Make of my idea what you can; I think I’ve sufficiently expressed it, and it’s at any rate to take or to leave. It’s the only one, I may nevertheless add; it’s the basket with all my eggs. It’s my conception, in short, of your duty.”
The girl’s tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small grotesque visibility. “You’re wonderful on such subjects! I think I should leave you in no doubt,” she pursued, “that if I were to sign my aunt’s agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter.”
“Rather, my own love! It’s just your honour that I appeal to. The only way to play the game IS to play it. There’s no limit to what your aunt can do for you.”
“Do you mean in the way of marrying me?”
“What else should I mean? Marry properly— “
“And then?” Kate asked as he hung fire.
“And then — well, I WILL talk with you. I’ll resume relations.”
She looked about her and picked up her parasol. “Because you’re not so afraid of any one else in the world as you are of HER? My husband, if I should marry, would be at the worst less of a terror? If that’s what you mean there may be something in it. But doesn’t it depend a little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However,” Kate added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, “I don’t suppose your idea of him is QUITE that he should persuade you to live with us.”
“Dear no — not a bit.” He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the hope she imputed; met both imputations in fact with a sort of intellectual relief. “I place the case for you wholly in your aunt’s hands. I take her view with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence any man she selects. If he’s good enough for HER — elephantine snob as she is — he’s good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that she’ll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan’t be so beastly poor, my darling,” Mr. Croy declared, “if I can help it.”
“Well then goodbye, papa,” the girl said after a reflexion on this that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate. “Of course you understand that it may be for long.”
Her companion had hereupon one of his finest inspirations. “Why not frankly for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don’t do things, that I’ve never done them, by halves — that if I offer you to efface myself it’s for the final fatal sponge I ask, well saturated and well applied.”
She turned her handsome quiet face upon him at such length that it might indeed have been for the last time. “I don’t know what you’re like.”
“No more do I, my dear. I’ve spent my life in trying in vain to discover. Like nothing — more’s the pity. If there had been many of us and we could have found each other out there’s no knowing what we mightn’t have done. But it doesn’t matter now. Goodbye, love.” He looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.
She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. “I wish there were some one here who might serve — for any contingency — as a witness that I HAVE put it to you that I’m ready to come.”
“Would you like me,” her father asked, “to call the landlady?”
“You may not believe me,” she pursued, “but I came really hoping you might have found some way. I’m very sorry at all events to leave you unwell.” He turned away from her on this and, as he had done before, took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. “Let me put it — unfortunately without a witness,” she added after a moment, “that there’s only one word you really need speak.”
When he took these words up it was still with his back to her. “If I don’t strike you as having already spoken it our time has been singularly wasted.”
“I’ll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I WILL choose. I’ll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune.”
He at last brought himself round. “Do you know, dear, you make me sick? I’ve tried to be clear, and it isn’t fair.”
But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. “Father!”
“I don’t quite see what’s the matter with you,” he said, “and if you can’t pull yourself together I’ll — upon my honour — take you in hand. Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate.”
She was really absent, distant. “Father.”
It was too much, and he met it sharply. “Well?”
“Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there’s a good you can do me and a help you can render.”
“Isn’t it then exactly what I’ve been trying to make you feel?”
“Yes,” she answered patiently, “but so in the wrong way. I’m perfectly honest in what I say, and I know what I’m talking about. It isn’t that I’ll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid or support from you. The case is changed — that’s what has happened; my difficulty is a new one. But even now it’s not a question of anything I should ask you in a way to ‘do.’ It’s simply a question of your not turning me away — taking yourself out of my life. It’s simply a question of your saying: ‘Yes then, since you will, we’ll stand together. We won’t worry in advance about how or where; we’ll have a faith and find a way.’ That’s all — THAT would be the good you’d do me. I should HAVE you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?”
If he didn’t it wasn’t for want of looking at her hard. “The matter with you is that you’re in love, and that your aunt knows and — for reasons, I’m sure, perfect — hates and opposes it. Well she may! It’s a matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please.” Though he spoke not in anger — rather in infinite sadness — he fairly turned her out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. “I’m sorry for her, deluded woman, if she builds on you.”
Kate stood a moment in the draught. “She’s not the person I pity most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she’s not the person who’s most so. I mean,” she explained, “if it’s a question of what you call building on me.”
He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of it. “You’re deceiving TWO persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?”
She shook her head with detachment. “I’ve no intention of that sort with respect to any one now — to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail me” — she seemed to make it out for herself— “that has the merit at least that it simplifies. I shall go my way — as I see my way.”
“Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a penny?”
“You demand a great deal of satisfaction,” she observed, “for the little you give.”
It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to be hustled, and though he glared at her
