"I don"t know much about business," said Kitty, "but I can think of a much more simple and obvious one. Why can"t your people buy in the library and sell it again for Miss Harden on commission?"
"Do you suppose I haven"t thought of that? It would be very simple and obvious if it rested with me, but I"m afraid my father mightn"t see it in the same light. You see, the thing doesn"t lie between Miss Harden and me, but between my father and Mr. Pilkington."
"I don"t understand."
"It"s this way. My father won"t be buying the library from Miss Harden, but from Mr. Pilkington. And--my father is a man of business."
"And you most certainly are not."
"So he isn"t likely to give any more for it than he can help."
"Of course not."
"Well, but--do you know what the library was valued at?"
Kitty did, and she would have blurted it out had not an inner voice told her to be discreet for once. He took her silence for a confession of ignorance.
"Would you think a thousand pounds an absurdly high valuation?"
"I don"t know."
Kitty tried to banish all expression from her face. She really knew very little about business and was as yet unaware of the necessary publicity of bills of sale. The suspicion crossed her mind that Rickman, in his father"s interests, might be trying to pump her as to the smallest sum that need be offered.
"Because," he added, "it isn"t. Miss Harden stands to lose something like three thousand pounds by it."
Kitty"s evil surmises vanished utterly. "Good Heavens!" she exclaimed, "how do you make that out?"
"It"s only the difference between what the library ought to fetch and what will be given for it. Of course no dealer could give the _full_ value; still, between one thousand and four thousand there"s a considerable difference."
"And who pockets it?"
"My fa--the dealer, if he succeeds in selling again to the best advantage. He might not, and my father, as it happens, considers that he"s taking a great risk. But I know more about it than he does, and I don"t agree with him. That"s why I don"t want him to get hold of those books if I can help it."
Kitty was thoughtful.
"You see," he continued, "I know he"d like to do what he thinks generous under the circ.u.mstances, but he isn"t interested in Miss Harden, and he _is_ interested in the Harden library. It"s a chance that a dealer like him only gets once in a lifetime and I"m afraid it isn"t in human nature to let it go."
"But," said Kitty wildly, "he _must_ let it go. You must make him. Do you mean to say you"re going to sit and look on calmly while Miss Harden loses three thousand pounds?"
"I"m not looking on calmly. On the contrary, I"ve lost my head."
"What"s the good of losing your head, if Miss Harden loses her money?
What do you propose to do _besides_ losing your head? Lose time I suppose? As if you hadn"t lost enough already."
"I wrote to Mr. Jewdwine as soon as I heard of Sir Frederick Harden"s death. Still, you"re right, I did lose time; and time was everything.
You can"t reproach me more than I reproach myself."
"My dear man, I"m not reproaching you. I only want to know what you"re going to _do_?"
"Do? Is there anything left for me to do?"
"Not much, that I can see."
"If I"d only spoken straight out in the beginning--"
"Do you mean to her?"
"To her." He whispered the p.r.o.noun so softly that it sounded like a sigh.
"Why didn"t you?"
"Why didn"t I? I can see it was the one honest thing to do. But I thought I"d no business to know about her father"s affairs if she didn"t; and certainly no business to talk about them."
"No. I don"t see how you could have done it."
"All the same I"d made up my mind to do it that morning--when the telegram came. That stopped me."
"You were well out of it. You don"t know what an awful thing it would have been to do. She worshipped her father. Is this what you"ve been making yourself ill about?"
"I suppose so. You know how adorably kind she was to me?"
"I can guess. She is adorably kind to every one," said Kitty, gentle but astute.
"And, you see, I"ve behaved dishonourably to her."
"No. I don"t see that."
"Don"t you? Don"t you? Why, my father sent me partly as his agent, and all the time she believed I was only working for her."
"Did you behave as your father"s agent?"
"No. But I let her slave from morning till night over that catalogue."
"Which she would have done in any case."
"Don"t you see that I ought to have backed out of it altogether, in the very beginning?"
"Ah yes--if everybody did what they ought."
"I tried twice, but it was no good. I suppose I didn"t try hard enough."
"What good would you have done by going, if she wanted you to stay?"
"That"s how I argued. But the fact is, I stayed because I couldn"t go away. Of course, it was an abominable position, but I a.s.sure you it felt like heaven when it didn"t feel like "ell."
His anguish, mercifully, was too great for him to feel the horror of his lapse. And Kitty hardly noticed it; at any rate she never felt the smallest inclination to smile, not even in recalling it afterwards.
It was, if you came to think of it, an unusual, a remarkable confession. But she remembered that he had had a nervous fever; it was his nerves, then, and his fever that had cried out, a cry covered, made decent almost, by the clangour of the sea.