Franklin Kane Part 32

'Does she say I shan't?'

Miss Grizel's smile was again grim. 'She says you shan't, and so do I.

She's not fit to see anybody.'

Gerald looked at her for another moment and then turned to the writing-table. 'I beg your pardon; I don't mean to be rude. Only I really must see her. Do you mind my writing a line? Will you have it taken to her?'

'Certainly,' said Miss Grizel, compressing her lips.

Gerald sat down and wrote, quickly, yet carefully, pausing between the sentences and fixing the same unseeing gaze on the garden. He then rose and gave the note to Miss Grizel, who, ringing, gave it to the maid, after which she and Gerald remained sitting on opposite sides of the room in absolute silence for quite a long while.

Gerald's note had been short. 'Don't be so unspeakably cruel,' it ran, without preamble. 'You know, don't you, that it has all turned out perfectly? Althea has thrown me over and taken Kane. I've made them happy at all events. As for us--O Helen, you must see me. I can't wait.

I can't wait for an hour. I beseech you to come. Only let me see you.--GERALD.'

To this appeal the maid presently brought the answer, which Gerald, oblivious of Miss Grizel's scrutiny, tore open and read.

'Don't make me despise you, Gerald. You come because of what I told you yesterday, and I told you because it was over, so that you insult me by coming. You must believe me when I say that it is over, and until you can meet me as if you had forgotten, I cannot see you. I will not see you now. I do not want to see you.--HELEN.'

He read this, and Miss Grizel saw the blood surge into his face. He leaned back in his chair, crumpled Helen's note in his fingers, and looked out of the window. Again Miss Grizel was sorry for him, though with her sympathy there mingled satisfaction. Presently Gerald looked at her, and it was as if he were, at last, aware of her. He looked for a long time, and suddenly, like some one spent and indifferent, he said, offering his explanation: 'You see--I'm in love with Helen--and she won't have me.'

Miss Grizel gasped and gazed. 'In love with Helen? You?' she repeated.

The gold locket on her ample bosom had risen with her astounded breath.

'Yes,' said Gerald, 'and she won't have me.'

'But Miss Jakes?' said Miss Grizel.

'She is in love with Kane, and Kane with her--as he always has been, you know. They are all right. Everything is all right, except Helen.'

A queer illumination began to shoot across Miss Grizel's stupor.

'Perhaps you told Helen that you loved her before Miss Jakes threw you over. Perhaps you told Mr. Kane that Miss Jakes loved him before she threw you over. Perhaps it's you who have upset the apple-cart.'

'I suppose it is,' said Gerald, gloomily, but without contrition. 'I thought it would bring things right to have the facts out. It has brought them right--for Althea and Kane; they will be perfectly happy together.'

This simplicity, in the face of her own deep knowledge--the knowledge she had built on in sending for Franklin Kane a week ago--roused a ruthless ire in Miss Grizel. 'I'm afraid that you've let your own wishes sadly deceive you,' she said. 'I must tell you, since you evidently don't know it, that Mr. Kane is in love with Helen; deeply in love with her. From what I understand of the situation you have sacrificed him to your own feeling, and perhaps sacrificed Miss Jakes too; but I don't go into that.'

It was now Gerald's turn to gaze and gasp; he did not gasp, however; he only gazed--gazed with a gaze no longer inward and unseeing. He was, at last, seeing everything. He fell back on the one most evident thing he saw, and had from the beginning seen. 'But Helen--she could never have loved him. Such a marriage would be unfit for Helen. I'm not excusing myself. I see I've been an unpardonable fool in one way.'

Miss Grizel's ire increased. 'Unfit for Helen? Why, pray? He would have given her the position of a princess--in our funny modern sense. I intended, and I made the marriage. I saw he'd fallen in love with her--dear little man--though at the time he didn't know it himself. And since then I've had the satisfaction--one of the greatest of my life--of seeing how happy I had made both of them. It was obvious, touchingly so, that he was desperately in love with Helen. Yes, Gerald, don't come to me for sympathy and help. You've wrecked a thing I had set my heart on.

You've wrecked Mr. Kane, and my opinion is that you've wrecked Helen too.'

Gerald, who had become very pale, kept his eyes on her, and he went back to his one foothold in a rocking world. 'Helen could never have loved him.'

Miss Grizel shook her hand impatiently above her knee. 'Love! Love! What do you all mean with your love, I'd like to know? What's this sudden love of yours for Helen, you who, until yesterday, were willing to marry another woman for her money--or were you in love with her too? What's Miss Jakes's love of Mr. Kane, who, until a week ago, thought herself in love with you? And you may well ask me what is Mr. Kane's love of Helen, who, until a week ago, thought himself in love with Miss Jakes? But there I answer you that he is the only one of you who seems to me to know what love is. One can respect his feeling; it means more than himself and his own emotions. It means something solid and dependable.

Helen recognised it, and Helen's feeling for him--though it certainly wasn't love in your foolish sense--was something that she valued more than anything you can have to offer her. And I repeat, though I'm sorry to pain you, that it is clear to me that you have wrecked her life as well as Mr. Kane's.'

Miss Grizel had had her say. She stood up, her lips compressed, her eyes weighty with their hard, good sense. And Gerald rose, too. He was at a disadvantage, and an unfair one, but he did not think of that. He thought, with stupefaction, of what he had done in this room the day before to Franklin and to Helen. In the depths of his heart he couldn't wish it undone, for he couldn't conceive of himself now as married to Althea, nor could he, in spite of Miss Grizel's demonstrations, conceive of Helen as married to Franklin Kane. But with all the depths of his heart he wished what he had done, done differently. And although he couldn't conceive of Helen as married to Franklin Kane, although he couldn't accept Miss Grizel's account of her state as final, nor believe her really wrecked--since, after all, she loved him, not Franklin--he could clearly conceive from Miss Grizel's words that by doing it as he had, he had wrecked many things and endangered many. What these things were her words only showed him confusedly, and his clearest impulse now was to see just what they were, to see just what he had done. Miss Grizel couldn't show him, for Miss Grizel didn't know the facts; Helen would not show him, she refused to see him; his mind leaped at once, as he rose and stood looking rather dazedly about before going, to Franklin Kane. Kane, as he had said yesterday, was the one person in the world before whom one could have such things out. Even though he had wrecked Kane, Kane was still the only person he could turn to. And since he had wrecked him in his ignorance he felt that now, in his enlightenment, he owed him something infinitely delicate and infinitely deep in the way of apology.

'Well, thank you,' he said, grasping Miss Grizel's hand. 'You had to say it, and it had to be said. Good-bye.'

Miss Grizel, not displeased with his fashion of taking her chastis.e.m.e.nt, returned his grasp. 'Yes,' she said, 'you couldn't go on as you were.

But all the same, I'm sorry for you.'

'Oh,' Gerald smiled a little. 'I don't suppose you've much left for me, and no wonder.'

'Oh yes, I've plenty left for you,' said Miss Grizel. And, in thinking over his expression as he had left her, the smile, its self-mockery, yet its lack of bitterness, his courage, and yet the frankness of his disarray, she felt that she liked Gerald more than she had ever liked him.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

'Why, yes, of course I can see you. Do sit down.' Franklin spoke gravely, scanning his visitor's face while he moved piles of pamphlets from a chair and pushed aside the books and papers spread before him on the table.

Gerald had found him, after a fruitless morning call, at his lodgings in Clarges Street, and Franklin, in the dim little sitting-room, had risen from the work that, for hours, had given him a feeling of anchorage--not too secure--in a world where many of his bearings were painfully confused. Seeing him so occupied, Gerald, in the doorway, had hesitated: 'Am I interrupting you? Shall I come another time? I want very much to see you, if I may.' And Franklin had replied with his quick rea.s.surance, too kindly for coldness, yet too grave for cordiality.

Gerald sat down at the other side of the table and glanced at the array of papers spread upon it. They gave him a further sense of being beyond his depth. It was like seeing suddenly the whole bulk of some ocean craft, of which before one had noticed only the sociable and very insignificant decks and riggings, lifted, for one's scientific edification, in its docks. All the laborious, underlying meaning of Franklin's life was symbolised in these neat papers and heavy books.

Gerald tried to remember, with only partial success, what Franklin's professional interests were; people's professional interests had rarely engaged his attention. It was queer to realise that the greater part of Franklin Kane's life was something entirely alien from his own imagination, and Gerald felt, as we have said, beyond his depth in realising it. Yet the fact of a significance he had no power of gauging did not disconcert him; he was quite willing to swim as best he could and even to splash grotesquely; quite willing to show Franklin Kane that he was very helpless and very ignorant, and could only appeal for mercy.

'Please be patient with me if I make mistakes,' he said. 'I probably shall make mistakes; please bear with me.'

Franklin, laying one pamphlet on another, did not reply to this, keeping only his clear, kind gaze responsively on the other's face.

'In the first place,' said Gerald, looking down and reaching out for a thick blue pencil which he seemed to examine while he spoke, 'I must ask your pardon. I made a terrible fool of myself yesterday afternoon. As you said, there were so many things I didn't see. I do see them now.'

He lifted his eyes from the pencil, and Franklin, after meeting them for a moment, said gently: 'Well, there isn't much good in looking at them, is there? As for asking my pardon--you couldn't have helped not knowing those things.'

'Perhaps I ought to have guessed them, but I didn't. I was able to play the fool in perfect good faith.'

'Well, I don't know about that; I don't know that you played the fool,'

said Franklin.

'My second point is this,' said Gerald. 'Of course I'm not going to pretend anything. You know that I love Helen and that I believe she loves me, and that for that reason I've a right to seem silly and fatuous and do my best to get her. I quite see what you must both of you have thought of me yesterday. I quite see that she couldn't stand my blindness--to all you meant and felt, you know, and then my imagining that everything could be patched up between her and me. She wants me to feel my folly to the full, and no wonder. But that sort of bitterness would have to go down where people love--wouldn't it? it's something that can be got over. But that's what I want to ask you; perhaps I'm more of a fool than I yet know; perhaps what her aunt tells me is true; perhaps I've wrecked Helen as well as wrecked you. It's a very queer question to ask--and you must forgive me--no one can answer it but you, except Helen, and Helen won't see me. Do you really think I have wrecked her?'

Everybody seemed to be asking this question of poor Franklin. He gave it his attention in this, its new application, and before answering, he asked:

'What's happened since I saw you?'

Gerald informed him of the events of the morning.

'I suppose,' said Franklin, reflecting, 'that you shouldn't have gone so soon. You ought to have given her more time to adjust herself. It looked a little too sure, didn't it? as if you felt that now that you'd settled matters satisfactorily you could come and claim her.'

'I know now what it looked like,' said Gerald; 'but, you see, I didn't know this morning. And I was sure, I am sure,' he said, fixing his charming eyes sadly and candidly upon Franklin, 'that Helen and I belong to one another.'

Franklin continued to reflect. 'Well, yes, I understand that,' he said.

'But how can you make her feel it? Why weren't you sure long ago?'

'Oh, you ask me again why I was a fool,' said Gerald gloomily, 'and I can only reply that Helen was too clever. After all, falling in love is suddenly seeing something and wanting something, isn't it? Well, Helen never let me see and never let me want.'