Franklin Kane Part 8

'Well, I don't know about that,' said Franklin, his voice a little shaken. 'You can't expect me to give you an impartial answer to that now--can you, dear? I feel as if I wanted you to marry me on the chance you'd come to love me. And you do care for me enough for this, don't you? That in itself is such an incredible gift.'

Yes, she evidently cared for him enough for this; and 'this' meant his arm about her, her hand in his, his eyes of devotion upon her, centre of his universe as she was. And 'this' had, after years of formality, incredibly indeed altered all their relation. But--to marry him--it meant all sorts of other things; it meant definitely giving up; it meant definitely taking on. What it meant taking on was Franklin's raylessness, Franklin's obscurity, Franklin's dun-colour--could a wife escape the infection? What it meant giving up was more vague, but it floated before her as the rose-coloured dream of her youth--the hero, the earnest, ardent hero, who was to light all life to rapture and significance. And, absurdly, while the drift of glamour and regret floated by, and while she sat with Franklin's arm about her, her hand in his, it seemed to shape itself for a moment into the gay, irresponsible face of Gerald Digby. Absurd, indeed; he was neither earnest nor ardent, and if he were he would never feel earnestness or ardour on her account.

Franklin certainly responded, in that respect, to the requirements of her dream. Yet--ah, yet--he responded in no other. It was not enough to have eyes only for her. A hero should draw others' eyes upon him; should have rays that others could recognise. Althea was troubled, and she was also ashamed of herself, but whether because of that vision of Gerald Digby, or whether because she was allowing Franklin privileges never allowed before, she did not know. Only the profundity of reverence that beamed upon her from Franklin's eyes enabled her to regain her self-respect.

Smiling a little constrainedly, she drew her hand from his and rose. 'I mustn't bind myself,' she repeated, standing with downcast eyes before him, 'but I'll try; indeed, I'll try.'

'You want to be in love with me, if only you can manage it, don't you, dear?' he questioned; and to this she could truthfully reply, 'Yes, dear Franklin, I want to be in love with you.'

CHAPTER X.

Althea found, as she had hoped, that her whole situation was altered by the arrival of her suitor. A woman boasting the possession of even the most rayless of that species is in a very different category from the woman as mere unsought unit. As unit she sinks easily into the background, is merged with other unemphatic things, but as sought she is always in the foreground, not only in her own, but in others' eyes. Be she ever so unnoticeable, she then gains, at least, the compliment of conjecture. The significance of her personal drama has a universal interest; the issues of her situation are those that appeal forcibly to all.

Althea and her steady, sallow satellite, became the centre of a watchful circle; watchful and kindly. Even to others her charms became more apparent, as, indeed, they were more actual. To be loved and to live in the presence of the adorer is the most beautifying of circ.u.mstances.

Althea bloomed under it. Her eyes became larger, sweeter, sadder; her lips softer; the mild fever of her indecision and of her sense of power burned dimly in her cheeks. As the centre of watchfulness she gained the grace of self-confidence.

Aunt Julia, observant and shrewd, smiled with half-ironic satisfaction.

She had felt sure that Althea must come to this, and 'this,' she considered as on the whole fortunate for Althea. Anything, Aunt Julia thought, was better than to become a wandering old maid, and she had, moreover, the highest respect for Franklin Winslow Kane. As a suitor for one of her own girls he would, of course, have been impossible; but her girls she placed in a different category from Althea; they had the rights of youth, charm, and beauty.

The girls, for their part, though seeing Franklin as a fair object for chaff, conceived of him as wholly suitable. Though they chaffed him, they never did so to his disadvantage, and they were respectful spectators of his enterprise. They had the nicest sense of loyalty for serious situations.

And Miss Buckston was of all the most satisfactory in her att.i.tude. Her contempt for the disillusions and impediments of marriage could not prevent her from feeling an altogether new regard for a person to whom marriage was so obviously open; moreover, she thought Mr. Kane highly interesting. She at once informed Althea that she always found American men vastly the superior in achievement and energy to the much-vaunted American woman, and Althea was not displeased. She was amused but gratified, when Miss Buckston told her what were Franklin's good qualities, and said that though he had many foolish democratic notions, he was more worth while talking to than any man she had met for a long time. She took every opportunity for talking to him about sociology, science, and international themes, and Althea even became a little irked by the frequency of these colloquies and tempted sometimes to withdraw Franklin from them; but the subtle flattery that Miss Buckston's interest in Franklin offered to herself was too acceptable for her to yield to such impulses. Yes, Franklin had a right to his air of careful elation; she had never been so near it. She had not again allowed him to kiss her--she was still rather ashamed when she remembered how often she had, on that one occasion, allowed him to kiss her; yet, in spite of her swift stepping back to discretion, she had never in all her life been so near to saying 'yes' to Franklin as during the eight or ten days after his arrival. And the fact that a third postcard from Helen expressed even further vagueness as to the chance of Gerald's being able to be with them that autumn at Merriston, added to the sense of inevitability.

Althea had been for this time so absorbed in Franklin, his effect on others and on herself, that she had not felt, as she would otherwise have done, Helen's unsatisfactory att.i.tude. Helen was at last coming, and she was fluttered at the thought of her coming, but she was far more able to cope with Helen; there was more self to do it with; she was stronger, more independent of Helen's opinion and of Helen's affection.

But dimly she felt also--hardly aware she felt it--that she was a more effective self as the undecided recipient of Franklin's devotion than as his affianced wife. A rayless person, it seemed, could crown one with beams as long as one maintained one's distance from him; merged with him one shared his insignificance. To accept Franklin might be to shear them both of all the radiance they borrowed from each other.

Helen arrived on a very hot evening in mid-August. She had lost the best train, which brought one to Merriston at tea-time--Althea felt that Helen was the sort of person who would always lose the best train--and after a tedious journey, with waits and changes at hot stations, she received her friend's kisses just as the dressing-bell for dinner sounded. Helen, standing among her boxes, while Amelie hurriedly got out her evening things, looked extremely tired, and felt, Althea was sure, extremely ill-tempered. It was characteristic of Helen, she knew it intuitively, to feel ill-temper, and yet to have it so perfectly under control that it made her manner sweeter than usual. Her sense of social duty never failed her, and it did not in the least fail her now as she smiled at Althea, and, while she drank the cup of tea that had been brought to her, gave an account of her misfortunes. She had arrived in London from Scotland the night before, spent two hours of the morning in frantic shopping--the shops like ovens and the London pavements exhaling a torrid heat; had found, on getting back to Aunt Grizel's--Aunt Grizel was away--that the silly maid had muddled all her packing; then, late already, had hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third cla.s.s with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, yes, I'll have a bath and come down in time for something to eat. I'd rather come down; please don't wait for me.'

They did, however, and she was very late. The windows in the drawing-room were widely open to the evening air, and the lamps had not yet been lit; and when Helen came she made Althea think a little of a beautiful grey moth, hovering vaguely in the dusk.

Captain Merton dined with them that evening, and young Harry Evans, son of a neighbouring squire; and Herbert Vaughan was still at Merriston, the masculine equivalent of Mildred and Dorothy, an exquisitely appointed youth, frank and boisterous, with charming, candid eyes, and the figure of an Adonis. These young men's eyes were fixed upon Helen as they took their places at the dinner-table, though not altogether, Althea perceived, with admiration. Helen, wherever she was, would always be centre; things and people grouped themselves about her; she made the picture, and she was the focus of interest. Why was it? Althea wondered, as, with almost a mother's wistful pleasure, she watched her friend and watched the others watch her. Pale, jaded, in her thin grey dress, haggard and hardly beautiful, Helen was full of apathetic power, and Helen was interested in n.o.body. It was Althea's pride to trace out reasons and to see in what Helen's subjugating quality consisted.

Franklin had taken Helen in, and she herself sat at some distance from them, her heart beating fast as she wondered what Helen would think of him. She could not hear what they said, but she could see that they talked, though not eagerly. Helen had, as usual, the air of giving her attention to anything put before her. One never could tell in the least what she really thought of it. She smiled with pale lips and weary eyes upon Franklin, listened to him gravely and with concentration, and, when she did speak, it was, once or twice, with gaiety, as though he had amused and surprised her. Yet Althea felt that her thoughts were far from Franklin, far from everybody in the room. And meanwhile, of everybody in the room, it was the lean, sallow young man beside her who seemed at once the least impressed and the most interested. But that was so like Franklin; no one could outdo him in interest, and no one could outdo him in placidity. That he could examine Helen with his calm, careful eye, as though she were an object for mental and moral apprais.e.m.e.nt only; that he could see her so acutely, and yet remain so unmoved by her rarity, at once pleased and displeased Althea. It showed him as so safe, but it showed him as so narrow. She found herself thinking almost impatiently that Franklin simply had no sense of charm at all. Helen interested him, but she did not stir in him the least wistfulness or wonder, as charm should do. Miss Buckston interested him, too. And she was very sure that Franklin while liking Helen as a human creature--so he liked Miss Buckston--disapproved of her as a type. Of course, he must disapprove of her. Didn't she contradict all the things he approved of--all the laboriousness, the earnestness, the tolerant bias towards the views and feelings of the majority? And Althea felt, with a rather sharp satisfaction, that it would give her some pleasure to show Franklin that she differed from him; that she had other tastes than his, other needs--needs which Helen more than satisfied.

She had no opportunity that night for fathoming Helen's impressions of Franklin, and indeed felt that the task was a delicate one to undertake.

If Helen didn't volunteer them she could hardly ask for them. Loyalty to Franklin and to the old bond between them, to say nothing of the new, made it unfit that Helen should know that her impressions of Franklin were of any weight with her friend. But the next morning Helen did not come down to breakfast, and there was no reason why, in a stroll round the garden with Franklin afterwards, she should not be point blank; the only unfairness here was that in his opinion of Helen it would not be Helen he judged, but himself.

'How do you like her, my new friend?' she asked.

Franklin was very willing to talk and had already clear impressions. The clearest was the one he put at once before her in the vernacular he had never taken the least pains to modify. 'She looks sick; I'd be worried about her if I were you. Can't you rouse her?'

'Rouse her? She is always like that. Only she was particularly tired last night.'

'A healthy young woman oughtn't to get so tired. If she's always like that she always needs rousing.'

'Don't be ridiculous, Franklin. What do you mean?'

'Why, I'm perfectly serious. I think she looks sick. She ought to take tonics and a lot of outdoor exercise.'

'Is that all that you can find to say about her?' Althea asked, half amused and half indignant.

'Why no,' Franklin replied. 'I think she's very attractive; she has a great deal of poise. Only she's half alive. I'd like to see her doing something.'

'It's enough for her to be, I think.'

'Enough for you, perhaps; but is it enough for her? She'd be a mighty lot happier if she had some work.'

'Really, Franklin, you are absurd,' said Althea laughing. 'There is room in the world, thank goodness, for other people besides people who work.'

'Oh no, there isn't; not really. The trouble with the world is that they're here and have to be taken care of; there's not room for them.

It's lovely of you to care so much about her,' he went on, turning his bright gaze upon her. 'I see how you care for her. It's because of that--for her sake, you know--what it can mean to her--that I emphasise the side that needs looking after. You look after her, Althea; that'll be the best thing that can happen to her.'

With all his acuteness, how guileless he was, the dear! She saw herself 'looking after' Helen!

'You might have a great deal of influence on her,' Franklin added.

Althea struggled for a moment with her pride. She liked Franklin to have this high opinion of her ministering powers, and yet she liked even more to have the comfort of confiding in him; and she was willing to add to Helen's impressiveness at the expense of her own. 'I've no influence with her,' she said. 'I never shall have. I don't believe that any one could influence Helen.'

Franklin looked fixedly at her for some time as though probing what there must be of pain for her in this avowal. Then he said, 'That's too bad. Too bad for her, I mean. You're all right, dear. She doesn't know what she misses.'

They sat out on the lawn that afternoon in the shade of the great trees.

Mildred and Dorothy, glittering in white, played lawn-tennis indefatigably with Herbert Vaughan and Captain Merton. Aunt Julia embroidered, and Miss Buckston read a review with a concentrated brow and an occasional e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of disapproval. Helen was lying p.r.o.ne in a green linen chair; her garden hat was bent over her eyes and she seemed to doze. Franklin sat on the gra.s.s in front of Althea, just outside the radius of shadow, clasping his thin knees with his thin hands. He looked at his worst out of doors, on a lawn and under trees. He was typically civic. Even with his attempts to adapt his clothes to rural requirements, he was out of place. His shoes seemed to demand a pavement, and his thin grey coat and trousers an office stool. Althea also eyed his tie with uncertainty. He wasn't right; he didn't in the least look like Herbert Vaughan, who was elegant, or like Captain Merton, who was easy. He sat out in the sunlight, undisturbed by it, though he screwed up his features in a very unbecoming way while he talked, the sun in his eyes. In her cool green shadow, Helen now and then opened her eyes and looked at him, and Althea wished that he would not remain in so resolutely disadvantageous a situation.

'See here, Althea,' he was saying, 'if you've gone so much into this matter'--the topic was that of sweated industries--'I don't see how you can avoid feeling responsible--making some use of all you know. I don't ask you to come home to do it, though we need you and your kind badly there, but you ought to lend a hand here.'

'I don't really think I could be of any use,' said Althea.

'With all your knowledge of political economy? Why, Miss Buckston could set you to something at once. Knowledge is always of use, isn't it, Miss Buckston?'

'Yes, if one cares enough about things to put them through,' said Miss Buckston. 'I always tell Althea that she might make herself very useful to me.'

'Exactly,' said Franklin. 'And she does care. All you need do, Althea, is to harness yourself. You mustn't drift.'

'The number of drifting American women one sees over here!' Miss Buckston e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed; to which Franklin cheerfully replied: 'Oh, we'll work them all in; they are of use to us in their own way, though they often don't know it. They are learning a lot; they are getting equipped.

The country will get the good of it some day. Look at Althea, for instance. You might say she drifted, but she's been a hard scholar; I know it; all she needs now is to get harnessed.'

It was not lover-like talk; yet what talk, in its very impartiality, could from a lover be more gratifying? Althea again glanced at Helen, but Helen again seemed to slumber. Her face in repose had a look of discontent and sorrow, and Franklin's eyes, following her own, no doubt recognised what she did. He observed Helen for some moments before returning to the theme of efficiency.

It was a little later on that Althea's opportunity--and crisis--came.

Aunt Julia had gone in and Miss Buckston suggested to Franklin that he should take a turn with her before tea. Franklin got up at once and walked away beside her, and Althea knew that his alacrity was the greater because he felt that by going with Miss Buckston he left her alone with her cherished friend. As he and Miss Buckston disappeared in the shrubberies, Helen opened her eyes and looked at them.

'How do you like Miss Buckston now that you see her at closer quarters?'

Althea asked, hoping to approach the subject that preoccupied her by a circuitous method.

Helen smiled. 'One hardly likes her better at closer quarters, does one?

She is like a gun going off every few moments.'