Franklin Kane Part 34

'Yes, yes, of course,' Gerald hastened past her qualifications to the one liberating fact. 'Two people like you would have had to. But you didn't love him; you couldn't have come to love him. I haven't robbed you of a man you could have loved.'

She saw his immense relief. The joy of it was in his eyes and voice; and the thought of Franklin, of what she had not been able to do for Franklin, made it bitter to her that because she had not been able to save Franklin, Gerald should find relief.

'You couldn't have robbed me of him if there'd been any chance of that,'

she said. 'If there had been any chance of my loving Franklin I would never have let him go. Don't be glad, don't show me that you are glad--because I didn't love him.'

'I can't help being glad, Helen,' he said.

She leaned her head on her hand, covering her eyes. While he was there, showing her that he was glad because she had not loved Franklin, she could not be kind, nor even just to him.

'Helen,' he said, 'I know what you are feeling; but will you listen to me?' She answered that she would listen to anything he had to say, and her voice had the leaden tone of impersonal charity.

'Helen,' Gerald said, 'I know how I've blundered. I see everything. But, with it all, seeing it all, I don't think that you are fair to me. I don't think it is fair if you can't see that I couldn't have thought of all these other possibilities--after what you'd told me--the other day.

How could I think of anything, then, but the one thing--that you loved me and that I loved you, and that, of course, I must set my mistake right at once, set Althea free and come to you? I was very simple and very stupid; but I don't think it's fair not to see that I couldn't believe you'd really repulse me, finally, if you loved me.'

'You ought to have believed it,' Helen said, still with her covered eyes. 'That is what is most simple, most stupid in you. You ought to have felt--and you ought to feel now--that to a woman who could tell you what I did, everything is over.'

'But, Helen, that's my point,' ever so carefully and patiently he insisted. 'How can it be over when I love you--if you still love me?'

She put down her hand now and looked up at him and she saw his hope; not yet dead; sick, wounded, perplexed, but, in his care and patience, vigilant. And it was with a sad wonder for the truth of her own words, that she said, looking up at the face dear beyond all telling for so many years, 'I don't want you, Gerald. I don't want your love. I'm not blaming you. I am fair to you. I see that you couldn't help it, and that it was my fault really. But you are asking for something that isn't there any longer.'

'You mean,' said Gerald, he was very pale, 'that I've won no rights; you don't want a man who has won no rights.'

'There are no rights to win, Gerald.'

'Because of what I've done to him?'

'Perhaps; but I don't think it's that.'

'Because of what I've done to you--not seeing--all our lives?'

'Perhaps, Gerald. I don't know. I can't tell you, for I don't know myself. I don't think anything has been killed. I think something is dead that's been dying by inches for years. Don't press me any more.

Accept the truth. It's all over. I don't want you any longer.'

Helen had risen while she spoke and kept her eyes on Gerald's in speaking. Until this moment, for all his pain and perplexity, he had not lost hope. He had been amazed and helpless and full of fear, but he had not believed, not really believed, that she was lost to him. Now, she saw it in his eyes, he did believe; and as the patient, hearing his sentence, gazes dumb and stricken, facing death, so he gazed at her, seeing irrevocability in her unmoved face. And, accepting his doom, sheer childishness overcame him. As Franklin the day before had felt, so he now felt, the intolerableness of his woe; and, as with Franklin, the waves closed over his head. Helen was so near him that it was but a stumbling step that brought her within his arms; but it was not with the lover's supplication that he clung to her; he clung, hiding his face on her breast, like a child to its mother, broken-hearted, bewildered, reproachful. And, bursting into tears, he sobbed: 'How cruel you are!

how cruel! It is your pride--you've the heart of a stone! If I'd loved you for years and told you and made you know you loved me back--could I have treated you like this--and cast you off--and stopped loving you, because you'd never seen before? O Helen, how can you--how can you!'

After a moment Helen spoke, angrily, because she was astounded, and because, for the first time in her life, she was frightened, beyond her depth, helpless in the waves of emotion that lifted her like great encompa.s.sing billows. 'Gerald, don't. Gerald, it is absurd of you.

Gerald, don't cry.' She had never seen him cry.

He heard her dimly, and the words were the cruel ones he expected. The sense of her cruelty filled him, and the dividing sense that she, who was so cruel, was still his only refuge, his only consolation.

'What have I done, I'd like to know, that you should treat me like this?

If you loved me before--all those years--why should you stop now, because I love you? why should you stop because of telling me?'

Again Helen's voice came to him after a pause, and it seemed now to grope, stupefied and uncertain, for answers to his absurdity. 'How can one argue, Gerald, like this; perhaps it was because I told you?

Perhaps----'

He took her up, not waiting to hear her surmises. 'How can one get over a thing like that, all in a moment? How can it die like that? You're not over it, not really. It is all pride, and you are punishing me for what I couldn't help, and punishing yourself too, for no one will ever love you as I do. O Helen--I can't believe it's dead. Don't you know that no one will ever love you as I do? Can't you see how happy we could have been together? It's so _silly_ of you not to see. Yes, you are silly as well as cruel.' He shook her while he held her, while he buried his face and cried--cried, literally, like a baby.

She stood still, enfolded but not enfolding, and now she said nothing for a long time, while her eyes, with their strained look of pain, gazed widely, and as if in astonishment, before her; and he, knowing only the silence, the unresponsive silence, continued to sob his protestation, his reproach, with a helplessness and vehemence ridiculous and heart-rending.

Then, slowly, as if compelled, Helen put her arms around him, and, dully, like a creature hypnotised to action strange to its whole nature, she said once more, and in a different voice: 'Don't cry, Gerald.' But she, too, was crying. She tried to control her sobs; but they broke from her, strange and difficult, like the sobs of the hypnotised creature waking from its trance to confused and painful consciousness, and, resting her forehead on his shoulder, she repeated dully, between her sobs: 'Don't cry.'

He was not crying any longer. Her weeping had stilled his in an instant, and she went on, between her broken breaths: 'How absurd--oh, how absurd. Sit down here--yes--keep your head so, if you must, you foolish, foolish child.'

He held her, hearing her sobs, feeling them lift her breast, and, in all his great astonishment, like a smile, the memory of the other day stole over him, the stillness, the accomplishment, the blissful peace, the lifting to a serene eternity of s.p.a.ce. To remember it now was like seeing the sky from a nest, and in the sweet darkness of sudden security he murmured: '_You_ are the foolish child.'

'How can I believe you love me?' said Helen.

'How can you not?'

They sat side by side, her arms around him and his head upon her breast.

'It was only because I told you----'

'Well--isn't that reason enough?'

'How can it be reason enough for me?'

'How can it not? You've spent your whole life hiding from me; when I saw you, why, of course, I fell in love at once. O Helen--dear, dear Helen!'

'When you saw my love.'

'Wasn't that seeing you?'

They spoke in whispers, and their hearts were not in their words. He raised his head and looked at her, and he smiled at her now with the smile of the beautiful necessity. 'How you've frightened me,' he said.

'Don't be proud. Even if it did need your cleverness to show me that, too. I mean--you've given me everything--always--and why shouldn't you have given me the chance to see you--and to know what you are to me? How you frightened me. You are not proud any longer. You love me.'

She was not proud any longer. She loved him. Vaguely, in the bewilderment of her strange, her blissful humility, among the great billows of life that encompa.s.sed and lifted her, it seemed with enormous heart-beats, Helen remembered Franklin's words. 'Let it melt--please let it melt, dear Helen.' But it had needed the inarticulate, the instinctive, to pierce to the depths of life. Gerald's tears, his head so boyishly pressed against her, his arms so childishly clinging, had told her what her heart might have been dead to for ever if, with reason and self-command, he had tried to put it into words.

She looked at him, through her tears, and she knew him dearer to her in this resurrection than if her heart had never died to him; and, as he smiled at her, she, too, smiled back, tremblingly.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

Althea had not seen Gerald after the day that they came up from Merriston together. The breaking of their engagement was duly announced, and, with his little note to her, thanking her for her frankness and wishing her every happiness, Gerald and all things connected with him seemed to pa.s.s out of her life. She saw no more of the frivolous relations who were really serious, nor of the serious ones who were really frivolous. She did not even see Helen. Helen's engagement to Franklin had never been formally announced, and few, beyond her circle of nearest friends, knew of it; the fact that Franklin had now returned to his first love was not one that could, at the moment, be made appropriately public. But, of course, Helen had had to be told, not only that Franklin had gone from her, but that he had come back to Althea, and Althea wondered deeply how this news had been imparted. She had not felt strength to impart it herself. When she asked Franklin, very tentatively, about it, he said: 'That's all right, dear. I've explained.

Helen perfectly understands.'

That it was all right seemed demonstrated by the little note, kind and sympathetic, that Helen wrote to her, saying that she did understand, perfectly, and was so glad for her and for Franklin, and that it was such a good thing when people found out mistakes in time. There was not a trace of grievance; Helen seemed to relinquish a good which, she recognised, had only been hers because Althea hadn't wanted it. And this was natural; how could one show one's grievance in such a case? Helen, above all, would never show it; and Althea was at once oppressed, and at the same time oddly sustained by the thought that she had, all inevitably, done her friend an injury. She lay awake at night, turning over in her mind Helen's present plight and framing loving plans for the future. She took refuge in such plans from a sense of having come to an end of things. To think of Helen, and of what, with their wealth, she and Franklin could do for Helen, seemed, really, her strongest hold on life. It was the brightest thing that she had to look forward to, and she looked forward to it with complete self-effacement. She saw the beautiful Italian villa where Helen should be the fitting centre, the English house where Helen, rather than she, should entertain. She felt that she asked nothing more for herself. She was safe, if one liked to put it so, and in that safety she felt not only her ambitions, but even any personal desires, extinguished. Her desire, now, was to unite with Franklin in making the proper background for Helen. But at the moment these projects were unrealisable; taste, as well as circ.u.mstance, required a pause, a lull. It was a relief--so many things were a relief, so few things more than merely that--to know that Helen was in the country somewhere, and would not be back for ten days or a fortnight.

Meanwhile, Miss Harriet Robinson, very grave but very staunch, sustained Althea through all the outward difficulties of her _volte-face_. Miss Robinson, of course, had had to be told of the reason for the _volte-face_, the fact that Althea had found, after all, that she cared more for Franklin Winslow Kane. It was in regard to the breaking of her engagement that Miss Robinson was staunch and grave; in regard to the new engagement, Althea saw that, though still staunch, she was much disturbed. Miss Robinson found Franklin hard to place, and found it hard to understand why Althea had turned from Gerald Digby to him. Franklin's millions didn't count for much with Miss Robinson, nor could she suspect them of counting for anything, where marriage was concerned, with her friend. She had not, indeed, a high opinion of the millionaire type of her compatriots. Her standards were birth and fashion, and poor Franklin could not be said to embody either of these claims. His mitigating qualities could hardly shine for Miss Robinson, who, accustomed to continually seeing and frequently evading the drab, dry, utilitarian species of her country-people, could not be expected to find in him the flavour of oddity and significance that his English acquaintance prized.

Franklin didn't make any effort to place himself more favourably. He was very gentle and very attentive, and he followed all Althea's directions as to clothes and behaviour with careful literalness; but even barbered and tailored by the best that London had to offer, he seemed to sink inevitably into the discreetly effaced position that the American husband so often a.s.sumes behind his more brilliant mate, and Althea might have been more aware of this had she not been so sunken in an encompa.s.sing consciousness of her own obliteration. She felt herself nearer Franklin there, and the sense of relief and safety came most to her when she could feel herself near Franklin. It didn't disturb her, standing by him in the background, that Miss Robinson should not appreciate him. After all, deeper than anything, was the knowledge that Helen had appreciated him. Recede as far as he would from the gross foreground places, Helen's choice of him, Helen's love--for after a fashion, Helen must have loved him--gave him a final and unquestionable value. It was in this a.s.surance of Helen's choice that she found a refuge when questionings and wonders came to drag her down to suffering again. There were many things that menaced the lull of safety, things she could not bear yet to look at. The sense of her own abandonment to weak and disingenuous impulses was one; another shadowed her unstable peace more darkly. Had Helen really minded losing Franklin--apart from his money? What had his value really been to her? What was she feeling and doing now? What was Gerald doing and feeling, and what did they both think or suspect of her? The answer to some of these questionings came to her from an unsuspected quarter. It was on a morning of chill mists and pale sunlight that Althea, free of Miss Robinson, walked down Grosvenor Street towards the park. She liked to go into the park on such mornings, when Miss Robinson left her free, and sit on a bench and abandon herself to remote, impersonal dreams. It was just as she entered Berkeley Square that she met Mrs. Mallison, that aunt of Gerald's who had struck her, some weeks ago, as so disconcerting, with her skilfully preserved prettiness and her ethical and metaphysical aspirations. This lady, furred to her ears, was taking out two small black pomeranians for an airing. She wore long pearl ear-rings, and her narrow, melancholy face was delicately rouged and powdered. Althea's colour rose painfully; she had seen none of Gerald's relatives since the severance. Mrs.

Mallison, however, showed no embarra.s.sment. She stopped at once and took Althea's hand and gazed tenderly upon her. Her manner had always afflicted Althea, with its intimations of some deep, mystical understanding.

'My dear, I'm so glad--to meet you, you know. How nice, how right you've been.' Mrs. Mallison murmured her words rather than spoke them and could p.r.o.nounce none of her r's. 'I'm so glad to be able to tell you so.