looking at her again--"your crying."
"I"m always afraid that I show it dreadfully. That"s the worst of it, I don"t dare indulge in it often."
"No, you don"t show it much. You sometimes look as though you had been crying when I"m sure you haven"t--early in the morning, for instance."
Helen could but smile again. "You are very observant. You really noticed that?"
"I don"t know that I"m so very observant, Miss Buchanan, but I"m interested in everybody, and I"m particularly interested in you, so that of course I notice things like that. Now you aren"t particularly interested in me--though you are so kind--are you?" and again Mr. Kane smiled his weary, gentle smile.
It seemed very natural to sit under peaceful trees and talk to Mr. Kane, and it was easy to be perfectly frank with him. Helen answered his smile. "No, I"m not. I"m quite absorbed in my own affairs. I"m interested in hardly anybody. I"m very selfish."
"Ah, you would find that you wouldn"t suffer so--in just your way, I mean--if you were less selfish," Franklin Kane remarked.
"What other way is there?" Helen asked. "What is your way?"
"Well, I don"t know that I"ve found a much better one, our ways seem to have brought us to pretty much the same place, haven"t they," he almost mused. "That"s the worst of suffering, it"s pretty much alike, at all times and in all ways. I"m not unselfish either, you know, a mighty long way from it. But I"m not sick of it, you know, not sick to death of it.
Forgive me if I offend in repeating your words."
"You are unselfish, I"m sure of that," said Helen. "And so you must have other things to live for. My life is very narrow, and when things I care about are ruined I see nothing further."
"Things are never ruined in life, Miss Buchanan. As long as there is life there is hope and action and love. As long as you can love you can"t be sick to death of it." Mr. Kane spoke in his deliberate, monotonous tones.
Helen was silent for a little while. She was wondering; not about Mr.
Kane, nor about his suffering, nor about the oddity of thus talking with him about her own. It was no more odd to talk to him than if he had been the warm-hearted dog, dowered for her benefit with speech; she was wondering about what he said and about that love to which he alluded.
"Perhaps I don"t know much about love," she said, and more to herself than to Mr. Kane.
"I"ve inferred that since knowing you," said Franklin.
"I mean, of course," Helen defined, "the selfless love you are talking of."
"Yes, I understand," said Franklin. "Now, you see, the other sort of love, the sort that makes people go away and cry in the woods--for I"ve been crying because I"m hopelessly in love, Miss Buchanan, and I presume that you are too--well, that sort of love can"t escape ruin sometimes.
That side of life may go to pieces and then there"s nothing left for it but to cry. But that side isn"t all life, Miss Buchanan."
Helen did not repudiate his interpretation of her grief. She was quite willing that Mr. Kane should know why she had been crying, but she did not care to talk about that side to him. It had been always, and it would always be, she feared, all life to her. She looked sombrely before her into the green vistas.
"Of course," Franklin went on, "I don"t know anything about your hopeless love affair. I"m only sure that your tragedy is a n.o.ble one and that you are up to it, you know--as big as it is. If it"s hopeless, it"s not, I"m sure, because of anything in you. It"s because of fate, or circ.u.mstance, or some unworthiness in the person you care for. Now with me one of the hardest things to bear is the fact that I"ve nothing to blame but myself. I"m not adequate, that"s the trouble; no charm, you see," Mr. Kane again almost mused, "no charm. Charm is the great thing, and it means more than it seems to mean, all evolution, the survival of the fittest--natural selection--is in it, when you come to think of it.
If I"d had charm, personality, or, well, greatness of some sort, I"d have probably won Althea long ago. You know, of course, that it"s Althea I"m in love with, and have been for years and years. Well, there it is,"
Franklin was picking tall blades of gra.s.s that grew in a little tuft near by and putting them neatly together as he spoke. "There it is, but even with the pain of just that sort of failure to bear, I don"t intend that my life shall be ruined. It can"t be, by the loss of that hope. I"m not good enough for Althea. I"ve got to accept that; natural selection rejects me," looking up from his gra.s.s blades he smiled gravely at his companion; "but I"m good enough for other beautiful things that need serving. And I"m good enough to go on being Althea"s friend, to be of some value to her in that capacity. So my life isn"t ruined, not by a long way, and I wish you"d try to feel the same about yours."
Helen didn"t feel in the least inclined to try, but she found herself deeply interested in Mr. Kane"s att.i.tude; for the first time Mr. Kane had roused her intent interest. She looked hard at him while he sat there, demonstrating to her the justice of life"s dealings with him and laying one blade of gra.s.s so accurately against another, and she was wondering now about him. It was not because she thought her own feelings sacred that she preferred them to be concealed, but she saw that Mr.
Kane"s were no less sacred to him for being thus unconcealed. She even guessed that his revelation of feeling was less for his personal relief than for her personal benefit; that he was carrying out, in all the depths of his sincerity, a wish to comfort her, to take her out of herself. Well, he had taken her out of herself, and after having heard that morning what Althea"s significance could be in the life of another man, she was curious to find what her so different significance could be in the life of this one, as alien from Gerald in type and temperament as it was possible to imagine. Why did Althea mean anything at all to Gerald, and why did she mean everything to Mr. Kane? And through what intuition of the truth had Mr. Kane come to his present hopelessness?
"Do you think women always fall in love with the adequate man, and _vice versa_?" she asked, and her eyes were gentle as they mused on him. "Why should you say that it"s because you"re not adequate that Althea isn"t in love with you?"
Franklin fixed his eye upon her and it had now a new light, it deepened for other problems than Helen"s and his own. "Not adequate for her--not what she wants--that"s my point," he said. "But there are other sorts of mistakes to make, of course. If Althea falls in love with a man equipped as I"m not equipped, that does prove that I lack something that would have won her; but it doesn"t prove that she"s found the right man. We"ve got beyond natural selection when it comes to life as a whole. He may be the man for her to fall in love with, but is he the man to make her happy? That"s just the question for me, Miss Buchanan, and I wish you"d help me with it."
"Help you?" Helen rather faltered.
"Yes, please try. You must see--I see it plainly enough--that Mr. Digby is going to marry Althea." He actually didn"t add, "If she"ll have him."
Helen wondered how far his perspicacity went; had he seen what Gerald had seen, and what she had not seen at all?
"You think it"s Gerald who is in love with her?" she asked.
Again Franklin"s eye was on her, and she now saw in it his deep perplexity. She couldn"t bear to add to it. "I"ve guessed nothing," she said. "You must enlighten me."
"I wasn"t sure at first," said Franklin, groping his way. "He seemed so devoted to Lady Pickering; but for some days it"s been obvious, hasn"t it, that that wasn"t in the least serious?"
"Not in the least."