“Wait. Let me finish what I was going to say. It was not what I did, it was that I did it far too late. You would not have given up coming to see me, if it had all happened a year earlier. My fault lay in putting it off too long. It was very wrong. I have been very sorry for it. There is nothing I would not do for you — I am just what I always was in my feelings towards you — and more. Can I humiliate myself more than I have done before you? I do not think there are many women who would have done what I have done, what I am doing now. Can I be more humble still? Shall I confess it all again?”
“You have done all that a woman could or should,” George said, and there was no bitterness in his voice. It seemed to him that the old Constance he had loved was slowly entering into the person of the young girl before him, whom he had of late treated as a stranger and who had been so really and truly one in his sight.
“And yet, will you not forgive?” she asked in a low and supplicating tone.
He gazed at the river and did not speak. He was not conscious that she was watching his face intently. She saw no bitterness nor hardness there, however, but only an expression of perplexity. The word forgiveness did not convey to him half what it meant to her. She attached a meaning to it, which escaped him. She was morbid and had taken an unreal view of all that had happened between them. His mind was strong, natural and healthy, and he could not easily understand why she should lend such importance to what he now considered a mere phrase, no matter how he had regarded it in the heat and anger of his memorable interview with her.
“Miss Fearing—” he began. He hardly knew why he called her by name, unless it was that he was about to make a categorical statement. So soon as the syllables had escaped his lips, however, he repented of having pronounced them. He saw a shade of pain pass over her face, and at the same time it seemed a childish way of indicating the distance by which they were now separated. It reminded him of George the Third’s “Mr. Washington.”
“Constance,” he said after another moment’s hesitation, “we do not speak in the same language. You ask me for my forgiveness. What am I to forgive? If there is anything to be forgiven, I forgive most freely. I was very angry, and therefore very foolish on that day when I said I would not forgive you. I am not angry now. What I feel is very different. I bear you no malice, I wish you no evil.”
Constance was silent and looked away. She did not understand him, though she felt that he was not speaking unkindly. What he offered her was not what she wanted.
“Since we have come to these explanations,” George continued after a pause, “I will try and tell you what it is that I feel. I called you Miss Fearing just now. Do you know why? Because it seems more natural. You are not the same person you once were, and when I call you Constance, I fancy I am calling some one else by the name of your old self, of the Constance I loved, and who loved me — a little.”
“It is not I who have changed,” said the young girl, looking down. “I am Constance still, and you are my best and dearest friend, though you be ever so unkind.”
“A change there is, and a great one. I daresay it is in me. I was never your friend, as you understand the word, and you were mistaken in thinking that I was. I loved you. That is not friendship.”
“And now, since I am another person — not the one you loved — can you not be my friend as well as — as you are of others? Why does it seem so impossible?”
“It is too painful to be thought of,” said George in a low voice. “You are too like the other, and yet too different.”
Constance sighed and twisted a blade of grass round her slender white finger. She wished she knew how to do away with the difference he felt so keenly.
“Do you never miss me?” she asked after a long silence.
“I miss the woman I loved,” George answered. “Is it any satisfaction to you to know it?”
“Yes, for I am she.”
There was another pause, during which George glanced at her face from time to time. It had changed, he thought. It was thinner and whiter than of old and there were shadows beneath the eyes and modellings — not yet lines — of sadness about the sensitive mouth. He wondered whether she had suffered, and why. She had never loved him. Could it be true that she missed his companionship, his conversation, his friendship, as she called it? If not, why should her face be altered? And yet it was strange, too. He could not understand how separation could be painful where there was no love. Nevertheless he was sorry that she should have suffered, now that his anger was gone.
“I am glad you loved me,” she said at last.
“And I am very sorry.”
“You should not say that. If you had not loved me — more than I knew — you would not have written, you would not be what you are. Can you not think of it in that way, sometimes?”
“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” said George bitterly.
“You have not lost your soul,” answered Constance, whose religious sensibilities were a little shocked, at once by the strength of the words as by the fact of their being quoted from the Bible. “You have no right to say that. You will some day find a woman who will love you as you deserve — —”
“And whom I shall not love.”
“Whom you will love as well as you once loved me. You will be happy, then. I hope it may happen soon.”
“Do you?” asked George, turning upon her quickly.
“For your sake I hope so, with all my heart.”
“And for yours?”
“I hope I should like her very much,” said Constance with a forced laugh, and looking away from him.
“I am afraid you will not,” George answered, almost unconsciously. The words fell from his lips as a reply to her strained laughter which told too plainly her real thoughts.
“You should not ask such questions,” she said, a moment later. “Do you find it hard to talk to me?” she asked, suddenly turning the conversation.
“I think it would be hard for you and me to talk about these things for long.”
“We need not — if we meet. It is better that we should have said what we had to say, and we need never say it again. And we shall meet more often, now, shall we not?”
“Does it give you pleasure to see me?” There was a touch of hardness in the tone.
Constance looked down and the colour came into her thin face. Her voice trembled a little when she spoke.
“Are you going to be unkind to me again? Or do you really wish to know?”
“I am in earnest. Does it give you pleasure to see me?”
“After all I have said — oh, George, this has been the happiest hour I have spent since the first of May.”
“Are you heartless or are you not?” asked George almost fiercely. “Do you love me that you should care to see me? Or does it amuse you to give me pain? What are you, yourself, the real woman that I can never understand?”
Constance was frightened by the sudden outbreak of passion, and turned pale.
“What are you saying? What do you mean?” she asked in an uncertain voice.
“What I say? What I mean? Do you think it is pleasure to me to talk as we have been talking? Do you suppose that my love for you was a mere name, an idea, a thing without reality, to be discussed and dissected and examined and turned inside out? Do you fancy that in three months I have forgotten, or ceased to care, or learned to talk of you as though you were a person in a book? What do you think I am made of?”
Constance hid her face in her hands and a long silence followed. She was not crying, but she looked as though she were trying to collect her thoughts, and at the same time to shut out some disagreeable sight. At last she looked up and saw that his lean, dark face was full of sadness. She knew him well and knew how much he must feel before his features betrayed what was passing in his mind.
“Forgive me, George,” she said in a beseeching tone. “I did not know that you loved — that you cared for me still.”
“It is nothing,” he answered b
itterly. “It will pass.”
Poor Constance felt that she had lost in a moment what she had gained with so much difficulty, the renewal of something like unconstrained intercourse. She rose slowly from the place where she had been sitting, two or three paces away from him. He did not rise, for he was still too much under the influence of the emotion to heed what she did. She came and stood before him and looked down into his face.
“George,” she said slowly and earnestly, “I am a very unhappy woman — more unhappy than you can guess. You are dearer to me than anything on earth, and yet I am always hurting you and wounding you. This life is killing me. Tell me what you would have me do and say, and I will do it and say it — anything — do you understand — anything rather than be parted from you as I have been during these last months.”
She meant every word she said, and in that moment, if George had asked her to be his wife she would have consented gladly. But he did not understand that she meant as much as that. He seemed to hesitate a moment and then rose quickly to his feet and stood beside her.
“You must not talk like that,” he said. “I owe you much, Constance, very much, though you have made me very unhappy. I do not understand you. I do not know why you should care to see me. But I will come to you as often as you please if only you will not talk to me about what is past. Let us try and speak of ordinary things, of everyday matters. I am ashamed to seem to be making conditions, and I do not know what it all means, because, as I have said, I cannot understand you, and I never shall. Will you have me on those terms?”
He held out his hand as he spoke the last words, and there was a kindly smile on his face.
“Come when you will and as you will — only come!” said Constance, her face lighting up with gladness. She, at least, was satisfied, and saw a prospect of happiness in the future. “Come here sometimes, in the afternoon, it will be like — —”
She was going to say that it would be like the old time when they used to meet in the Park.
“It will be like a sort of picnic, you know,” were the words that fell from her lips. But the blush on her face told plainly enough that she had meant to say something else.
“Yes,” said George with a grim smile, “it will be like a sort of picnic. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye — when will you come?” Constance could not help letting her hand linger in his as long as he would hold it.
“Next Sunday,” George answered quickly. He reflected that it would not be easy to escape Mamie on any other day.
A moment later he was in his boat, pulling away into the midstream. Constance stood on the shore watching him and wishing with all her heart that she were sitting in the stern of the neat craft, wishing more than all that he might desire her presence there. But he did not. He knew very well that he could have stayed another hour or two in her company if he had chosen to do so, but he had been glad to escape, and he knew it. The meeting had been painful to him in many ways, and it had made him dissatisfied and disappointed with himself. It had shown him what he had not known, that he loved the old Constance as dearly as ever, though he could not always recognise her in the strange girl who did not love him but who assured him that her separation from him was killing her. He had hoped and almost believed that he should never again feel an emotion in her presence, and yet he had felt many during that afternoon. Nor did he anticipate with any pleasure a renewal of the situation on the following Sunday, though he was quite sure that he had no means of avoiding it. If he had thought that Constance was merely making a heartless attempt to renew the old relations, he would have given her a sharp and decisive refusal. But she was undoubtedly in earnest and she was evidently suffering. She had gone to the length of reminding him that he owed the beginning of his literary career to her influence. It was true, and he would not be ungrateful. Courtesy and honour alike forbade ingratitude, and he only hoped that he might become accustomed to the pain of such meetings.
CHAPTER XX.
WHEN GEORGE MET Mamie on that evening, he hoped that she would ask no questions as to the way in which he had employed his afternoon, for he knew that if she discovered that he had been with Constance Fearing she would in all probability make some disagreeable observations about the latter, of a kind which he did not wish to hear. Without having defined the situation in his own mind, he felt that Mamie was jealous of Constance and would show it on every occasion. As a general rule she followed her mother’s advice and asked him no questions when he had been out alone. But this evening her curiosity was aroused by an almost imperceptible change in his manner. His face was a shade darker, his voice a shade more grave than usual. After dinner, Totty stayed in the drawing-room to write letters and left the two together upon the verandah. It was very dark and they sat near each other in low straw chairs.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Mamie asked, almost as soon as they were alone.
“Something that will surprise you,” George answered. “I have been with Miss Fearing.”
He had no intention of concealing the fact, for he saw that such a course would be foolish in the extreme. He meant to go and see Constance again, as he had promised her, and he saw that it would be folly to give a clandestine appearance to their meetings.
“Oh!” exclaimed Mamie, “that accounts for it all!” He could not see her face distinctly, but her tone told him that she was smiling to herself.
“Accounts for what?” he asked.
“For a great many things. For your black looks and your gloomy view of the dinner, and your general unsociability.”
“I do not feel in the least gloomy or unsociable,” George said drily. “You have too much imagination.”
“Why did you go to see her?”
“I did not. I landed on their place without knowing it, and when I had been there a quarter of an hour, Miss Fearing suddenly appeared upon the scene. Is there anything else you would like to know?”
“Now you are angry!” Mamie exclaimed. “Of course. I knew you would be. That shows that your conversation with Conny was either very pleasant or very disagreeable. I am not naturally curious, but I would like to know what you talked about!”
“Would you?” George laughed a little roughly. “We did not talk of you — why should you want to know?”
“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book!” Mamie exclaimed, “and put into it an accurate report of your conversations, and send it to me to be criticised.”
“Why are you so vicious? Let Miss Fearing alone, if you do not like her. She has done you no harm, and there is no reason why you should call her your enemy, and quote the Bible against her.”
“I hate to hear you call her Miss Fearing. I know you call her Constance when you are alone with her.”
“Mamie, you are a privileged person, but you sometimes go too far. It is of no consequence what I call her. Let us drop the subject and talk of something else, unless you will speak of her reasonably and quietly.”
“Do you expect me to go with you when you make your next visit?”
“I shall be very glad if you will, provided that you will behave yourself like a sensible creature.”
“As I did the other day, when she was here? Is that the way?” Mamie laughed.
“No. You behaved abominably — —”
“And she has been complaining to you, and that is the reason why you are lecturing me, and making the night hideous with your highly moral and excellent advice. Give it up, George. It is of no use. I am bad by nature.”
George was silent for a few minutes. It was clear that if he meant to see Constance from time to time in future matters must be established upon a permanent basis of some sort.
“Mamie,” he said at last, “let us be serious. Are you really as fond of me as you seem to be? Will you do something, not to please me, but to help me?”
“Provided it is easy and I like to do it!” Mamie laughed. “Of course I will, George,” she added a moment later in a serious tone.
“Very well. It
is this. Forget, or pretend to forget, that there is such a person as Miss Fearing in the world. Or else go and see her and be as good and charming as you know how to be.”
“You give me my choice? I may do either?”
“It will help me if you will do either. I cannot hear her spoken of unkindly, and I cannot see her treated as you treated her the other day, without the shadow of a cause.”
“I think there is cause enough, considering how she treated you. Oh, yes, I know what you will say — that there never was any engagement, and all the rest of it. It is very honourable of you, and I admire you men much for putting it in that way. But we all knew, and it is of no use to deny it, you know.”
“You do not believe me? I give you my word of honour that there was no engagement. Do you understand? I made a fool of myself, and when I came to put the question I was disappointed. She was as free to refuse me as you are now, if I asked you to marry me. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” said Mamie in a rather unnatural tone. “Since you give me your word, it is a different thing. I have been mistaken. I am very sorry.”
“And will you do what I ask?”
“If you give me my choice, I will go and see her to-morrow. I will do it to please you — though I do not understand how it can help you.”
“It will, nevertheless, and I shall be grateful to you.”
The result of this conversation was that Mamie actually crossed the river on the following day and spent an hour with Constance Fearing to the great surprise of the latter, especially when she saw that her visitor was determined to be agreeable, as though to efface the impression she had made a few days earlier. Mamie was very careful to say nothing in the least pointed, nor anything which could be construed as an allusion to George.
Totty saw and wondered, but said nothing. She supposed that Mamie had made the visit because George had asked her to, and she was well satisfied that George should take the position of asking Mamie to do anything for him. That sort of thing, she said to herself, helps on a flirtation wonderfully.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 517
