Part 183

He sat down, overburdened with his crime, a heartrending spectacle to Laura.

"Well," she said, "I suppose it was worth it. It must have given you an exquisite pleasure."

"It did. That's where the iniquity comes in. It gave me an exquisite pleasure at your expense."

"You give me an exquisite pleasure," she said, "in everything you do."

Her lips made a sign for him to come to her, and he came and knelt at her feet and took her hands in his. He bowed his head over them and kissed them.

"Do you know what you are?" she said. "You're a divine prodigal."

"Yes," he said, kissing her, "I'm a prodigal, a dissolute, good-for-noting wastrel. I adore you and your little holy hands; but I'm not the least use to you. You ink your blessed little fingers to the bone for me, and I take your earnings and fling them away--in--in----" He grew incoherent with kissing.

"In one night's spiritual debauchery," said she. She was pleased with her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably pleased with him.

But Owen was not pleased in the very least.

"That," said he, "is precisely what I do."

He rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening eyes. He was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. He had struggled to support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and here he was, living on her, living on Laura. The position was incredible, abominable, but it was his.

She looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung away from his sunken waist.

"Oh," she cried, "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that, when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your own savings that you flung. It was, dear," she insisted.

"Yes, and as I've flung them, I'll have to live on you for a year at least. It all comes back to that."

"I wish you wouldn't come back to it. Can't you see, can't you see," she implored, "how, literally, I'm living on you?"

"If you only did!"

"But I do, I do. In the real things, the things that matter. I cling and suck like a vampire. Why can't you have the courage of your opinions?"

"My opinions? I haven't any. Hence, no doubt, my lack of courage."

"Your convictions, then, whatever you call the things you do have. You think, and I think, that money doesn't matter. You won't even allow that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. Well then, why make such a fuss about it? And what does it matter which of us earns it, or who spends it?"

He seemed to be considering her point. Then he put it violently from him.

"That's the argument of all the humbugs, all the consecrated hypocrites that have ever been. All the lazy, long-haired, rickety freaks and loafers who go nourishing their damned spirituality at some woman's physical expense. The thing's indecent, it's unspeakable. Those Brodricks are perfectly right."

Laura raised her head. "They? What have they got to do with you and me?"

"A good deal. They supply me with work, which they don't want me to do, in order to keep me from sponging on my wife. They are admirable men. They represent the sanity and decency of the world pronouncing judgment on the fact. No Brodrick ever blinked a fact. When people ask the Brodricks, What does that fellow Prothero do? they shrug their shoulders and say, 'He has visions, and his wife pays for them.'"

"But I don't. It's the public that pays for them. And your wife has a savage joy in making it pay. If it wasn't for that I should loathe my celebrity more than Jinny ever loathed hers. It makes me feel sillier."

"Poor little thing," said Prothero.

"Well--it's hard that I should have to entertain imbeciles who wouldn't read you if they were paid."

He knew that that was the sting of it for her.

"They're all right," he said. "It's your funny little humour that they like. I like it, too."