Queed Part 67

"Happiness?" He flung the word back at her impatiently, but his intention of demolishing it was suddenly checked by a flashing remembrance of Fifi's definition of it. "Will you kindly explain how you would get happiness from that?"

"Oh--if you don't see, I am afraid I--could never explain--"

"It is a display of just the same sort of unthinking Quixotism which has led you hitherto to refuse to accept your own money. What you propose is utterly irrational in every way. Can you deny it? Can you defend your proposal by any reasonable argument? I cannot imagine how so--so mad an idea ever came into your mind."

She sat still, her fingers playing with the frayed edges of Mr. Dayne's blotting-pad, and allowed the silence to enfold them once more.

"Your foundation," he went on, with still further loss of motive power, "would--gain nothing by bearing the name of my father. He was not worthy.... No one knows that better than you. Will you tell me what impulse put it into your mind to--to do this?"

"I--had many reasons," said she, speaking with some difficulty. "I will tell you one. My father loved him once. I know he would like me to do something--to make the name honorable again."

"That," he said, in a hard voice, "is beyond your power."

She showed no disposition to contradict him, or even to maintain the conversation. Presently he went on:--

"I cannot let you injure your foundation by--branding it with his notoriety, in an impulsive and--and fruitless generosity. For it would be fruitless. You, of all people, must understand that the burden on the other side is--impossibly heavy. You know that, don't you?"

She raised her head and looked at him.

Again, her pride had been plucking at her heartstrings, burning her with the remembrance that he, when he gave her everything that a man could give, had done it in a manner perfect and without flaw. And now she, with her infinitely smaller offering, sat tongue-tied and ineffectual, unable to give with a show of the purple, too poor-spirited even to yield him the truth for his truth which alone made the gift worth the offering.

Her blood, her spirit, and all her inheritance rallied at the call of her pride. She looked at him, and made her gaze be steady: though this seemed to her the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.

"I must not let you think that I wanted to do this only for your father's sake. That would not be honest. Part of my pleasure in planning it--most of it, perhaps--was because I--I should so much like to do something for your father's son."

She rose, trying to give the movement a casual air, and went over to her little desk, pretending to busy herself straightening out the litter of papers upon it. From this safe distance, her back toward him, she forced herself to add:--

"This reformatory will take the place of the one you--would have won for us. Don't you see? Half-my happiness in giving it is gone, unless you will lend me the name."

Behind her the silence was impenetrable.

She stood at her desk, methodically sorting papers which she did not see, and wildly guessing at the meaning of that look of turbulent consciousness which she had seen break startled into his eyes. More even than in their last meeting, she had found that the sight of his face, wonderfully changed yet even more wonderfully the same, deeply affected her to-day. Its new sadness and premature age moved her strangely; with a peculiar stab of compa.s.sion and pain she had seen for the first time the gray in the nondescript hair about his temples. For his face, she had seen that the smooth sheath of satisfied self-absorption, which had once overlain it like the hard veneer on a table-top, had been scorched away as in a baptism by fire; from which all that was best in it had come out at once strengthened and chastened. And she thought that the shining quality of honesty in his face must be such as to strike strangers on the street.

And now, behind her on the office floor, she heard his footsteps, and in one breath was suddenly cold with the fear that her hour had come, and hot with the fear that it had not.

Engrossed with her papers, she moved so as to keep her back toward him; but he, with a directness which would not flinch even in this untried emergency, deliberately intruded himself between her and the table; and so once more they stood face to face.

"I don't understand you," he began, his manner at its quietest. "Why do you want to do this for me?"

At this close range, she glanced once at him and instantly looked away.

His face was as white as paper; and when she saw that her heart first stopped beating, and then pounded off in a wild frightened paean.

"I--cannot tell you--I don't know--exactly."

"What do you mean?"

She hardly recognized his voice; instinctively she began backing away.

"I don't think I--can explain. You--rather terrify me this morning."

"Are you in love with ME?" he demanded in a terrible voice, beginning at the wrong end, as he would be sure to do.

Finger at her lip, her blue eyes, bright with unshed tears, resting upon his in a gaze as direct as a child's, Sharlee nodded her head up and down.

And that was all the hint required by clever Mr. Surface, the famous social scientist. He advanced somehow, and took her in his arms. On the whole, it was rather surprising how satisfactorily he did it, considering that she was the first woman he had ever touched in all his days.

So they stood through a time that might have been a minute and might have been an age, since all of them that mattered had soared away to the sunlit s.p.a.ces where no time is. After awhile, driven by a strange fierce desire to see her face in the light of this new glory, he made a gentle effort to hold her off from him, but she clung to him, crying, "No, no!

I don't want you to see me yet."

After another interval of uncertain length, she said:--

"All along my heart has cried out that you couldn't have done that, and hurt me so. _You couldn't_. I will never doubt my heart again. And you were so fine--so fine--to forgive me so easily."

In the midst of his dizzying exaltation, he marveled at the ease with which she spoke her inmost feeling; he, the great apostle of reason and self-mastery, was much slower in recovering lost voice and control. It was some time before he would trust himself to speak, and even then the voice that he used was not recognizable as his.

"So you are willing to do as much for my father's son as to--to--take his name for your own."

"No, this is something that I am doing for myself. Your father was not perfect, but he was the only father that ever had a son whose name I would take for mine."

A silence.

"We can keep my father's house," he said, in time, "for--for--us to live in. You must give up the office. And I will find light remunerative work, which will leave at least part of my time free for my book."

She gave a little laugh that was half a sob. "Perhaps--you could persuade that wealthy old lady--to get out a second edition of her _thesaurus!_"

"I wish I could, though!"

"You talk just like my little Doctor," she gasped--"my--own little Doctor.... I've got a little surprise for you--about remunerative work," she went on, "only I can't tell you now, because it's a secret.

Promise that you won't make me tell you."

He promised.

Suddenly, without knowing why, she began to cry, her cheek against his breast. "You've had a sad life, little Doctor--a sad life. But I am going to make it all up to you--if you will show me the way."

Presently she became aware that her telephone was ringing, and ringing as though it had been at it for some time.

"Oh bother! They won't let us have even a little minute together after all these years. I suppose you must let me go--"

She turned from the desk with the most beautiful smile he had ever seen upon a face.

"It's for you!"

"For me?" he echoed like a man in a dream. "That is--very strange."

Strange, indeed! Outside, the dull world was wagging on as before, unaware that there had taken place in this enchanted room the most momentous event in history.

He took the receiver from her with a left hand which trembled, and with his untrained right somehow caught and imprisoned both of hers. "Stand right by me," he begged hurriedly.

Now he hoisted the receiver in the general direction of his ear, and said in what he doubtless thought was quite a businesslike manner: "Well?"