"So do I," smiled Franklin.
Helen was summoning her courage. "Good-bye," she repeated, and now she smiled with a new sweetness. "I think we ought to kiss each other good-bye, don"t you? We are such an old engaged couple."
Resolved, and firm in her resolve, though knowing commotion of soul, she leaned to him and kissed his forehead and turned her cheek to him.
Franklin had kept her hand, and in the pause, where she did not see his face, she felt his tighten on it; but he did not kiss her. Smiling a little nervously, she raised her head and looked at him. He was gazing at her with a shaken, stricken look.
"You must kiss me good-bye," said Helen, speaking as she would have spoken to a departing child. "Why, we have no right to be put in the _Morning Post_ unless we"ve given each other a kiss."
And, really like the child, Franklin said: "Must I?"
He kissed her then, gently, and spoke no further word. But she knew, when he had gone, and when thinking over the meaning of his face as it only came to her when the daze of her own daring faded and left her able to think, that she had hardly helped Franklin over a difficulty; she had made him aware of it rather; she had shown him what his task must be.
And it could not rea.s.sure her, for Franklin, that his face, after that stricken moment, and with a wonderful swiftness of delicacy, had promised her that it should be accomplished. It promised her that there should be no emotions, or, if there were, that they should be mastered ones; it promised her that she should see nothing in him to make her feel that she was refusing anything, nothing to make her feel that she was giving pain by a refusal. It seemed to say that he knew, now, at last, what the burden was that he laid upon her and that it should be as light as he could make it. It did not show her that he saw his own burden; but Helen saw it for him. She, too, made herself promises as she stood after his departure, taking a long breath over her discovery; she was not afraid in looking forward. All that she was afraid of--and it was of this that she was thinking as she now stood leaning her arm upon the mantelshelf and looking into the fire,--all that she was afraid of was of looking back. It was for Gerald that she was waiting and it was Gerald"s note that hung from her hand against her knee, and since that note had come, not long after Franklin had left her, her thoughts had been centred on the coming interview. Gerald had not written to her from the country; she had expected to have an answer to her announcement that morning, but none had come. This note had been brought by hand, and it said that if he could not find her at four would she kindly name some other hour when he might do so. She had answered that he would find her, and it was now five minutes to the hour.
Gerald"s note had not said much more, and yet, in the little it did say, it had contrived to be tense and cool. It seemed to intimate that he reserved a great deal to say to her, and that, perhaps more, he reserved a great deal to think and not to say. It was a note that had startled her and that then had filled her with a bitterness of heart greater than any she had ever known. For that she would not accept, not that tone from Gerald. That it should be Gerald--Gerald of all the people in the world--to adopt that tone to her! The exceeding irony of it brought a laugh to her lips. She was on edge. Her strength had only just taken her through the morning and its revelations, there was none left now for patience and evasion. Gerald must be careful, was the thought that followed the laugh.
CHAPTER XXVI.
She heard the door-bell ring, and then his quick step. It did not seem to her this afternoon that she had to master the disquiet of heart that his coming always brought. It was something steeled and hostile that waited for him.
When he had entered and stood before her she saw that he intended to be careful, to be very careful, and the recognition of that att.i.tude in him gave further bitterness to her cold, her fierce revolt. What right had he to that bright formal smile, that chill pressure of her fingers, that air of crisp cheerfulness, as of one injured but willing, magnanimously, to conceal his hurt? What right--good heavens!--had Gerald to feel injured? She almost laughed again as she looked at him and at this unveiling of his sublime self-centredness. He expected to find his world just as he would have it, his cushion at his head and his footstool at his feet, the wife in her place fulfilling her comely duties, the spinster friend in hers, administering balms and counsels; the wife at Merriston House, and the spinster friend in the little sitting-room where, for so many years, he had come to her with all his moods and misfortunes. She felt that her eyes fixed themselves on him with a cold menace as he stood there on the other side of the fire and, putting his foot on the fender, looked first at her and then down at the flames. His very silence was full of the sense of injury; but she knew that hers was the compelling silence and that she could force him to be the first to speak. And so it was that presently he said:
"Well, Helen, this is great news."
"Yes, isn"t it?" she answered. "It has been a year of news, hasn"t it?"
He stared, courteously blank, and something in her was pleased to observe that he looked silly with his affectation of blandness.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You had your great event, and I, now, have mine."
"Ah yes, I see."
"It"s all rather queer when one comes to think of it," said Helen.
"Althea, my new friend--whom I told you of here, only a few months ago--and her friend. How important they have become to us, and how little, last summer, we could have dreamed of it." She, too, was speaking artificially, and was aware of it; but she was well aware that Gerald didn"t find that she looked silly. She had every advantage over the friend who came with his pretended calm and his badly hidden rancour. And since he stood silent, looking at the fire, she added, mildly and cheerfully: "I am so glad for your happiness, Gerald, and I hope that you are glad for mine."
He looked up at her now, and she could not read the look; it hid something--or else it sought for something hidden; and in its oddity--which reminded her of a blind animal dazedly seeking its path--it so nearly touched her that, with a revulsion from any hint of weakening pity for him, it made her bitterness against him greater than before.
"I"m afraid I can"t say I"m glad, Helen," he replied. "I"m too amazed, still, to feel anything except"--he seemed to grope for a word and then to give it up--"amazement."
"I was surprised myself," said Helen. "I had not much hope left of anything so fortunate happening to me."
"You feel it, then, so fortunate?"
"Don"t you think that it is--to marry millions," Helen asked, smiling, "and to have found such a good man to care for me?"
"I think it is he who is fortunate," said Gerald, after a moment.
"Thank you; perhaps we both are fortunate."
Once more there was a long silence and then, suddenly, Gerald flung away, thrusting his hands in his pockets and stopping before the window, his back turned to her. "I can"t stand this," he declared.
"What can"t you stand?"
"You don"t love this man. He doesn"t love you."
"What is that to you?" asked Helen.
"I can"t think it of you; I can"t bear to think it."
"What is it to you?" she repeated, in a deadened voice.
"Why do you say that?" he took her up with controlled fury. "How couldn"t it but be a great deal to me? Haven"t you been a great deal--for all our lives nearly? Do you mean that you"re going to kick me out completely--because you are going to marry? What does it mean to me? I wish it could mean something to you of what it does to me. To give yourself--you--you--to a man who doesn"t love you--whom you don"t love--for money. Oh, I know we"ve always talked of that sort of thing as if it were possible--and perhaps it is--for a man. But when it comes to a woman--a woman one has cared for--looked up to--as I have to you--it"s a different matter. One expects a different standard."
"What standard do you expect from me?" asked Helen. There were tears, but tears of rage, in her voice.
"You know," said Gerald, who also was struggling with an emotion that, rising, overcame his control, "you know what I think of you--what I expect of you. A great match--a great man--something fitting for you--one could accept that; but this little American nonent.i.ty, this little American--barely a gentleman--whom you"d never have looked at if he hadn"t money--a man who will make you ridiculous, a man who can"t have a thought or feeling in common with you--it"s not fit--it"s not worthy; it smirches you; it"s debasing."
He had not turned to look at her while he spoke, perhaps did not dare to look. He knew that his anger, his more than anger, had no warrant, and that the words in which it cloaked itself--though he believed in all he said--were unjustifiable. But it was more than anger, and it must speak, must plead, must protest. He had no right to say these things, perhaps, but Helen should understand the more beneath, should understand that he was lost, bewildered, miserable; if Helen did not understand, what was to become of him? And now she stood there behind him, not speaking, not answering him, so that he was almost frightened and murmured on, half inaudibly: "It"s a wrong you do--to me--to our friendship, as well as to yourself."
Helen now spoke, and the tone of her voice arrested his attention even before the meaning of her words reached him. It was a tone that he had never heard from her, and it was not so much that it made him feel that he had lost her as that it made him feel--strangely and penetratingly--that he had never known her.
"You say all this to me, Gerald, you who in all these years have never taken the trouble to wonder or think about me at all--except how I might amuse you or advise you, or help you." These were Helen"s words. "Why should I go on considering you, who have never considered me?"
It was so sudden, so amazing, and so cruel that, turning to her, he literally stared, open-eyed and open-mouthed. "I don"t know what you mean, Helen," he said.
"Of course you don"t," she continued in her measured voice, "of course you don"t know what I mean; you never have. I don"t blame you; you are not imaginative, and all my life I"ve taken care that you should know very little of what I meant. The only bit of me that you"ve known has been the bit that has always been at your service. There is a good deal more of me than that."
"But--what have you meant?" he stammered, almost in tears.
Her face, white and cold, was bent on him, and in her little pause she seemed to deliberate--not on what he should be told, that was fixed--but on how to tell it; and for this she found finally short and simple words.
"Can"t you guess, even now, when at last I"ve become desperate and indifferent?" she said. "Can"t you see, even now, that I"ve always loved you?"
They confronted each other in a long moment of revelation and avowal. It grew like a great distance between them, the distance of all the years through which she had suffered and he been blind. Gerald saw it like a chasm, dark with time, with secrecy, with his intolerable stupidity. He gazed at her across it, and in her face, her strange, strong, fragile, weary face, he saw it all, at last. Yes, she had loved him all her life, and he had never seen it.
She had moved, in speaking to him, away from her place near the fire, and he now went to it, and put his arms on the mantelpiece and hid his face upon them. "Fool--fool that I am!" he uttered softly. He stood so, his face hidden from her, and his words seemed to release some bond in Helen"s heart. The worst of the bitterness against him pa.s.sed away. The tragedy, after all, was not his fault, but Fate"s, and to suggest that he was accountable was to be grotesquely stupid. That he had not loved her was the tragedy; that he had never seen was, in reality, the tragedy"s alleviation. Absurd to blame poor Gerald for not seeing. When she spoke again it was in an altered voice.
"No, you"re not," she said, and she seemed with him to contemplate the chasm and to make it clear for him--she had always made things clear for him, and there was now, with all the melancholy, a peacefulness in sharing with him this, their last, situation. Never before had they talked over one so strange, and never again would they talk over any other so near; to speak at last was to make it, in its very nearness, immeasurably remote, to put it away, from both their lives, for ever.
"No, you"re not; I shouldn"t have said that you were not imaginative; I shouldn"t have said that you had never considered me; you have--you have been the best of friends; I was letting myself be cruel. It"s only that _I"m_ not a fool. A woman who isn"t can always keep a man from imagining; it"s the one thing that even a stupid woman can do. And my whole nature has been moulded by the instinct for concealment." She looked round mechanically for a seat while she spoke; she felt horribly tired; and she sank on a straight, high chair near the writing-table.
Here, leaning forward, her arms resting on her knees, her hands clasped and hanging, she went on, looking before her. "I want to tell you about it now. There are things to confess. I haven"t been a nice woman in it all; I"ve not taken it as a nice woman would. I"ve hated you for not loving me. I"ve hated you for not wanting anything more from me and for your contentment with what I gave you, and for caring as much as you did, too, for being fonder of me than of any one else in the world, and yet never caring more. Of course I understood; it was a little comfort to my pride to understand. Even if I"d been the sort of woman you would have fallen in love with, I was too near. I had to make myself too near; that was my shield. I had to give you everything you wanted because that was the sure way to hide from you that I had so much more to give.
And for years I went on hoping--not that you would see--I should have lost everything then--but that, of yourself, you would want more."
Gerald had lifted his head, but his hand still hid his eyes. "Helen, dear Helen," he said, and she did not understand his voice--it was pain, but more than pain; "why were you so cruel? why were you so proud? If you"d only let me see; if you"d only given me a hint. Don"t you know it only needed that?"