Part 15

“To make you raise money--since you could, you could. You did, you did--so what better proof?”

His hands fell from what he had touched; he could only stare--her own manner for it was different now too. “I did. I did indeed--!” And the woful weak simplicity of it, which seemed somehow all that was left him, fell even on his own ear.

“Well then, here it is--it isn’t lost!” she returned with a graver face.

“‘Here’ it is,” he gasped, “my poor agonised old money--my blood?”

“Oh, it’s my blood too, you must know now!” She held up her head as not before--as for her right to speak of the thing to-day most precious to her. “I took it, but this--my being here this way--is what I’ve made of it! That was the idea I had!”

Her “ideas,” as things to boast of, staggered him. “To have everything in the world, like this, at my wretched expense?”

She had folded her arms back again--grasping each elbow she sat firm; she knew he could see, and had known well from the first, what she had wanted to say, difficult, monstrous though it might be. “No more than at my own--but to do something with your money that you’d never do yourself.”

“Myself, myself?” he wonderingly wailed. “Do you know--or don’t you?--what my life has been?”

She waited, and for an instant, though the light in the room had failed a little more and would soon be mainly that of the flaring lamps on the windy Parade, he caught from her dark eye a silver gleam of impatience. “You’ve suffered and you’ve worked--which, God knows, is what I’ve done! Of course you’ve suffered,” she said--“you inevitably had to! We have to,” she went on, “to do or to be or to get anything.”

“And pray what have I done or been or got?” Herbert Dodd found it almost desolately natural to demand.

It made her cover him again as with all she was thinking of. “Can you imagine nothing, or can’t you conceive--?” And then as her challenge struck deeper in, deeper down than it had yet reached, and with the effect of a rush of the blood to his face, “It was for you, it was for you!” she again broke out--“and for what or whom else could it have been?”

He saw things to a tune now that made him answer straight: “I thought at one time it might be for Bill Frankle.”

“Yes--that was the way you treated me,” Miss Cookham as plainly replied.

But he let this pass; his thought had already got away from it. “What good then--its having been for me--has that ever done me?”

“Doesn’t it do you any good now?” his friend returned. To which she added, with another dim play of her tormented brightness, before he could speak: “But if you won’t even have your tea----!”

He had in fact touched nothing and, if he could have explained, would have pleaded very veraciously that his appetite, keen when he came in, had somehow suddenly failed. It was beyond eating or drinking, what she seemed to want him to take from her. So if he looked, before him, over the array, it was to say, very grave and graceless: “Am I to understand that you offer to repay me?”

“I offer to repay you with interest, Herbert Dodd”--and her emphasis of the great word was wonderful.

It held him in his place a minute, and held his eyes upon her; after which, agitated too sharply to sit still, he pushed back his chair and stood up. It was as if mere distress or dismay at first worked in him, and was in fact a wave of deep and irresistible emotion which made him, on his feet, sway as in a great trouble and then, to correct it, throw himself stiffly toward the window, where he stood and looked out unseeing. The road, the wide terrace beyond, the seats, the eternal sea beyond that, the lighted lamps now flaring in the October night-wind, with the few dispersed people abroad at the tea-hour; these things, meeting and melting into the firelit hospitality at his elbow--or was it that portentous amenity that melted into them?--seemed to form round him and to put before him, all together, the strangest of circles and the newest of experiences, in which the unforgettable and the unimaginable were confoundingly mixed. “Oh, oh, oh!”--he could only almost howl for it.

And then, while a thick blur for some moments mantled everything, he knew she had got up, that she stood watching him, allowing for everything, again all “cleverly” patient with him, and he heard her speak again as with studied quietness and clearness. “I wanted to take care of you--it was what I first wanted--and what you first consented to. I’d have done it, oh I’d have done it, I’d have loved you and helped you and guarded you, and you’d have had no trouble, no bad blighting ruin, in all your easy, yes, just your quite jolly and comfortable life. I showed you and proved to you this--I brought it home to you, as I fondly fancied, and it made me briefly happy. You swore you cared for me, you wrote it and made me believe it--you pledged me your honour and your faith. Then you turned and changed suddenly from one day to another; everything altered, you broke your vows, you as good as told me you only wanted it off. You faced me with dislike, and in fact tried not to face me at all; you behaved as if you hated me--you had seen a girl, of great beauty, I admit, who made me a fright and a bore.”

This brought him straight round. “No, Kate Cookham.”

“Yes, Herbert Dodd.” She but shook her head, calmly and nobly, in the now gathered dusk, and her memories and her cause and her character--or was it only her arch-subtlety, her line and her “idea”?--gave her an extraordinary large assurance.

She had touched, however, the treasure of his own case--his terrible own case that began to live again at once by the force of her talking of hers, and which could always all cluster about his great asseveration. “No, no, never, never; I had never seen her then and didn’t dream of her; so that when you yourself began to be harsh and sharp with me, and to seem to want to quarrel, I could have but one idea--which was an appearance you didn’t in the least, as I saw it then, account for or disprove.”

“An appearance--?” Kate desired, as with high astonishment, to know which one.

“How shouldn’t I have supposed you really to care for Bill Frankle?--as thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn’t marry me. I was only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn’t happened; and perhaps,” he added the next instant with something of a conscious lapse from the finer style, “hadn’t been in question.”

She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window again, and then she answered, but without passion unless it was that of her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, “Oh, the blind, the pitiful folly!”--to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on. “Have it then that there wasn’t much to do--between your finding that you loathed me for another woman or discovering only, when it came to the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself.”

Which, as she put it in that immensely effective fashion, he recognised that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly--not so very!--take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it wasn’t to perjure himself with any pretence that, “another woman” or no other woman, he hadn’t, for years and years, abhorred her. Now he was taking tea with her--or rather, literally, seemed not to be; but this made no difference, and he let her express it as she would while he distinguished a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had never before conversed. Dodd’s own position was that of acquiescing in this recall of what had so bitterly been--but he hadn’t come back to her, of himself, to stir up, to recall or to recriminate, and for her it could but be the very lesson of her whole present act that if she touched anything she touched everything. Soon enough she was indeed, and all overwhelmingly, touching everything--with a hand of which the boldness grew.

“But I didn’t let that, even, make a difference in what I wanted--which was all,” she said, “and had only and passionately been, to take care of you. I had no money whatever--nothing then of my own, not a penny to come by anyhow; so it wasn’t with mine I could do it. But I could do it with yours,” she amazingly wound up--“if I could once get yours out of you.”

He faced straight about again--his eyebrows higher than they had ever been in his life. “Mine? What penny of it was mine? What scrap beyond a bare, mean little living had I ever pretended to have?”