"One girl"s happiness--against a thing n.o.bler than happiness for thousands--who can hesitate? _Not Jean._"
"Good G.o.d! can"t you see that this crazed campaign you"d start her on--even if it"s successful, it can only be so through the help of men?
What excuse shall you make your own soul for not going straight to the goal?"
"You think we wouldn"t be glad," she said, "to go straight to the goal?"
"I do. I see you"d much rather punish me and see her revel in a morbid self-sacrifice."
"You say I want to punish you only because, like other men, you won"t take the trouble to understand what we do want--or how determined we are to have it. You can"t kill this New Spirit among women." She went nearer. "And you couldn"t make a greater mistake than to think it finds a home only in the exceptional or the unhappy. It is so strange to see a man like you as much deluded as the Hyde Park loafers, who say to Ernestine Blunt, "Who"s hurt _your_ feelings?" Why not realize"--she came still closer, if she had put out her hand she would have touched him--"this is a thing that goes deeper than personal experience? And yet," she said in a voice so hushed that it was full of a sense of the girl on the other side of the door, "if you take only the narrowest personal view, a good deal depends on what you and I agree upon in the next five minutes."
"You recommend my realizing the larger issues. But in your ambition to attach that poor girl to the chariot-wheels of Progress"--his voice put the drag of ironic pomposity upon the phrase--"you quite ignore the fact that people fitter for such work, the men you look to enlist in the end, are ready waiting"--he pulled himself up in time for an anti-climax--"to give the thing a chance."
"Men are ready! What men?"
His eyes evaded hers. He picked his words. "Women have themselves to blame that the question has grown so delicate that responsible people shrink for the moment from being implicated in it."
"We have seen the shrinking."
"Without quoting any one else, I might point out that the New Antagonism seems to have blinded you to the small fact that I for one am not an opponent."
"The phrase has a familiar ring. We have heard it four hundred and twenty times."
His eyes were shining with anger. "I spoke, if I may say so, of some one who would count. Some one who can carry his party along with him--or risk a seat in the cabinet over the issue."
"Did you mean you are "ready" to do that?" she exclaimed.
"An hour ago I was."
"Ah! an hour ago!"
"Exactly! You don"t understand men. They can be led; they can"t be driven. Ten minutes before you came into the room I was ready to say I would throw in my political lot with this Reform."
"And now?"
"Now you block my way by an attempt at coercion. By forcing my hand you give my adherence an air of bargain-driving for a personal end. Exactly the mistake of the ignorant agitators in Trafalgar Square. You have a great deal to learn. This movement will go forward, not because of the agitation outside, but in spite of it. There are men in Parliament who would have been actively serving the Reform to-day--as actively as so vast a const.i.tutional change----"
She smiled faintly. "And they haven"t done it because----"
"Because it would have put a premium on breaches of decent behaviour and defiance of the law!"
She looked at him with an attempt to appear to accept this version. What did it matter what reasons were given for past failure, if only the future might be a.s.sured? He had taken a piece of crumpled paper from his pocket and smoothed it out.
"Look here!" He held the telegram before her.
She flushed with excitement as she read. "This is very good. I see only one objection."
"Objection!"
"You haven"t sent it."
"That is your fault." And he looked as if he thought he spoke the truth.
"When did you write this?"
"Just before you came in--when she began to talk about----"
"Ah, Jean!" Vida gave him back the paper. "That must have pleased Jean."
It was a master stroke, the casual giving back, and the invocation of a pleasure that had been strangled at the birth along with something greater. Did he see before him again the girl"s tear-filled, hopeless eyes, that had not so much as read the wonderful message, too intent upon the death-warrant of their common happiness? He threw himself heavily into a chair, staring at the closed door. Behind it, in a prison of which this woman held the key, Jean waited for her life sentence.
Stonor"s look, his att.i.tude, seemed to say that he too only waited now to hear it. He dropped his head in his hand.
When Vida spoke, it was without raising her eyes from the ground.
"I could drive a hard-and-fast bargain with you; but I think I won"t. If love and ambition both urge you on, perhaps----" She looked up a little defiantly, seeming to expect to meet triumph in his face. Instead, her eye took in the profound hopelessness of the bent head, the slackness of the big frame, that so suddenly had a.s.sumed a look of age. She went over to him silently, and stood by his side. "After all," she said, "life hasn"t been quite fair to you." At the new thing in her voice he raised his heavy eyes. "You fall out of one ardent woman"s dreams into another"s," she said.
"Then you don"t--after all, you don"t mean to----"
"To keep you and her apart? No."
For the first time tears came into his eyes.
After a little silence he held out his hand. "What can I do for you?"
She seemed not to see the hand he offered. Or did she only see that it was empty? She was looking at the other. Mere instinct made him close his left hand more firmly on the message.
It was as if something finer than her slim fingers, the woman"s invisible antennae, felt the force that would need be overcome if trial of strength should be precipitated then. Upon his "What can I do?" she shook her head.
"For the real you," he said. "Not the Reformer, or the would-be politician--for the woman I so unwillingly hurt." As she only turned away, he stood up, detaining her with a hold upon her arm. "You may not believe it, but now that I understand, there is almost nothing I wouldn"t do to right that old wrong."
"There"s nothing to be done," she said; and then, shrinking under that look of almost cheerful benevolence, "You can never give me back my child."
More than at the words, at the anguish in her face, his own had changed.
"Will that ghost give you no rest?" he said.
"Yes, oh, yes." She was calm again. "I see life is n.o.bler than I knew.
There is work to do."
On her way to the great folding doors, once again he stopped her.
"Why should you think that it"s only you these ten years have taught something to? Why not give even a man credit for a willingness to learn something of life, and for being sorry--profoundly sorry--for the pain his instruction has cost others? You seem to think I"ve taken it all quite lightly. That"s not fair. All my life, ever since you disappeared, the thought of you has hurt. I would give anything I possess to know you--were happy again."
"Oh, happiness!"
"Why shouldn"t you find it still?"
He said it with a significance that made her stare, and then?--