She shook her head again. "It settles nothing. I told you that I was a woman with a broken heart. It"s not mended; it never can be mended."
"But, Helen," he said, and a pitiful smile of supplication dawned on his ravaged little face, "that"s where you"re so wrong. You"ve got to let it soften and then it will have to mend. It"s the hard hearts that get broken."
"Well, mine is hard."
"Let it melt, Helen," he pleaded with her, "please let it melt. Please let yourself be happy, dear Helen."
But still she shook her head, looking deeply at him, and in the negation, in the look, it was as if she held her cup of magic steadily before him. She was there, for him, if he would have her. She kept him to his word for his sake; but she kept him to his word for hers, too.
Yes, he saw that though it was for his sake, it was not for his alone--there was the final magic--that her eyes met his in that long, clear look. It was the nearest he would ever come to Helen; it was the most she could ever do for him; and, with a pang, deep and piercing, he felt all that it meant, and felt his love of her avowed in his own eyes, and recognised, received in hers. Helplessly, now, he looked at her, his lips pressed together so that they should not show their trembling, and only a little muscle in his cheek quivering irrepressibly. And he faltered: "Helen--you could never love me back."
"Not in that way," said Helen. She was grave and clear; she had not a hesitation. "But that way is ruined and over for me. I could live for you, though. I could make it worth your while."
He looked, and he could say nothing. Against his need of Helen he must measure Althea"s need of him. He must measure, too--ah, cruel perplexity--the chance for Helen"s happiness. She was unhesitating; but how could she know herself so inflexible, how could she know that the hard heart might not melt? For the sake of Helen"s happiness he must measure not only Gerald"s need of her against his own and Gerald"s power against his own mere pitifulness, but he must wonder, in an agony of sudden surmise, which, in the long-run, could give her most, the loved or the unloved man. In all his life no moment had ever equalled this in its fulness, and its intensity, and its pain. It thundered, it rushed, it darkened--like the moment of death by drowning and like the great river that bears away the drowning man. Memories flashed in it, broken and vivid--of Althea"s eyes and Helen"s smile; Althea so appealing, Helen so strong; and, incongruous in its remoteness, a memory of the bleak, shabby little street in a Boston suburb, the small wooden house painted brown, where he was born, where scanty nasturtiums flowered on the fence in summer, and in winter, by the light of a lamp with a ground gla.s.s shade, his mother"s face, careful, worn, and gentle, bent over the family mending. Where, indeed, had the river borne him, and what had been done to him?
Helen"s voice came to him, and Helen"s face reshaped itself--a strange and lovely beacon over the engulfing waters. She saw his torment and she understood. "Go to her if you must," she said; "and I know that you must. But don"t go with mistaken ideas. Remember what I tell you.
Nothing is changed--for me, or in me. If Althea doesn"t want you back--or if Althea does want you back--I shall be waiting." And, seeing his extremity, Helen, grave and clear, filled her cup of magic to the brim. As she had said that morning, she said now--but with what a difference: "Kiss me good-bye, Franklin."
He could not move towards her; he could not kiss her; but, smiling more tenderly than he could have thought Helen would ever smile, she put her arms around him and drew his rapt, transfigured face to hers. And holding him tenderly, she kissed him and said: "Whatever happens--you"ve had the best of me."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Althea, since the misty walk with Gerald, had been plunged in a pit of mental confusion. She swung from accepted abas.e.m.e.nt to the desperate thought of the magnanimity in such abas.e.m.e.nt; she dropped from this fragile foothold to burning resentment, and, seeing where resentment must lead her, she turned again and clasped, with tight-closed eyes, the love that, looked upon, could not be held without humiliation.
Self-doubt and self-a.n.a.lysis had brought her to this state of pitiful chaos. The only self left seemed centred in her love; if she did not give up Gerald, what was left her but accepted abas.e.m.e.nt? If she let him go, it would be to own to herself that she had failed to hold him, to see herself as a nonent.i.ty. Yet, to go on clinging, what would that show? Only with closed eyes could she cling. To open them for the merest glimmer was to see that she was, indeed, nothing, if she had not strength to relinquish a man who did not any longer, in any sense, wish to make her his wife. With closed eyes one might imagine that it was strength that clung; with open eyes one saw that it was weakness.
Miss Harriet Robinson, all alert gaiety and appreciation, had arrived at Merriston on Sat.u.r.day, had talked all through Sunday, and had come up to London with Althea and Gerald on Monday morning. Gerald had gone to a smoking-carriage, and Althea had hardly exchanged a word with him. She and Miss Robinson went to a little hotel in Mayfair, a hotel supposed to atone for its costliness and shabbiness by some peculiar emanation of British comfort. Americans of an earnest, if luxurious type, congregated there and found a satisfactory local flavour in worn chintzes and uneven pa.s.sages. Lady Blair had kindly pressed Althea to stay with her in South Kensington and be married from her house; but even a week ago, when this plan had been suggested, Althea had shrunk from it. It had seemed, even then, too decisive. Once beneath Lady Blair"s quasi-maternal roof one would be propelled, like a labelled parcel, resistlessly to the altar.
Even then Althea had felt that the little hotel in Mayfair, with its transient guests and impersonal atmosphere, offered further breathing s.p.a.ce for indefiniteness.
She was thankful indeed for breathing s.p.a.ce as, on the afternoon of her arrival, she sat sunken in a large chair and felt, as one relief, that she would not see Miss Robinson again until evening. It had been tormenting, all the journey up, to tear herself from her own sick thoughts and to answer Miss Robinson"s unsuspecting comments and suggestions.
Miss Robinson was as complacent and as beaming as though she had herself "settled" Althea. She richly embroidered the themes, now so remote, that had once occupied poor Althea"s imagination--house-parties at Merriston; hostess-ship on a large scale in London; Gerald"s seat in Parliament taken as a matter-of-course. Althea, feeling the intolerable irony, had attempted vague qualifications; Gerald did not care for politics; she herself preferred a quieter life; they probably could not afford a town house. But to such disclaimers Miss Robinson opposed the brightness of her faith in her friend"s capacities. "Ah, my dear, it"s your very reticence, your very quietness, that will tell. Once settled--I"ve always felt it of you--you will make your place--and your place can only be a big one. My only regret is that you won"t get your wedding-dress in Paris--oh yes, I know that they have immensely improved over here; but, for cut and _cachet_, Paris is still the only place."
This had all been tormenting, and Miss Buckston"s presence at lunch had been something of a refuge--Miss Buckston, far more interested in her Bach choir practice than in Althea"s plans, and lending but a preoccupied attention to Miss Robinson"s matrimonial talk. Miss Buckston, at a glance, had dismissed Miss Robinson as frothy and shallow. They were both gone now, thank goodness. Lady Blair would not descend upon her till next morning, and Sally and Mrs. Peel were not due in London until the end of the week. Althea sat, her head leaning back, her eyes closed, and wondered whether Gerald would come and see her. He had parted from her at the station, and the memory of his face, courteous, gentle, yet so unseeing, made her feel like weeping piteously. She spent the afternoon in the chair, her eyes closed and an electric excitement of expectancy tingling through her, and Gerald did not come. He did not come that evening, and the evening pa.s.sed like a phantasmagoria--the dinner in the sober little dining-room, Miss Robinson, richly dressed, opposite her; and the hours in her drawing-room afterwards, she and Miss Robinson on either side of the fire, quietly conversing. And next morning there was no word from him.
It was then, as she lay in bed and felt the tears, though she did not sob, roll down over her cheeks upon the pillow, that sudden strength came with sudden revolt. A revulsion against her suffering and the cause of it went through her, and she seemed to shake off a torpor, an obsession, and to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months, her helpless love had shut her out.
Lying there, her cheeks still wet but her eyes now stern and steady, she felt herself sustained, as if by sudden wings, at a vertiginous height from which she looked down upon herself and upon her love. What had it been, that love? what was it but pa.s.sion pure and simple, the craving feminine thing, enmeshed in charm. To a woman of her training, her tradition, must not a love that could finally satisfy her nature, its deeps and heights, be a far other love; a love of spirit rather than of flesh? What was all the pain that had warped her for so long but the inevitable retribution for her back-sliding? Old adages came to her, aerial Emersonian faiths. Why, one was bound and fettered if feeling was to rule one and not mind. Friendship, deep, spiritual congeniality, was the real basis for marriage, not the enchantment of the heart and senses. She had been weak and dazzled; she had followed the will-o"-the-wisp--and see, see the bog where it had led her.
She saw it now, still sustained above it and looking down. Her love for Gerald was not a high thing; it called out no greatness in her; appealed to none; there was no spiritual congeniality between them. In the region of her soul he was, and would always remain, a stranger.
Sure of this at last, she rose and wrote to Franklin, swiftly and urgently. She did not clearly know what she wanted of him; but she felt, like a flame of faith within her, that he, and he only, could sustain her at her height. He was her spiritual affinity; he was her wings.
Merely to see him, merely to steep herself in the radiance of his love and sympathy, would be to recover power, poise, personality, and independence. It was a goal she flew towards, though she saw it but in dizzy glimpses, and as if through vast hallucinations of s.p.a.ce.
She told Franklin to come at six. She gave herself one more day; for what she could not have said. A lightness of head seemed to swim over her, and a loss of breath, when she tried to see more clearly the goal, or what might still capture and keep her from it.
She told Amelie that she had a bad headache and would spend the day on her sofa, denying herself to Lady Blair; and all day long she lay there with tingling nerves and a heavily beating heart--poor heart, what was happening to it in its depths she could not tell--and Gerald did not write or come.
At tea-time Miss Robinson could not be avoided. She tip-toed in and sat beside her sofa commenting compa.s.sionately on her pallor. "I do so beg you to go straight to bed, dear," she said. "Let me give you some sal volatile; there is nothing better for a headache."
But Althea, smiling heroically, said that she must stay up to see Franklin Kane. "He wants to see me, and will be here at six. After he is gone I will go to bed." She did not know why she should thus arrange facts a little for Miss Robinson; but all her nature was stretched on its impulse towards safety, and it was automatically that she adjusted facts to that end. After the first great moment of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and soaring, it was like relapsing to some sub-conscious function of the organism--digestion or circulation--that did things for one if one didn"t interfere with it. Her mind no longer directed her course except in this transformed and subsidiary guise; it had become part of the machinery of self-preservation.
"You really are an angel, my dear," said Miss Robinson. "You oughtn"t to allow your devotees to _accaparer_ you like this. You will wear yourself out."
Althea, with a smile still more heroic, said that dear Franklin could never wear her out; and Miss Robinson, not to be undeceived, shook her head, while retiring to make room for the indiscreet friend.
When she was gone, Althea got up and took her place in the chintz chair where she had waited for so long yesterday.
Outside, a foggy day closed to almost opaque obscurity. The fire burned brightly, there were candles on the mantelpiece and a lamp on the table, yet the encompa.s.sing darkness seemed to have entered the room. After the aerial heights of the morning it was now at a corresponding depth, as if sunken to the ocean-bed, that she seemed to sit and wait, and feel, in a trance-like pause, deep, essential forces working. And she remembered the sunny day in Paris, and the other hotel drawing-room where, empty and aimless, she had sat, only six months ago. How much had come to her since then; through how much hope and life had she lived, to what heights been lifted, to what depths struck down. And now, once more she sat, bereft of everything, and waiting for she knew not what.
Franklin appeared almost to the moment. Althea had not seen him since leaving London some weeks before, and at the first glance he seemed to her in some way different. She had only time to think, fleetingly, of all that had happened to Franklin since she had last seen him, all the strange, new things that Helen must have meant to him; and the thought, fleeting though it was, made more urgent the impulse that pressed her on. For, after all, the second glance showed him as so much the same, the same to the unbecomingness of his clothes, the flatness of his features, the general effect of decision and placidity that he always, predominatingly, gave.
It was on Franklin"s sameness that she leaned. It was Franklin"s sameness that was her goal; she trusted it like the ground beneath her feet. She went to him and put out her hands. "Dear Franklin," she said, "I am so glad to see you."
He took her hands and held them while he looked into her eyes. The face she lifted to him was a woeful one, in spite of the steadying of its pale lips to a smile. It was not enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and the sustained height that he saw--it was fear and desolation; they looked at him out of her large, sad eyes and they were like an uttered cry. He saw her need, worse still, he saw her trust; and yet, ah yet, his hope, his unacknowledged hope, the hope which Helen"s magic had poured into his veins, pulsed in him. He saw her need, but as he looked, full of compa.s.sion and solicitude, he was hoping that her need was not of him.
Suddenly Althea burst into sobs. She leaned her face against his shoulder, her hands still held in his, and she wept out: "O Franklin, I had to send for you--you are my only friend--I am so unhappy, so unhappy." Franklin put an arm around her, still holding her hand, and he slightly patted her back as she leaned upon him. "Poor Althea, poor dear," he said.
"Oh, what shall I do, Franklin?" she whispered.
"Tell me all about it," said Franklin. "Tell me what"s the matter."
She paused for a moment, and in the pause her thoughts, released for that one instant from their place of servitude, scurried through the inner confusion. His tone, the quietness, kindness, rationality of it, seemed to demand reason, not impulse, from her, the order of truth and not the chaos of feeling. But pain and fear had worked for too long upon her, and she did not know what truth was. All she knew was that he was near, and tender and compa.s.sionate, and to know that seemed to be knowing at last that here was the real love, the love of spirit from which she had turned to lower things. Impulse, not insincere, surged up, and moved by it alone she sobbed on, "O Franklin, I have made a mistake, a horrible, horrible mistake. It"s killing me. I can"t go on. I don"t love him, Franklin--I don"t love Gerald--I can"t marry him. And how can I tell him? How can I break faith with him?"
Franklin stood very still, his hand clasping hers, the other ceasing its rhythmic, consolatory movement. He held her, this woman whom he had loved for so many years, and over her bent head he looked before him at the frivolous and ugly wall-paper, a chaos of festooned chrysanthemums on a bright pink ground. He gazed at the chrysanthemums, and he wondered, with a direful pang, whether Althea were consciously lying to him.
She sobbed on: "Even in the first week, I knew that something was wrong.
Of course I was in love--but it was only that--there was nothing else except being in love. Doubts gnawed at me from the first; I couldn"t bear to accept them; I hoped on and on. Only in this last week I"ve seen that I can"t--I can"t marry him. Oh----" and the wail was again repeated, "what shall I do, Franklin?"
He spoke at last, and in the disarray of her sobbing and darkened condition--her face pressed against him, her ears full of the sound of her own labouring breath--she could not know to the full how strange his voice was, though she felt strangeness and caught her breath to listen.
"Don"t take it like this, Althea," he said. "It"s not so bad as all this. It can all be made right. You must just tell him the truth and set him free."
And now there was a strange silence. He was waiting, and she was waiting too; she stilled her breath and he stilled his; all each heard was the beating of his and her own heart. And the silence, to Althea, was full of a new and formless fear, and to Franklin of an acceptation sad beyond all the sadnesses of his life. Even before Althea spoke, and while the sweet, the rapturous, the impossible hope softly died away, he knew in his heart, emptied of magic, that it was he Althea needed.
She spoke at last, in a changed and trembling voice; it pierced him, for he felt the new fear in it: "How can I tell him the truth, Franklin?"
she said. "How can I tell you the truth? How can I say that I turned from the real thing, the deepest, most beautiful thing in my life--and hurt it, broke it, put it aside, so blind, so terribly blind I was--and took the unreal thing? How can I ever forgive myself--but, O Franklin, much, much more, how can you ever forgive me?" her voice wailed up, claiming him supremely.
She believed it to be the truth, and he saw that she believed it. He saw, sadly, clearly, that among all the twistings and deviations of her predicament, one thing held firm for her, so firm that it had given her this new faith in herself--her faith in his supreme devotion. And he saw that he owed it to her. He had given it to her, he had made it her possession, to trust to as she trusted to the ground under her feet, ever since they were boy and girl together. Six months ago it would have been with joy, and with joy only, that he would have received her, and have received the gift of her bruised, uncertain heart. Six months--why only a week ago he would have thought that it could only be with joy.
So now he found his voice and he knew that it was nearly his old voice for her, and he said, in answer to that despairing statement that wailed for contradiction: "Oh no, Althea, dear. Oh no, you haven"t wrecked our lives."
"But you are bound now," she hardly audibly faltered. "You have another life opening before you. You can"t come back now."
"No, Althea," Franklin repeated, and he stroked her shoulder again. "I can come back, if you want me. And you do want me, don"t you, dear? You will let me try to make you happy?"
She put back her head to look at him, her poor face, tear-stained, her eyes wild with their suffering, and he saw the new fear in them, the formless fear. "O Franklin," she said, and the question was indeed a strange one to be asked by her of him: "do you love me?"