"Never," said Franklin, his intent face expressing an almost ritualistic receptivity.
"Well, she"s a poor creature," said Miss Buchanan, "a poor, rubbishy creature; the most selfish and reckless woman I know. I warned my brother how it would turn out from the first; but he was infatuated and had his way, and a wretched way it turned out. She made him miserable, and she made the children miserable, and she nearly ruined him with her extravagance; he and I together managed to put things straight, and see to it that Nigel should come into a property not too much enc.u.mbered and that Helen should inherit a little sum, enough to keep her going--a little more it was, as a matter of fact, than what I"ll be able to leave her. Well, when my brother died, she was of age and she came into her modest fortune; for a young girl, with me to back her up, it wasn"t bad. She had hardly seen her mother for three years--they"d always been at daggers drawn--when one day, up in Scotland, when she was with her brother--it was before Nigel married--who should appear but Daisy. She had travelled up there in desperate haste to throw herself on her children"s mercy. She was in terrible straits. She had got into debt--cards and racing--and she was frightfully involved with some horror of a man. Her honour was wrecked unless she could pay her debts and extricate herself. Well, she found no mercy in Nigel; he refused to give her a farthing. It was Helen who stripped herself of every penny she possessed and saved her. I don"t know whether she touched Helen"s pity, or whether it was mere family pride; the thought of the horror of a man was probably a strong motive too. All Helen ever said about it to me was, "How could I bear to see her like that?" So, she ruined herself.
Of course after that it was more than ever necessary that she should marry. I hadn"t begun to save for her, and there was nothing else for her to look to. Of course I expected her to marry at once; she was altogether the most charming girl of her day. But there is the trouble; she never did. She refused two most brilliant offers, one after the other, and hosts of minor ones. There was some streak of girlish romance in her, I suppose. I wish I could have been more on the spot and put on pressure. But it was difficult to be on the spot. Helen never told me about her offers until long after; and pressure with her wouldn"t come to much. Of course I didn"t respect her the less for her foolishness.
But, dear me, dear me," said Miss Buchanan, turning her eyes on the fire, "what a pity it has all been, what a pity it is, to see her wasted."
Franklin listened to this strange tale, dealing with matters to him particularly strange, such as gambling, dishonoured mothers, horrors of men and mercenary marriages. It all struck him as very dreadful; it all sank into him; but it didn"t oppress him in its strangeness; no outside fact, however dreadful, ever oppressed Franklin. What did oppress him was the thought of Helen in it all. This oppressed him very much.
Miss Buchanan continued to look into the fire for a little while after she had finished her story, and then, bringing her eyes back to Franklin"s countenance, she looked at him keenly and steadily. "And now, Mr. Kane," she said, "you are perhaps asking yourself why I tell you all this?"
Franklin was not asking it at all, and he answered with earnest sincerity: "Why, no; I think I ought to be told. I want to be told everything about my friends that I may hear. I"m glad to know this, because it makes me feel more than ever what a fine woman Miss Helen is, and I"m sorry, because she"s wasted, as you say. I only wish," said Franklin, and the intensity of cogitation deepened on his face, "I only wish that one could think out some plan to give her a chance."
"I wish one could," said Miss Buchanan. And without any change of voice she added: "I want you to marry her, Mr. Kane."
Franklin sat perfectly still and turned his eyes on her with no apparent altering of expression, unless the arrested stillness of his look was alteration. His eyes and Miss Buchanan"s plunged deep into each other"s, held each other"s for a long time. Then, slowly, deeply, Franklin flushed.
"But, Miss Buchanan," he said, pausing between his sentences, for he did not see his way, "I"m in love with another woman--that is----" and for a longer pause his way became quite invisible--"I"ve been in love with another woman for years."
"You mean Miss Jakes," said Miss Buchanan. "Helen told me about it. But does that interfere? Helen isn"t likely to be in love with you or to expect you to be in love with her. And the woman you"ve loved for years is going to marry some one else. It"s not as if you had any hope."
There was pain for Franklin in this reasonable speech, but he could not see clearly where it lay; curiously, it did not seem to centre on that hopelessness as regarded Althea. He could see nothing clearly, and there was no time for self-examination. "No," he agreed. "No, that"s true.
It"s not as if I had any hope."
"I think Helen worthy of any man alive," said Miss Buchanan, "and yet, under the strange circ.u.mstances, I know that what I"m asking of you is an act of chivalry. I want to see Helen safe, and I think she would be safe with you."
Franklin flushed still more deeply. "Yes, I think she would," he said.
He paused then, again, trying to think, and what he found first was a discomfort in the way she had put it. "It wouldn"t be an act of chivalry," he said. "Don"t think that. I care for Miss Helen too much for that. It"s all the other way round, you know. I mean"--he brought out--"I don"t believe she"d think of taking me."
Miss Grizel"s eyes were on him, and it may have been their gaze that made him feel the discomfort. She seemed to be seeing something that evaded him. "I don"t look like a husband for a decorative idler, do I, Miss Buchanan?" he tried to smile.
Her eyes, with their probing keenness, smiled back. "You mayn"t look like one, but you are one, with your millions," she said. "And I believe Helen might think of taking you. She has had plenty of time to outgrow youthful dreams. She"s tired. She wants ease and security. She needs a husband, and she doesn"t need a lover at all. She would get power, and you would get a charming wife--a woman, moreover, whom you care for and respect--as she does you; and you would get a home and children. I imagine that you care for children. Decorative idler though she is, Helen would make an excellent mother."
"Yes, I care very much for children," Franklin murmured, not confused--pained, rather, by this unveiling of his inner sanct.i.ties.
"Of course," Miss Buchanan went on, "you wouldn"t want Helen to live out of England. Of course you would make generous settlements and give her her proper establishments here. I want Helen to be safe; but I don"t want safety for her at the price of extinction."
Obviously, Franklin could see that very clearly, whatever else was dim, he was the vase for the lovely flower. That was his use and his supreme significance in Miss Buchanan"s eyes. And the lovely flower was to be left on its high stand where all the world could see it; what other use was there for it? He quite saw Miss Buchanan"s point, and the strange thing was, in spite of all the struggling of confused pain and perplexity in him, that here he, too, was clear; with no sense of inner protest he could make it his point too. He wanted Helen to stay in her vase; he didn"t want to take her off the high stand. He had not time now to seek for consistency with his principles, his principles must stretch, that was all; they must stretch far enough to take in Helen and her stand; once they had done that he felt that there might be more to say and that he should be able to say it; he felt sure that he should say nothing that Helen would not like; even if she disagreed, she would always smile at him.
"No," he said, "it wouldn"t do for her to live anywhere but in England."
"Well, then, what do you say to it?" asked Miss Buchanan. She had rather the manner of a powerful chancellor negotiating for the marriage of a princess.
"Why," Franklin replied, smiling very gravely, "I say yes. But I can"t think that Miss Helen will."
"Try your chances," said Miss Buchanan. She reached across the table and shook his hand. "I like you, Mr. Kane," she said. "I think you are a good man; and, don"t forget, in spite of my worldliness, that if I weren"t sure of that, all your millions wouldn"t have made me think of you for Helen."
CHAPTER XXIII.
Helen returned to town on Monday afternoon, and, on going to her room, found two notes there. One from Gerald said that he was staying on for another week at Merriston, the other from Franklin said that he would take his chances of finding her in at 5.30 that afternoon. Helen only glanced at Franklin"s note and then dropped it into the fire; at Gerald"s she looked long and attentively. She always, familiar as they were, studied any letter of Gerald"s that she received; they seemed, the slightest of them, to have something of himself; the small crisp writing was charming to her, and the very way he had of affixing his stamps in not quite the same way that most people affixed theirs, ridiculously endeared even his envelopes. She turned the note over in her fingers as she stood before the fire, seeing all that it meant to him--how little!--and all that it meant to her, and she laid it for a moment against her cheek before tearing it across and putting it, too, into the fire. Aunt Grizel was gone out and had left word that she would not be in till dinner-time. Helen looked idly at the clock and decided that she would take a lazy afternoon, have tea at home, and await Franklin.
When he arrived he found her reading before the fire in the little room where she did not often receive him; it was usually in the drawing-room that they met. Helen wore a black tea-gown, transparent and flowing, the same gown, indeed, remodelled to more domestic uses, in which Althea had first seen her. She looked pale and very thin.
Franklin, too, was aware of feeling pale; he thought that he had felt pale ever since his talk with Miss Buchanan on Sat.u.r.day. He had not yet come to any decision about the motives that had made him acquiesce in her proposal; he only knew that, whatever they were, they were not those merely reasonable ones that she had put before him. A charming wife, a home and children; these were not enough, and Franklin knew it, to have brought him here to-day on his strange errand; nor was it an act of chivalry; nor was it pity and sympathy for his friend. All these, no doubt, made some small part of it; but they far from covered the case; they would have left him as calm and as rational as, he knew, he looked; but since he did not feel calm and rational he knew that the case was covered by very different motives. What they were he could not clearly see; but he felt that something was happening to him and that it was taking him far out of his normal course. Even his love for Althea had not taken him out of his course; it had never been incalculable; it had been the ground he walked on, the goal he worked towards; what was happening now was like a current, swift and unfathomable, that was bearing him he knew not where.
Helen smiled at him and, turning in her chair to look up at him, gave him her hand. "You look tired," she said. "You"ll have some tea?"
"I"ve been looking up some things at the British Museum," said Franklin, "and I had a gla.s.s of milk and a bun; the bun was very satisfying, though I can"t say that it was very satisfactory; I guess I shan"t want anything else for some hours yet."
"A bun? What made you have a bun?" said Helen, laughing.
"Well, it seemed to go with the place, somehow," said Franklin.
"I can imagine that it might; I"ve only been there once; very large and very indigestible I found it, and most depressing. Yes, I see that it might make a bun seem suitable."
"Ah, but it"s a very wonderful place, you know," Franklin said. "I should have expected you to go oftener; you care about beauty."
"Not beauty in a museum. I don"t like museums. The mummies were what impressed me most, after the Elgin marbles, and everything there seemed like a mummy--dead and desecrated. Well, what have you been doing besides eating buns at the British Museum? Has London been working you very hard?"
"I"ve not seen much of London while you"ve been away," said Franklin, who had drawn a chair to the other side of the fire. "I think that you are London to me, and when you are out of it it doesn"t seem to mean much--beyond museums and work."
"Come, what of all your scientific friends?"
"They don"t mean London; they mean science," said Franklin, smiling back at her. She always made him feel happy for himself, and at ease, even when he was feeling unhappy for her; and just now he was feeling strangely, deeply unhappy for her. It wasn"t humility, in the usual sense, that showed his coming offer to him as so inadequate; he did not think of himself as unworthy; but he did think of himself as incongruous; and that this fine, sad, subtle creature should be brought, from merely reasonable motives, to taking the incongruous intimately into her life made him more unhappy for her than usual. He wished he wasn"t so incongruous; he wished he had something besides friendship and millions; he wished, almost, that his case was hopeless and that friendship and millions would not gain her. Yet, under these wishes, which made his face look tired and jaded, was another feeling; it was too selfless to be called a wish; rather it was a wonder, deep and melancholy, as to what was being done to him, and what would be done, as an end of it all. That something had been done he knew; it was because of Helen--that was one thing at last seen clearly--that he had not, long ago, left London.
"Science is perfectly impersonal, perfectly cosmopolitan, you know," he went on. "Now you are intensely personal and intensely local."
"I don"t think of myself as London, then, if I"m local," said Helen, her eyes on the fire. "I think of myself as Scotland, in the moorlands, on a bleak, grey day, when the heather is over and there"s a touch of winter in the wind. You don"t know the real me."
"I"d like to," said Franklin, quietly and unemphatically.
They sat for a little while in silence, and Helen, so unconscious of what was approaching her, seemed in no haste to break it. She was capable of sitting thus in silent musing, her cheek on her hand, her eyes on the fire, for half an hour with Mr. Kane beside her.
Franklin was reflecting. It wouldn"t do to put it to her as her need; it must be put to her as his; as his reasonable need for the castle, the princess, the charming wife, the home, and children. And it must be that need only, the need of the dry, matter-of-fact friend who could give her a little and to whom she could give much. To hint at other needs--if other needs there were--would not be in keeping with the spirit of the transaction, and would, no doubt, endanger it. He well remembered old Miss Buchanan"s hint; it was as a husband that Helen might contemplate him, not as a lover. "Miss Buchanan," he said at last, "you don"t consider that love, romantic love, is necessary in marriage, do you?
I"ve gathered more than once from remarks of yours that that point of view is rather childish to you."
Helen turned her eyes on him with the look of kindly scrutiny to which he was accustomed. She had felt, in these last weeks, that London might be having some unforeseen effect on Franklin Kane; she thought of him as very clear and very fixed, yet of such a guilelessly open nature as well, that new experience might impress too sharply the candid tablets of his mind. She did not like to think of any alteration in Franklin.
She wanted him to remain a changeless type, tolerant of alteration, but in itself inalterable. "To tell you the truth, I used to think so," she said, "for myself, I mean. And I hope that you will always think so."
"Why?" asked Franklin.
"I want you to go on believing always in the things that other people give up--the nice, beautiful things."
"Well, that"s just my point; can"t marriage without romantic love be nice and beautiful?"
"Well, can it?" Helen smiled.