Althea gazed at these words. Then she turned her eyes and gazed at Gerald, who was not looking at her but straight before him. Her first clear thought was that if he had received a shock it could not be comparable to that which she now felt. It could not be that the letter had fallen on his heart like a sword, severing it. Althea"s heart seemed cleft in twain. Gerald--Franklin--it seemed to pulse, horribly divided and horribly bleeding. Looking still at Gerald"s face, pallid, absorbed, far from any thought of her, anger surged up in her, and not now against Gerald only, but against Franklin, who had failed her, against Helen, who, it seemed, did not win love, yet won something that took people to her and bound them to her. Then she remembered her unread letters, and remembered that Franklin could not have let this news come to her from another than himself. She drew out his letter and read it. It, too, was short.
"DEAREST ALTHEA,--I know how glad you"ll be to hear that happiness, though of a different sort, has come to me. Any sort of happiness was, for so many years, connected with you, dear Althea, that it"s very strange to me to realise that there can be another happiness; though this one is connected with you, too, and that makes me gladder. Helen, your dear friend, has consented to marry me, and the fact of her being your dear friend makes her even dearer to me. So that I must thank you for your part in this wonderful new opening in my life, as well as for all the other lovely things you"ve always meant to me.--Your friend, "FRANKLIN."
Althea"s hand dropped. She stared before her. She did not offer the letter to Gerald. "It"s incredible," she said, while, in the heavy mist, they walked along the road.
Gerald still said nothing. He held his head high, and gazed before him too, as if intent on difficult and evasive thoughts.
"I could not have believed it of Helen," said Althea after a little pause.
At this he started and looked round at her. "Believed? What? What is that you say?" His voice was sharp, as though she had struck him on the raw.
Althea steadied her own voice; she wished to strike him on the raw, and accurately; she could only do that by hiding from him her own great dismay. "I could not have believed that Helen would marry a man merely for his money." She did not believe that Helen was to marry Franklin merely for his money. If only she could have believed it; but the bleeding heart throbbed: "Lost--lost--lost." It was not money that Helen had seen and accepted; it was something that she herself had been too blind and weak to see. In Helen"s discovery she helplessly partook. He _was_ of value, then. He, whom she had not found good enough for her, was good enough for Helen. And this man--this affianced husband of hers--ah, his value she well knew; she was not blind to it--that was the sickening knowledge; she knew his value and it was not hers, not her possession, as Franklin"s love and all that Franklin was had been.
Gerald possessed her; she seemed to have no part in him; how little, his next words showed.
"What right have you to say she"s taking him merely for his money?"
Gerald demanded in his tense, vibrant voice.
Ah, how he made her suffer with his hateful unconsciousness of her pain--the male unconsciousness that rouses woman"s conscious cruelty.
"I know Helen. She has always been quite frank about her mercenary ideas. She always told me she would marry a man for his money."
"Then why do you say it"s incredible that she is going to?"
Why, indeed? but Althea held her lash. "I did not believe, even of her, that she would marry a man she considered so completely insignificant, so completely negligible--a man she described to me as a funny little man. There are limits, even to Helen"s insensitiveness, I should have imagined."
She had discovered the raw. Gerald was breathing hard.
"That must have been at first--when she didn"t know him. They became great friends; everybody saw that Helen had become very fond of him; I never knew her to be so fond of anybody. You are merely angry because a man who used to be in love with you has fallen in love with another woman."
So he, too, could lash. "How dare you, Gerald!" she said.
At her voice he paused, and there, in the wet road, they stood and looked at each other.
What Althea then saw in his face plunged her into the nightmare abyss of nothingness. What had she left? He did not love her--he did not even care for her. She had lost the real love, and this brightness that she clung to darkened for her. He looked at her, steadily, gloomily, ashamed of what she had made him say, yet too sunken in his own pain, too indifferent to hers, to unsay it. And in her dispossession she did not dare make manifest the severance that she saw. He did not care for her, but she could not tell him so; she could not tell him to go. With horrid sickness of heart she made a feint that hid her knowledge.
"What you say is not true. Franklin does not love her. I know him through and through. I am the great love of his life; even in his letter to me, here, he tells me that I am."
"Well, since you"ve thrown him over, he can console himself, I hope."
"You do not understand, Gerald. I am disappointed--in both my friends.
It is an ugly thing that has happened. You feel it so; and so do I."
He turned and began to walk on again. And still it lay with her to speak the words that would make truth manifest. She could not utter them; she could not, now, think. All that she knew was the dense, suffocating fear.
Suddenly she stopped, put her hands on her heart, then covered her eyes.
"I am ill; I feel very ill," she said. It was true. She did feel very ill. She went to the bank at the side of the road and sank down on it.
Gerald had supported her; she had dimly been aware of the bitter joy of feeling his arm around her, and the joy of it slid away like a snake, leaving poison behind. He stood above her, alarmed and pitying.
"Althea--shall I go and get some one? I am so awfully sorry--so frightfully sorry," he repeated.
She shook her head, sitting there, her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees. And in her great weakness an unbelievable thing happened to her. She began to cry piteously, and she sobbed: "O Gerald--don"t be unkind to me! don"t be cruel! don"t hurt me! O Gerald--love me--please love me!" The barriers of her pride, of her thought, were down, and, like the flowing of blood from an open wound, the truth gushed forth.
For a moment Gerald was absolutely silent. It was a tense, a stricken silence, and she felt in it something of the horror that the showing of a fatal wound might give. Then he knelt beside her; he took her hand; he put his arm around her. "Althea, what a brute--what a brute I"ve been.
Forgive me." It was for something else than his harsh words that he was asking her forgiveness. He pa.s.sed hurriedly from that further, that inevitable hurt. "I can"t tell you how---- I mean I"m so completely sorry. You see, I was so taken aback--so cut up, you know. I could think of nothing else. She is such an old friend--my nearest friend. I never imagined her marrying, somehow; it was like hearing that she was going away for ever. And what you said made me angry." Even he, with all his compunction, could but come back to the truth.
And, helpless, she could but lean on his pity, his sheer human pity.
"I know. He was my nearest friend too. For all my life I"ve been first with him. I was cut up too. I am sorry--I spoke so."
"Poor girl--poor dear. Here, take my arm. Here. Now, you do feel better."
She was on her feet, her hand drawn through his arm, her face turned from him and still bathed in tears.
They walked back slowly along the road. They were silent. From time to time she knew that he looked at her with solicitude; but she could not return his look. The memory of her own words was with her, a strange, new, menacing fact in life. She had said them, and they had altered everything. Henceforth she depended on his pity, on his loyalty, on his sense of duty to a task undertaken. Their bond was recognised as an unequal one. Once or twice, in the dull chaos of her mind, a flicker of pride rose up. Could she not emulate Helen? Helen was to marry a man who did not love her. Helen was to marry rationally, with open eyes, a man who was her friend. But Helen did not love the man who did not love her.
She was not his thrall. She gained, she did not lose, her freedom.
CHAPTER XXV.
A week was gone since Helen had given her consent to Franklin, and again she was in her little sitting-room and again waiting, though not for Franklin. Franklin had been with her all the morning; and he had been constantly with her through the week, and she had found the closer companionship, until to-day, strangely easy. Franklin"s very lacks endeared him to her. It was wonderful to see any one so devoid of any glamour, of any advent.i.tious aid from nature, who yet so beamed. This beaming quality was, for Helen, his chief characteristic. There was certainly no brilliancy in Franklin"s light; it was hardly a ray and it emitted never a sparkle; but it was a mild, diffused effulgence, and she always felt more peaceful and restored for coming within its radius.
It had wrapped her around all the week, and it had remained so unchanged that their relation, too, had seemed unchanged and her friend only a little nearer, a little more solicitous. They had gone about together; they had taken walks in the parks; they had made plans while strolling beside the banks of the Serpentine or leaning on the bridge in St.
James"s Park, to watch the ducks being fed. Already she and Franklin and the deeply triumphant Aunt Grizel had gone on a journey down to the country to look at a beautiful old house in order to see if it would do as one of Helen"s "establishments." Already Franklin had brought her a milky string of perfect pearls, saying mildly, as he had said of the box of sweets, "I don"t approve of them, but I hope you do." And on her finger was Franklin"s ring, a n.o.ble emerald that they had selected together.
Helen had been pleased to feel in herself a capacity for satisfaction in these possessions, actual and potential. She liked to look at the great blot of green on her hand and to see the string of pearls sliding to her waist. She liked to ponder on the Jacobean house with its splendid rise of park and fall of sward. She didn"t at all dislike it, either, when Franklin, as calmly possessed as ever with a clear sense of his duties, discussed with her the larger and more impersonal uses of their fortune.
She found that she had ideas for him there; that the thinking and active self, so long inert, could be roused to very good purpose; that it was interesting, and very interesting, to plan, with millions at one"s disposal, for the furtherance of the just and the beautiful. And she found, too, in spite of her warnings to Franklin, that though she might be a hard, a selfish, and a broken-hearted woman, she was a woman with a very definite idea of her own responsibilities. It did not suit her at all to be the mere pa.s.sive receiver; it did not suit her to be greedy.
She turned her mind at once, carefully and consistently, to Franklin"s interests. She found atoms and kinetics rather confusing at first, but Franklin"s delighted and deliberate elucidations made a light for her that promised by degrees to illuminate these dark subjects. Yes; already life had taken hold of her and, ironically, yet not unwillingly, she followed it along the appointed path. Yesterday, however, and to-day, especially, a complication, subtle yet emphatic, had stolen upon her consciousness.
All the week long, in spite of something mastered and controlled in his bearing, she had seen that he was happy, and though not imaginative as to Franklin"s past, she had guessed that he had never in all his life been so happy, and that never had life so taken hold of him. He enjoyed the pearls, he enjoyed the emerald, he enjoyed the Jacobean house and going over it with her and Aunt Grizel; above all he enjoyed herself as a thinking and acting being, the turning of her attention to atoms, her grave, steady penetration of his life. And in this happiness the something controlled and mastered had melted more and more; she had intended that it should melt. She had guessed at the pain, the anxiety for her that had underlain the dear little man"s imperturbability, and she had determined that as far as in her lay Franklin should think her happy, should think that, at all events, she was serene and without qualms or misgivings. And she had accomplished this. It was as if she saw him breathing more deeply, more easily; as if, with a long sigh of relief, he smiled at her and said, with a new accent of confidence: "All right." And then, after the sigh of relief, she saw that he became too happy. It was only yesterday that she began to see it; it was to-day that she had clearly seen that Franklin had fallen in love with her.
It wasn"t that, in any blindness to what she meant, he came nearer and made mistakes. He did not come a step nearer, and, in his happiness, his unconscious happiness, he was further from the possibility of mistakes than before. He did not draw near. He stood and gazed. Men had loved Helen before, yet, she felt it, no man had loved her as Franklin did.
She could not have a.n.a.lysed the difference between his love and that of other men, yet she felt it dimly. Franklin stood and gazed; but it was not at charm or beauty that he gazed; whether he was really deeply aware of them she could not tell; the only words she could find with which to express her predicament and its cause sounded silly to her, but she could find no others. Franklin was gazing at her soul. She couldn"t imagine what he found to fix him in it; he had certainly said that she was the honestest woman he had known; she gloomily made out that she was, she supposed, "straight"; she liked clear, firm things, and she liked to keep a bargain. It didn"t seem to her a very arresting array of virtues; but then--no, she couldn"t settle Franklin"s case so glibly as that; if it wasn"t what she might have of charm that he had fallen in love with, it wasn"t what she might have of virtue either. Perhaps one"s soul hadn"t much to do with either charm or virtue. And, after all, whatever it was, he was gazing at it, rapt, smiling, grave, in the lover"s trance. He saw her, and only her. And she saw him, and a great many other things besides.
The immediate hope that came to her was that Franklin, perhaps, might really never know just what had happened to him. If he never recognised it, it might never become explicit; it might be managed; it could of course be managed in any case; but how she should hate having him made conscious of pain. If he never said to himself, and far less to her, that he had fallen in love with her, he might not really suffer in the strange, ill-adjusted union before them. She did not think that he had yet said it to himself; but she feared that he was hovering on the verge of self-recognition. His very guilelessness in the realm of the emotions exposed him to her, and with her perplexity went a yearning of pity as she witnessed the soft, the hesitant, the delicate unfolding.
For more had come than the tranced gaze. That morning, writing notes, with Franklin beside her, her hand had inadvertently touched his once or twice in taking the papers from him, and Helen then had seen that Franklin blushed. Twice, also, looking up, she had found his eyes fixed on her with the lover"s dwelling tenderness, and both times he had quickly averted his glance in a manner very new in him.
Helen had pondered deeply in the moments before his departure. Franklin had never kissed her; the time would come when he must kiss her. The time would come when a kiss of farewell or greeting must, however rare, be a facile, marital custom. How would Franklin--trembling on that verge of a self-recognition that might make a chaos of his life--how and when would he initiate that custom? How could it be initiated by him at all unless with an emotion that would not only reveal him to himself, but make it known to him that he was revealed to her. The revelation, if it came, must come gradually; they must both have time to get used to it, she to having a husband she did not love in love with her; he to loving a wife who would never love him back. She shrank from the thought of emotional revelations. It was her part to initiate and to make a kiss an easy thing. Yet she found, sitting there, writing the last notes, with Franklin beside her, that it was not an easy thing to contemplate. The thought of her own cowardice spurred her on. When Franklin rose at last, gave her his hand, said that he"d come back that evening, Helen rose too, resolved. "Good-bye," she said. "Don"t forget the tickets for that concert."
"No, indeed," said Franklin.
"And I think, don"t you? that we might put the announcement in the papers to-morrow. Aunt Grizel wants, I am sure, to see me safely Morning Posted."