Franklin Kane Part 28

She paused over his question for so long that he put down his hand and looked at her, and her eyes, meeting his unfalteringly, widened with a strained, suffering look.

'It's kind of you to say so,' she said. 'And I know you believe it now; you are so fond of me, and so sorry for this horrid tale I inflict on you, that you have to believe it. And of course it may be true. Perhaps it did only need that.'

They had both now looked away again, Gerald gazing unseeingly into the mirror, Helen at the opposite wall. 'It may be true,' she repeated. 'I had only, perhaps, to be instinctive--to withdraw--to hide--create the little mysteries that appeal to men's senses and imaginations. I had only to put aside my pride and to shut my eyes on my horrible, hard, lucid self-consciousness, let instinct guide me, be a mere woman, and you might have been in love with me. It's true. I used often to think it, too. I used often to think that I might make you fall in love with me if I could stop being your friend. But, don't you see, I knew myself far too well. I _was_ too proud. I didn't want you if you only wanted me because I'd lured you and appealed to your senses and imagination. I didn't want you unless you wanted me for the big and not for the little things of love. I couldn't pretend that I had something to hide--I know perfectly how it is done--the air of evasion, of wistfulness--all the innocent hypocrisies women make use of; but I couldn't. I didn't want you like that. There was nothing for it but to look straight at you and pretend, not that there was anything to hide, but that there was nothing.'

Again, his eyes meeting hers, she looked, indeed, straight at him and smiled a little; for there was, indeed, nothing now to hide; and she went on quietly, 'You see now, how I've been feeling for these last months, when everything has gone, at last, completely. I'd determined, long ago, to give up hope and marry some one else. But I didn't know till this autumn, when you decided to marry Althea, I didn't know till then how much hope there was still left to be killed. When a thing like that has been killed, you see, one hasn't much feeling left for the rest of life. I don't care enough, one way or the other, not to marry as I'm doing. There is still one's life to live, and one may as well make what seems the best of it. I've not succeeded, you see, in marrying your great man, and I've fallen back very thankfully on my dear, good Franklin, who is not, let me tell you, a nonent.i.ty in my eyes; I'm fonder of him than of any one I've ever known except yourself. And it was too much, just the one touch too much, to have you come to me to-day with reproaches and an air of injury. But, at the same time, I ask your pardon for having spoken to you like that--as though you'd done _me_ a wrong. And if I've been too cruel, if the memory rankles and makes you uncomfortable, you must keep away from me as long as you like. It won't be for ever, I'm sure. In spite of everything I'm sure that we shall always be friends.'

She got up now, knowing in her exhaustion that she was near tears, and she found her cigarette-case on the writing-table; it was an automatic relapse to the customary. She felt that everything, indeed, was over, and that the sooner one relapsed on every-day trivialities the better.

Gerald watched her light the cigarette, the pulsing little flicker of yellow flame illuminating her cheek and hair as she stood half turned from him. She was near him and he had but one step to take to her. He was almost unaware of motive. What he did was nearly as automatic, as inevitable, as her search for the cigarette. He was beside her and he put his arms around her and took the cigarette from her hand. Then, folding her to him, he hid his face against her hair.

It was, then, not excitement he felt so much as the envelopment of a great, a beautiful necessity. So great, so beautiful, in its peace and accomplishment, that it was as if he had stood there holding Helen for an eternity, and as if all the miserable years that had separated them were looked down at serenely from some far height.

And Helen had stood absolutely still. When she spoke he heard in her voice an amazement too great for anger. It was almost gentle in its astonishment. 'Gerald,' she said, 'I am not in need of consolation.'

Foolish Helen, he thought, breathing quietly in the warm dusk of her hair; foolish dear one, to speak from that realm of abolished time.

'I'm not consoling you,' he said.

She was again silent for a moment and he felt that her heart was throbbing hard; its shocks went through him. 'Let me go,' she said.

He kissed her hair, holding her closer.

Helen, starting violently, thrust him away with all her strength, and though blissfully aware only of his own interpretation, Gerald half released her, keeping her only by his clasp of her wrists.

His kiss had confirmed her incredible suspicion. 'You insult me!' she said. 'And after what I told you! What intolerable a.s.sumption! What intolerable arrogance! What baseness!'

Her eyes seemed to burn their eyelids; her face was transformed in its wild, blanched indignation.

'But I love you,' said Gerald, and he looked at her with a candour of conviction too deep for pleading.

'You love me!' Helen repeated. She could have wept for sheer fury and humiliation had not her scornful concentration on him been too intent to admit the flooding image of herself--mocked and abased by this travesty--which might have brought the fears. 'I think that you are mad.'

'But I do love you,' Gerald reiterated. 'I've been mad, if you like; but I'm quite sane now.'

'You are a simpleton,' was Helen's reply; she could find no other word for his fatuity.

'Be as cruel as you like; I know I deserve it,' said Gerald.

'You imagine I'm punishing you?'

'I don't imagine anything, or see anything, Helen, except that we love each other and that you've got to marry me.'

Helen looked deeply into his eyes, deeply and, he saw it at last, implacably. 'If your last chance hadn't been gone, can you believe that I would ever have told you? Your last chance is gone. I will never marry you.' And hearing steps outside, she twisted her hands from his, saying, 'Think of appearances, please. Here is Franklin.'

CHAPTER XXVII.

Gerald was standing at the window looking out when Franklin entered, and Helen, in the place where he had left her, met the gaze of her affianced with a firm and sombre look. There was a moment of silence while Franklin stood near the door, turning a hesitant glance from Gerald's back to Helen's face, and then Helen said, 'Gerald and I have been quarrelling.'

Franklin, feeling his way, tried to smile. 'Well, that's too bad,' he said. He looked at her for another silent moment before adding, 'Do you want to go on? Am I in the way?'

'No, I don't want to go on, and you are very welcome,' Helen answered.

Her eyes were fixed on Franklin and she wondered at her own self-command, for, in his eyes, so troubled and so kindly, she seemed to see mutual memories; the memory of herself lying in the wood and saying 'I'm sick to death of it'; the memory of herself standing here and saying to him 'I'm a broken-hearted woman.' And she knew that Franklin was seeing in her face the same memories, and that, with his intuitive insight where things of the heart were concerned, he was linking them with the silent figure at the window.

'I suppose,' he said, going to the fire and standing before it, his back to the others, 'I suppose I can't help to elucidate things a little.'

'No, I think they are quite clear,' said Helen, 'or, at all events, you put an end to them by staying; especially'--and she fixed her gaze on the figure at the window--'as Gerald is going now.'

But Gerald did not move and Franklin presently remarked, 'Sometimes, you know, a third person can see things in another way and help things out.

If you could just, for instance, talk the matter over quietly, before me, as a sort of adviser, you know. That might help. It's a pity for old friends to quarrel.'

Gerald turned from the window at this. He had come down from the heights and knew that he had risen there too lightly, and that the tangles of lower realities must be unravelled before he could be free to mount again--Helen with him. He knew, at last, that he had made Helen very angry and that it might take some time to disentangle things; but the radiance of the heights was with him still, and if, to Helen's eye, he looked fatuous, to Franklin, seeing his face now, for the first time, he looked radiant.

'Helen,' he said, smiling gravely at her, 'what Kane says is very sensible. He is the one person in the world one could have such things out before. Let's have them out; let's put the case to him and he shall be umpire.'

Helen bent her ironic and implacable gaze upon him and remained silent.

'You think I've no right to put it before him, I suppose.'

'You most certainly have no right. And you would gain nothing by it.

What I told you just now was true.'

'I can't accept that.'

'Then you are absurd.'

'Very well, I am absurd, then. But there's one thing I have a right to tell Kane,' Gerald went on, unsmiling now. 'I owe it to him to tell him.

He'll think badly of me, I know; but that can't be helped. We've all got into a dreadful muddle and the only way out of it is to be frank. So I must tell you, Kane, that Althea and I have found out that we have made a mistake; we can't hit it off. I'm not the man to make her happy and she feels it, I'm sure she feels it. It's only for my sake, I know, that she hasn't broken off long ago. You are in love with Althea, and I am in love with Helen; so there it is. I'm only saying what we are all seeing.' Gerald spoke gravely, yet at the same time with a certain blitheness, as though he took it for granted, for Franklin as well as for himself, that he thus made both their paths clear and left any hazardous element in their situations the same for both. Would Althea have Franklin and would Helen have him? This was really all that now needed elucidation.

A heavy silence followed his words. In the silence the impression that came to Gerald was as if one threw reconnoitring pebbles into a well, expecting a swift response of shallowness, and heard instead, after a wondering pause, the hollow reverberations of sombre, undreamed-of depths. Franklin's eyes were on him and Helen's eyes were on him, and he knew that in both their eyes he had proved himself once more, to say the least of it, absurd.

'Mr. Digby,' said Franklin Kane, and his voice was so strange that it sounded indeed like the fall of the stone in far-off darkness, 'perhaps you are saying what we all see; but perhaps we don't all see the same things in the same way; perhaps,' Franklin went on, finding his way, 'you don't even see some things at all.'

Gerald had flushed. 'I know I'm behaving caddishly. I've no right to say anything until I see Althea.'

'Well, perhaps not,' Franklin conceded.

'But, you know,' said Gerald, groping too, 'it's not as if it were really sudden--the Althea side of it, I mean. We've not hit it off at all. I've disappointed her frightfully; it will be a relief to her, I know--to hear'--Gerald stammered a little--'that I see now, as clearly as she does, that we couldn't be happy together. Of course,' and he grew still more red, 'it will be she who throws me over. And--I think I'd better go to her at once.'

'Wait, Gerald,' said Helen.

He paused in his precipitate dash to the door. Only her gaze, till now, had told of the chaos within her; but when Gerald said that he was going to Althea, she found words. 'Wait a moment. I don't think that you understand. I don't think, as Franklin says, that you see some things at all. Do you realise what you are doing?'

Gerald stood, his hand on the door k.n.o.b, and looked at her. 'Yes; I realise it perfectly.'