Part 93 (1/2)
”Come,” said she, ”don't say you never change.”
”I don't say it. You'll have to allow for that possibility, too.”
”It seems to me I have to allow for a good many things.”
”You have indeed.”
”Well, are we going to sit here all night?”
”I'm ready.”
They walked back in silence over the straight path that seemed as if it would never end. Flossie stopped half-way in it, stung by an idea.
”There's something you haven't thought of. What are you going to do with the house? And with all that furniture?”
”Let them to somebody. That's all right, Beaver. The house and the furniture can't run away.”
”No, but they'll never be the same again.”
Nothing would ever be the same again; that was clear. The flowers were still gay in the Broad Walk, and the children, though a little sleepier, were still adorable; but Flossie did not turn to look at them as she pa.s.sed. Would she ever look at them, at anything, with pleasure again? He had made life very difficult, very cruel to this poor child, whom after all he had promised to protect and care for.
”I say, Beaver dear, it _is_ hard luck on you.”
The look and the tone would have softened most women, at least for the time being; but the Beaver remained implacable.
”I'll try to make it easier for you. I'll work like mad. I'll do anything to shorten the time.”
”Shorten the time? You don't know how many years you're asking me to wait.”
”I'm not asking you to wait. I'm asking you to choose.”
”Do you want me to do it now?”
”No, certainly not.” She was not indeed in a mood favourable to choice; and he would not influence her decision. It was mean to urge her to an arduous constancy; meaner still to precipitate her refusal.
”You must think. You can, you know, when you give your mind to it.”
She appeared to be giving her mind to it for the rest of the way home; and her silence left him also free to think it over. After all, what had he done? He had not asked her to wait, but what if he had? Many men have to ask as much of the woman who loves them. Some men have asked even more of the woman whom they love. That was the secret. He could have asked it with a clear conscience if he had but loved her.
CHAPTER LXIV
Flossie was in no hurry about making up her mind. If Keith had asked her to give him time, it was only fair that he should give her time too, and since his mind was made up in any case, time could be no object to him. So days and weeks had pa.s.sed on and she had conveyed to him no hint of her decision.
On that Sunday evening, in the seclusion of her bedroom, Flossie said to herself that she had made one great mistake. Prudence and foresight were all very well in their way, but this time she had blundered through excess of caution. In sticking to the post that made her independent she had broken her strongest line of defence. If only she had had the courage to relinquish it at the crucial moment, she would have stood a very much better chance in her contest with Keith. She could then have appealed to his pity as she had done with such signal success two years ago, when the result of the appeal had been to bring him violently to the point. She was wise enough to know that in contending with a chivalrous man a woman's strongest defence is her defencelessness. Though she was unable to believe that pure abstract honour was or could be the sole and supreme motive of Keith's behaviour, she felt that if she could have said to him, ”I've thrown up a good situation to marry you,” his chivalry would not have held out against that argument.
But Flossie never made mistakes. She was too consummate a diplomatist.
Therefore, though appearances were against her, it was only reasonable to suppose that she had not really done so now, and that her original inspiration had been right. It was foresight so subtle, so advanced, that it outstripped the ordinary processes of calculation, and appeared afterwards as the mysterious leading of a profounder power, of the under-soul that presses the innocent intellect into the services of its own elemental instincts. The people who yield most obediently to this compulsion are said to have good luck.
Flossie's good luck, however, was not yet apparent either to herself or to her fellow-boarders at Tavistock Place. Not that she had enlarged on her trouble to any of them. The whole thing had been too profoundly humiliating for that. To say nothing of being engaged to a man who had shown so very little impatience to marry her, to have taken and furnished a house and be unable to live in it, to have received congratulations and wedding presents which had all proved premature, to know, and feel that everybody else knew, that her bedroom was at this moment lumbered up with a trousseau which, whether she wore it or put it by two years, would make her equally ridiculous, was really a very trying position for any young lady, and to Flossie, whose nature was most delicately sensitive to such considerations, it was torture. But, after all, these things were material and external; and the worst of Flossie's suffering was in her soul. Before the appearance of Miss Harden, the last two years had pa.s.sed for Flossie in gorgeous triumphal procession through the boarding-house. She had been the invincible heroine of Mrs. Downey's for two years, she had dragged its young hero at her chariot wheels for two years, she had filled the heart of Ada Bishop with envy and the hearts of Mr. Soper and Mr. Spinks with jealousy and anguish for two years; and now she had all these people pitying her and looking down on her because she had been so queerly treated; and this was even more intolerable to poor Flossie. She knew perfectly well what every one of them was saying. She knew that Ada Bishop had thanked Goodness she wasn't in her shoes; that Miss Bramble spoke of her persistently as ”that poor young thing”; that Mrs. Downey didn't know which she pitied most, her or poor Mr. Rickman. He was poor Mr. Rickman, if you please, because he was considered to have entangled himself so inextricably with her.
She knew that Miss Roots maintained that it was all her (Flossie's) own fault for holding Keith to his engagement; that Mr. Partridge had wondered why girls were in such a hurry to get married; and that Mr.