The Return of the Prodigal Part 40

"No," I said, "there weren't any 'things' in it----"

"There couldn't be," she said superbly. "Not things we'd want to hide."

I said there weren't. It wasn't "things" at all. I shut my eyes and went at it head downward.

It was, somehow, the whole thing.

"The whole thing?" she said, and I saw that I had hit her hard.

"The whole thing," I said.

She looked scared for a moment. Then she rallied.

"But it's the whole thing we want. He wanted it. I know he did. He wanted to be represented completely or not at all. As he stood. As he stood," she reiterated.

She had given me the word I wanted. I could do it gently now.

"That's it," I said. "These 'Memoirs' won't represent him."

Subtlety, diabolic or divine, was given me. I went at it like a man inspired.

"They won't do him justice. They'll do him harm."

"Harm?" She breathed it with an audible fright.

"Very great harm. They give a wrong impression, an impression of--of----"

I left it to her. It sank in. She pondered it.

"You mean," she said at last, "the things he says about himself?"

"Precisely. The things he says about himself. I doubt if he really intended them all for publication."

"It's not the things he says about himself so much," she said. "We could leave some of them out. It's what Grevill might have said about him."

That was awful; but it helped me; it showed me where to plant the blow that would do for her, poor lamb.

"My dear child," I said (I was very gentle, now that I had come to it, to my butcher's work), "that's what I want you to realize.

He'll--he'll say what he can, of course; but he can't say very much. There--there isn't really very much to say."

She took it in silence. She was too much hurt, I thought, to see. I softened it and at the same time made it luminous.

"I mean," I said, "for Grevill to say."

She saw.

"You mean," she said simply, "he isn't great enough?"

I amended it. "For Grevill."

"Grevill," she repeated. I shall never forget how she said it. It was as if her voice reached out and touched him tenderly.

"Lankester is more in his line," I said. "It's a question of temperament, of fitness."

She said she knew that.

"And," I said, "of proportion. If he says what you want him to say about your father, what can he say about Lankester?"

"But if he does Lankester first?"

"Then--if he says what you want him to say--he undoes everything he has done for Lankester. And," I added, "_he's_ done for."

She hadn't seen that aspect of it, for she said: "Grevill is?"

I said he was, of course. I said we all felt that strongly; Grevill felt it himself. It would finish him.

Dear Antigone, I saw her take it. She pressed the sword into her heart. "If--if he did Papa? Is it--is it as bad as all that?"

I said we were afraid it was--for Grevill.

"And is _he_," she said, "afraid?"

"Not for himself," I said, and she asked me: "For whom, then?" And I said: "For Lankester." I told her that was what I'd meant when I said just now that he couldn't do them both. And, as a matter of fact, he wasn't going to do them both. He had given up one of them.

"Which?" she asked; and I said she might guess which.

But she said nothing. She sat there with her eyes fixed on me and her lips parted slightly. It struck me that she was waiting for me, in her dreadful silence, as if her life hung on what I should say.

"He has given up Lankester," I said.

I heard her breath go through her parted lips in a long sigh, and she looked away from me.

"He cared," she said, "as much as that."

"He cared for _you_ as much," I said. I was a little doubtful as to what she meant. But I know now.

She asked me if I had come to tell her that.

I said I thought it was as well she should realize it. But I'd come to ask her--if she cared for him--to let him off. To--to----

She stopped me with it as I fumbled.

"To give Papa up?"

I said, to give him up as far as Grevill was concerned.

She reminded me that it was to be Grevill or n.o.body.

Then, I said, it had much better be n.o.body. If she didn't want to do her father harm.