"Not unlikely. But since we"re only dreaming why not dream more to our taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of success as the crown."
"But failure might come."
"It couldn"t. We wouldn"t work for fame or for riches or for any outside thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy each of the other and both of our great love."
Again they were walking in silence.
"I am so sad," Marian said at last. "But I am so happy too. What has come over me? But--you will work on, won"t you? And you will accomplish everything. Yes, I am sure you will."
"Oh, I"ll work--in my own way. And I"ll get a good deal of what I want.
But not everything. You say you can"t understand yourself. No more can I understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger.
And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open winter sky, here is--you."
They were in the Avenue again--"the awakening," Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.
"You will win," she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. "You will be famous."
"Probably not. The price for fame may be too big."
"The price? But you are willing to work?"
"Work--yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect for self-contempt--at least, I think, I hope not."
"But why should that be necessary?"
"It may not be if I am free--free to meet every situation as it arises, with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself--not for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a married man. She would decide, wouldn"t she?"
"Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for self-respect."
"Of course--if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a woman he lets her know?"
"It would be a crime not to let her know."
"It would be a greater crime to put her to the test--if she were a woman brought up, say, as you have been."
"How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere incidentals?"
"How can I? Because I have known poverty--have known what it was to look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me--yes, and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves--well, the man does not live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen.
No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It is not for my kind, not for me."
They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon"s door.
"I shall not come in this afternoon," he said. "But to-morrow--if I don"t come in to-day, don"t you think it will be all right for me to come then?"
"I shall expect you," she said.
The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat.
She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.
"You are a traitor," she said to her reflection in the mirror over the desk. "But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that for which she is willing to pay?"
XII.
MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH.
To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-a.s.surance that made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.
His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great fortune. His favourite maxim was, "Always look for motives." And he once summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: "I often wake at night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds, scheming to get something out of me for nothing."
There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator.
Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one"s self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has a possession that is all but universally coveted--wealth or position or power or beauty.
Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities--his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had much in common--the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and the proper, the same pa.s.sion for out-door life, especially for hunting.
He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.
One day--it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her--they were "in at the death" together after a run across a stiff country that included several dangerous jumps. "You"re the only one that can keep up with me," he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes, her graceful, a.s.sured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or dared to ride.
"You mean you are the only one who can keep up with _me,_" she laughed, preparing for what his face warned her was coming.
"No I don"t, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up with each other. You won"t say no, will you?"
Marian was liking him that day--he was looking his best. She particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said: "No--which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we mustn"t disappoint them."
The fact that "everybody" did expect it, the fact that he was the great "catch" in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year, his good looks and his good character--these were her real reasons, with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity.
Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.
But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom.
She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative, ambitious. Until she "came out" she had spent much time among books; but as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.
"I never saw such an ungrateful girl," was Mrs. Carnarvon"s comment upon one of Marian"s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. "What do you want?"
"That"s just it," exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. "What _do_ I want?
I look all about me and I can"t see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away--away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste subst.i.tutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt crescent and said: "Here is a nice little moon for baby;" and it made me furious."
Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. "I don"t understand it. You are getting the best of everything. Of course you can"t expect to be happy. I don"t suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented."
"That"s just it," answered Marian indignantly. "I have always been swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man.
I"m sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome."
It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.
Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in "The Valley." He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement would be announced, and the wedding would be in May--such was the arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential points.
"A month"s holiday," was his comment. They were alone on the second seat of George Browning"s coach, driving through the Park. "If we were like those people"--he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious amus.e.m.e.nt and became so interested that she turned her head to follow them with her eyes after the coach had pa.s.sed.