Jason Part 5

"Love!" he said, in a reflective tone. "Love!" He repeated the word two or three times slowly, and he stirred a little in his bed. "I have forgotten what it is," said he. "I expect I must be very old. I have forgotten what love--that sort of love--is like. It seems very far away to me and rather unimportant. But I remember that I thought it important enough once, a century or two ago. Do you know, it strikes me as rather odd that I have forgotten what love is like. It strikes me as rather pathetic." He gave a sort of uncouth grimace and stuck the black cigar once more into his mouth. "Egad!" said he, mumbling indistinctly over the cigar, "how foolish love seems when you look back at it across fifty or sixty years!"

Miss Benham rose to her feet smiling, and she came and stood near where the old man lay propped up against his pillows. She touched his cheek with her cool hand, and old David put up one of his own hands and patted it.

"I'm going to bed now," said she. "I've sat here talking too long. You ought to be asleep, and so ought I."

"Perhaps! Perhaps!" the old man said. "I don't feel sleepy, though. I dare say I shall read a little." He held her hand in his and looked up at her.

"I've been talking a great deal of nonsense about marriage," said he.

"Put it out of your head! It's all nonsense. I don't want you to marry for a long time. I don't want to lose you." His face twisted a little, quite suddenly. "You're precious near all I have left, now," he said.

The girl did not answer at once, for it seemed to her that there was nothing to say. She knew that her grandfather was thinking of the lost boy, and she knew what a bitter blow the thing had been to him. She often thought that it would kill him before his old malady could run its course.

But after a moment she said, very gently: "We won't give up hope. We'll never give up hope. Think! he might come home to-morrow! Who knows?"

"If he has stayed away of his own accord," cried out old David Stewart, in a loud voice, "I'll never forgive him--not if he comes to me to-morrow on his knees! Not even if he comes to me on his knees!"

The girl bent over her grandfather, saying: "Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+ You mustn't excite yourself." But old David's gray face was working, and his eyes gleamed from their cavernous shadows with a savage fire.

"If the boy is staying away out of spite," he repeated, "he need never come back to me. I won't forgive him." He beat his unemployed hand upon the table before him, and the things which lay there jumped and danced.

"And if he waits until I'm dead and then comes back," said he, "he'll find he has made a mistake--a great mistake. He'll find a surprise in store for him, I can tell you that. I won't tell you what I have done, but it will be a disagreeable surprise for Master Arthur, you may be sure."

The old gentleman fell to frowning and muttering in his choleric fas.h.i.+on, but the fierce glitter began to go out of his eyes and his hands ceased to tremble and clutch at the things before him. The girl was silent, because again there seemed to her to be nothing that she could say. She longed very much to plead her brother's cause, but she was sure that would only excite her grandfather, and he was growing quieter after his burst of anger. She bent down over him and kissed his cheek.

"Try to go to sleep," she said. "And don't torture yourself with thinking about all this. I'm as sure that poor Arthur is not staying away out of spite as if he were myself. He's foolish and headstrong, but he's not spiteful, dear. Try to believe that. And now I'm really going.

Good-night." She kissed him again and slipped out of the room. And as she closed the door she heard her grandfather pull the bell-cord which hung beside him and summoned the excellent Peters from the room beyond.

V

JASON SETS FORTH UPON THE GREAT ADVENTURE

Miss Benham stood at one of the long drawing-room windows of the house in the rue de l'Universite, and looked out between the curtains upon the rather grimy little garden, where a few not very prosperous cypresses and chestnuts stood guard over the rows of lilac shrubs and the box-bordered flower-beds and the usual moss-stained fountain. She was thinking of the events of the past month, the month which had elapsed since the evening of the De Saulnes' dinner-party. They were not at all startling events; in a practical sense there were no events at all, only a quiet sequence of affairs which was about as inevitable as the night upon the day--the day upon the night again. In a word, this girl, who had considered herself very strong and very much the mistress of her feelings, found, for the first time in her life, that her strength was as nothing at all against the potent charm and magnetism of a man who had almost none of the qualities she chiefly admired in men. During the month's time she had pa.s.sed from a phase of angry self-scorn through a period of bewilderment not unmixed with fear, and from that she had come into an unknown world, a land very strange to her, where old standards and judgments seemed to be valueless--a place seemingly ruled altogether by new emotions, sweet and thrilling, or full of vague terrors as her mood veered here or there.

That sublimated form of guesswork which is called "woman's intuition"

told her that Ste. Marie would come to her on this afternoon, and that something in the nature of a crisis would have to be faced. It can be proved even by poor masculine mathematics that guesswork, like other gambling ventures, is bound to succeed about half the time, and it succeeded on this occasion. Even as Miss Benham stood at the window looking out through the curtains, M. Ste. Marie was announced from the doorway.

She turned to meet him with a little frown of determination, for in his absence she was often very strong, indeed, and sometimes she made up and rehea.r.s.ed little speeches of great dignity and decision in which she told him that he was attempting a quite hopeless thing, and, as a well-wis.h.i.+ng friend, advised him to go away and attempt it no longer.

But as Ste. Marie came quickly across the room toward her, the little frown wavered and at last fled from her face and another look came there. It was always so. The man's bodily presence exerted an absolute spell over her.

"I have been sitting with your grandfather for half an hour," Ste. Marie said. And she said:

"Oh, I'm glad! I'm very glad! You always cheer him up. He hasn't been too cheerful or too well of late." She unnecessarily twisted a chair about, and after a moment sat down in it. And she gave a little laugh.

"This friends.h.i.+p which has grown up between my grandfather and you,"

said she--"I don't understand it at all. Of course, he knew your father and all that; but you two seem such very different types, I shouldn't think you would amuse each other at all. There's Mr. Hartley, for example. I should expect my grandfather to like him very much better than you, but he doesn't--though I fancy he approves of him much more."

She laughed again, but a different laugh; and when he heard it Ste.

Marie's eyes gleamed a little and his hands moved beside him.

"I expect," said she--"I expect, you know, that he just likes you without stopping to think why--as everybody else does. I fancy it's just that. What do you think?"

"Oh, I?" said the man. "I--how should I know? I know it's a great privilege to be allowed to see him--such a man as that. And I know we get on wonderfully well. He doesn't condescend, as most old men do who have led important lives. We just talk as two men in a club might talk, and I tell him stories and make him laugh. Oh yes, we get on wonderfully well."

"Oh," said she, "I've often wondered what you talk about. What did you talk about to-day?"

Ste. Marie turned abruptly away from her and went across to one of the windows--the window where she had stood earlier, looking out upon the dingy garden. She saw him stand there, with his back turned, the head a little bent, the hands twisting together behind him, and a sudden fit of nervous s.h.i.+vering wrung her. Every woman knows when a certain thing is going to be said to her, and usually she is prepared for it, though usually, also, she says she is not. Miss Benham knew what was coming now, and she was frightened, not of Ste. Marie, but of herself. It meant so very much to her--more than to most women at such a time. It meant, if she said yes to him, the surrender of almost all the things she had cared for and hoped for. It meant the giving up of that career which old David Stewart had dwelt upon a month ago.

Ste. Marie turned back into the room. He came a little way toward where the girl sat, and halted, and she could see that he was very pale. A sort of critical second self noticed that he was pale and was surprised, because, although men's faces often turn red, they seldom turn noticeably pale except in very great nervous crises--or in works of fiction; while women, on the contrary, may turn red and white twenty times a day, and no harm done. He raised his hands a little way from his sides in the beginning of a gesture, but they dropped again as if there was no strength in them.

"I told him," said Ste. Marie, in a flat voice--"I told your grandfather that I--loved you more than anything in this world or in the next. I told him that my love for you had made another being of me--a new being.

I told him that I wanted to come to you and to kneel at your feet, and to ask you if you could give me just a little, little hope--something to live for, a light to climb toward. That is what we talked about, your grandfather and I."

"Ste. Marie! Ste. Marie!" said the girl, in a half whisper. "What did my grandfather say to you?" she asked, after a silence.

Ste. Marie looked away.

"I cannot tell you," he said. "He--was not quite sympathetic."

The girl gave a little cry.

"Tell me what he said!" she demanded. "I must know what he said."

The man's eyes pleaded with her, but she held him with her gaze, and in the end he gave in.

"He said I was a d.a.m.ned fool," said Ste. Marie.

And the girl, after an instant of staring, broke into a little fit of nervous, overwrought laughter, and covered her face with her hands.

He threw himself upon his knees before her, and her laughter died away.

An Englishman or an American cannot do that. Richard Hartley, for example, would have looked like an idiot upon his knees, and he would have felt it. But it did not seem extravagant with Ste. Marie. It became him.

"Listen! Listen!" he cried to her, but the girl checked him before he could go on.

She dropped her hands from her face, and she bent a little forward over the man as he knelt there. She put out her hands and took his head for a swift instant between them, looking down into his eyes. At the touch a sudden wave of tenderness swept her--almost an engulfing wave; it almost overwhelmed her and bore her away from the land she knew. And so when she spoke her voice was not quite steady. She said:

"Ah, dear Ste. Marie! I cannot pretend to be cold toward you. You have laid a spell upon me, Ste. Marie. You enchant us all, somehow, don't you? I suppose I'm not so different from the others as I thought I was.

And yet," she said, "he was right, you know. My grandfather was right.

No, let me talk, now. I must talk for a little. I must try to tell you how it is with me--try somehow to find a way. He was right. He meant that you and I were utterly unsuited to each other, and so, in calm moments, I know we are. I know that well enough. When you're not with me, I feel very sure about it. I think of a thousand excellent reasons why you and I ought to be no more to each other than friends. Do you know, I think my grandfather is a little uncanny. I think he has prophetic powers. They say very old people often have. He and I talked about you when I came home from that dinner-party at the De Saulnes', a month ago--the dinner-party where you and I first met. I told him that I had met a man whom I liked very much--a man with great charm; and though I must have said the same sort of thing to him before about other men, he was quite oddly disturbed, and talked for a long time about it--about the sort of man I ought to marry and the sort I ought not to marry. It was unusual for him. He seldom says anything of that kind. Yes, he is right. You see, I'm ambitious in a particular way. If I marry at all I ought to marry a man who is working hard in politics or in something of that kind. I could help him. We could do a great deal together."

"I could go into politics!" cried Ste. Marie; but she shook her head, smiling down upon him.

"No, not you, my dear. Politics least of all. You could be a soldier, if you chose. You could fight as your father and your grandfather and the others of your house have done. You could lead a forlorn hope in the field. You could suffer and starve and go on fighting. You could die splendidly, but--politics, no! That wants a tougher sh.e.l.l than you have.

And a soldier's wife! Of what use to him is she?"