Part 2

Her pause had this time more visible thought. "Nowhere you most want. Oh," she declared, "I know what you most want and what you've a thousand reasons for wanting. I know just what your admirable life has been and how, by so rare a chance, you've been held fast here and prevented. I know you're at last free, and that--except, if you insist on it, your idea about _me_--you've naturally now no other thought in your head but to make up for lost time and repair your sacrifice. That's naturally your necessity much more than the fancied necessity in obedience to which you've spoken to me; and my conviction of this is what makes me bold to speak to you as I do. I don't fear, you see"--she gathered confidence, she gathered even a force of expression she had never known, as she went--"that I shall have it on my conscience that I've succeeded with you. I shall on the contrary simply have exposed myself; which I shan't at all regret, however, if I've helped you to clear up your feelings." To this service of charity in fact, and nothing more, she had finally the air of lending herself, while Pendrel began to take it all from her as if he too saw the truth. It was at the same time characteristic of her that at the moment of indicating the sacrifice she made, the exposure, as she called it, that she consented to, for his ultimate peace, she drove well home the knife she had planted. "My excuse would have been--if there _were_ any chance for me--that you happened to be so perfect a case for what I call to myself salvation. One doesn't easily find a man of your general condition who has not, as we say, 'been'; and much less therefore a man of your particular one. By your particular one," Aurora Coyne wonderfully proceeded, "I mean that of knowing so much that might seem to have been to be got at only by immense experience. You know everything, and yet you've learnt it all over here; some miracle or other has worked for you or--it comes to the same thing!--for my vision of you: I don't know, even with your happy conditions, after all, what it can have been, but it makes you, doesn't it? the single case of your kind. If you had been spoiled there would have been no use--and of course as it is there's none. Only I can't help having just put it to you thus," she wound up, "that you've not been spoiled."

There was no doubt of the nature of the effort made by Pendrel to do these remarks justice. "You do put it to me with the magnificence that attends every breath of your being. I haven't been spoiled--I see quite what you mean--I only _can_ be."

"You only _will_ be," she said almost tenderly. "You'll be beautifully spoiled."

"For _you_, that is, of course," Ralph went on.

"For me--certainly. Isn't it only of myself after all that we're talking?"

He answered nothing and the silence between them was for a little as if she had suddenly given him a chance. This effect moreover grew from what he finally said; which was after he had restlessly moved to the window, looked out thence for some instants and then come back. "You would definitely accept me if I did formally give up everything but this?"--and he jerked his head at the outer world of which he had with such intensity just renewed his impression.

"Ah," she disappointingly answered, "I don't absolutely say that."

Poor Pendrel again stared. "Then what do you say at all? Do you expect me to renounce for nothing?"

"I don't expect you, as I've perfectly told you, in any degree to renounce. Why should you?" she added. "No one will ever have an idea of what you have lost."

"No one but myself," he said with his eyes on her.

"Oh I think you will least of all."

She had answered so straight that it had almost the sound of levity; by the hint of which he was justly enough irritated. "It's too portentous--what you ask!"

But she found for this her quickest reply. "I don't ask anything. It's you who ask. I only answer. I decline the honour of your hand, and I give my reasons. If I had given none I should have been doubtless less absurd, and my reward is that I'm not really sure I should have been even less cruel. I'm sure," she continued, "but of one thing--or rather perhaps of two: that I'm as insane as you please, but that I'm also as rigid. Don't think, at all events, that you need, or that you possibly _can_, tell me how my attitude strikes you. Do me the simple justice to believe that I know."

So she appeared quietly to conclude, and it was in her quietness indeed that her perversity most showed; though this was in a manner an aid, if a lame one, to her suitor, called upon at a moment's notice both to measure its extent and to give up the hope of getting round it. "You call me a 'case,' but it seems to me you're at least as extraordinary a one."

"I didn't apply the term to you abusively," she made sufficient haste to explain. And then as, however she applied it, he but sat, in his hard dilemma, with his head in his hands: "Am I not the first to admit that I can only appear unaccountably exalted--it's the word you must have in your mind about me; and exalted on the subject on which it most seems to people grotesque to be so?" She gave herself up, in fine, as extravagant, maniacal, and then, further, to the moral of it, which was that they lacked all ground for possibly meeting. They must accept their preposterous difference, and she could herself do so the better that she was sure of what he had intended to say to her. He had his plans made; he "sailed," didn't he? next week, next month, next year even, if that should be more convenient to her, and had come to propose that she should sail with him. This was, as he saw, not so much as discussable; but he must go on sailing as if nothing whatever had happened. He must stay a long time, and it was indeed all but a certainty for her that when once he should get well into it he would find himself staying indefinitely. Yes, that was inevitably what must happen to him: he offered the bright example of a man of thirty, with means, curiosity, the highest culture, who had, for whatever reasons, never gone at all, but he would show how people with that history infallibly made it up by never coming back when once they did go. Why _should_ he come back? With his tastes, his resources and opportunities, his intensified longing and disciplined youth, he would have an admirable life.

Many things were before him while she talked, but most of all perhaps the almost sinister strangeness of his having been condemned to this ordeal. It was the last predicament he had ever dreamed of, the prescription of further patience least on the cards for him, he would have supposed, and least congruous with other realities. This in fact made her spring of action, the unconfessed influence that had worked in her, constantly less and less doubtful. The difficulty was that though he had everything on his side he actually felt himself in a cleft stick. "Don't you then," he appealed, "just simply and personally care for me the least little bit? What you seem to me to have in your head," he went on after waiting a while in vain for her reply, "is, however you express it, a mere cold little theory, which is rather proud of itself, but which has the peculiarity of being both sophisticated and stupid. I don't quite see, you know, why I should be offered up on such an altar." After which, as she was still silent, though only as if because she had already said all: "Is it inconceivable," he demanded, "that I should in the course of time go for a few months without you?"

She smiled in her implacable splendour at his touching want of grasp. "Isn't the whole point that you can't _possibly_ go for a few months? It would be a shame moreover if you did. I had quite as soon you went for a lifetime as for three days. I want you perfect, and three hours would prevent it. When I say 'I want' you," she handsomely developed, "I only mean I should want you if I had a right. My insanity, I quite understand, deprives me of all rights. But at the same time," she insisted, "you don't in the least undermine it by calling it a cold little theory. I don't pretend that it's anything else: my cold little theory is exactly indeed that it would be interesting to catch you--catch you young, as they say, since you _are_ young--and put you through."

He followed her with his face of gloom. "For the amusement of seeing what I should be at fifty?"

"There you are"--it had made her again quick; "and see what it is to be really intelligent! Precisely for the amusement, if you prefer that word--though I should use some other: save for the high idea, the intense interest, the peculiar beauty. I should see," said Mrs. Coyne, "what it makes of a man."

"You would indeed!" her visitor brooded.

She laughed out at his tone. "Ah but don't put it as a threat--as if you'd be Nick o' the Woods, and, to punish me for what I should have kept you from, wish to beat out my brains. You'd really be as pleased with me, I feel sure, as I should with you, and we'd grow old together in honour and patriotism." She became, however, the next moment braver; which had the effect of showing her as kinder. "It's all, when one considers, the fault of your peculiar situation--added, I mean, to the turn of your mind. The result of the combination of your starved state (which I call, you see, to oblige you, what you would call it) and your natural passion for everything old is as calculable as to-morrow's dawn," It was the sort of fact one could put in a nutshell. "The only way for you not to remain is not to go."

"You'll see whether I remain," Ralph said as drily as he could.

"Oh but do! Do," she earnestly repeated. "The great thing is after all not to spoil it--whichever way you take it; and isn't it also, when one thinks, much better you should be perfect for yourself than for me?"

"How you must, fortunately, hate and loathe me!"--Ralph returned to that with the same mastered misery. "Because if it weren't for that what a question for us to separate on!"

This appeared just to strike her. "It wouldn't be such a base one as you seem to suggest; but, to give you the benefit of the doubt, don't let us admit for a moment that it is the one! By which I mean that we _don't_ separate, inasmuch as for people to do that they must first have come together. For you to decline my condition I must first have imposed it. I mentioned just now," she added for further lucidity, "the fact that makes you such a catch for one's theory, but I didn't mention the other fact, the way you're in spite of everything pledged and committed--which spoils it all. The ideal subject of my experiment," she perfectly allowed, "needn't certainly be that particular rare bird, a young New Yorker who's an ardent student of history. It's over there," she appeared magnanimously to muse, "that history _can_ best be studied!"

"How you laugh at me and lash me and rub it in!" Ralph grimly observed.

But she put the matter for him now as if in her achieved indulgence of it no misjudgment could interrupt her. "You've earned your holiday, and nothing can be more right and just than for it to be long and unclouded. I know nothing of a finer grace than the way you've gone on year after year doing without it for the charity nearest home; and I'm not so stupid as not to have a notion of the disadvantage at which, in the intellectual work you scraped time for, your limitations and privations must often have placed you. You did it, bravely and patiently, as you could, and I'm sure, ignorant as I am, that no one else could have in the conditions done it half so well. Only the conditions were so wrong that it's delightful they _can_ at last be right. I'll wait for another day," she smiled, "to try my theory."

"What you'll wait for," he after a moment returned, "is evidently and more especially another person."

She shook her head in general relinquishment. "Another person will never turn up. There will always be a flaw. If he's worth one's idea he'll be sure to have been over. If he hasn't been over he'll be sure not to be worth one's idea. _You_"--oh she could indeed, as he said, rub it in!-- "would have been so perfectly worth it."

"Perhaps I might still try to be," he thoughtfully suggested, "if I could by any chance come as near to it as really to understand. But I assure you I don't so much as to take hold of it."

She struck him for a moment as on the point, in answer to this, of breaking into impatience and declaring that his failure of comprehension need't matter to him. He had a glimpse thus of what he believed--that she truly would have wished him to take her conception on trust, and, as it were, for the love of her; to oblige her by adopting it, by accommodating himself blindly. Her courage, however, he made out, was insufficient for this, and the next minute she only did for herself what she could. "That's because I'm at the disadvantage, which I perfectly recognise, of not having practised what I preach--because I naturally, in my position, have everything against me." She smiled again for the vanity of the regret, but she went on. "If I could have known how I was now to feel I would never have gone."

Ralph tried to follow her as if something might come of it. "But it took nothing less than your charming experience, I gather, to produce your actual attitude. You would have had no attitude without it. You had to qualify yourself for your remonstrance."

He spoke so gravely that it made, in effect, for irony, and that in turn just visibly made her flinch. "Well, I do of course hold myself qualified, and of course I'm glad to be, on any terms. I give it to you at best as mere inevitable reaction, but the point I make is that as reaction it's final. One must choose at last"--she couldn't, he saw, but let herself go; "and I take up definitely with my own country. It's high time; here, _en fin de compte_, one can at least do or be something, show something, make something. To try and make something is at all events what's wanted of us, and even if we make nothing it's at least as good ta make it here on the spot as to go thousands of miles on as great a fool's errand. I want in short to be an American as other people are--well, whatever they are."

Ralph turned it all over. "Yes, it's the new cry, and what can be more interesting than to hear it sounded more or less in French? It's recommended--for the 'upper classes,' and perhaps even beginning a little to be tried by them. It wouldn't take much," he continued, "to make me say that the day only _could_ inevitably come when it would be for its little hour the new pose."

"I dare say indeed it wouldn't take much to make you say it," she returned; "and I've also seen the moment coming at which--_for_ the moment--you inevitably would. But I dare say you hold that the hour you speak of will pass: all the more reason therefore that I should make the most of it while it lasts. It may be only a dream, but the thing is--while one can--to keep dreaming."

He looked at her in silence longer than he had done yet. "What it comes to then is that you'll never dream of me."

"By no means; because it's just in dreams----!" But she pulled herself up. "I mean that their strangeness is their law. _They_, when they're happy, arrange everything to perfection. With you or without you at any rate," she pursued, "mine will go on. They'll be as fantastic as you please--that is as much about the poor product." She held him for a moment with this, then she broke out: "How shall we ever know his possibility unless we give him a chance? What I'm dying to see is the best we can turn out quite by ourselves."

He sacrificed his indifference. "The best young man?"

"Oh I don't care how old he is----"

"So long as he's young!" Poor Pendrel--for want of anything better to do--interrupted.

But she held her course. "The older he is the more he'll have given us time to see. Of course," she splendidly added, "he may be a failure, and, if he is, that will more or less settle the question. We're nowhere till it _is_ settled."

Ralph showed on his side no less noble a patience. "But isn't it settled by the cowboy?"

"The cowboy?" she stared.

"Why isn't he what you want, and why isn't he good enough? He sometimes in spite of his calling, I believe, lives to a great age. There are cases surely in which he will have given you time to see, and he has the great merit of standing there ready to your hand. You talk about the 'question,' but what is he but the best answer to it that any conditions at all conceivable can yield? You say mine--my conditions--are wrong; so that what are his, logically, unless right? If he isn't right _with_ them it would seem therefore their fault. I wonder it doesn't strike you in fine that if he isn't good enough your idea itself perhaps isn't." Now that Ralph was launched he felt the tide high. "That's what it comes to, your idea, dress it up as you will. You want a fellow only who shall have had adventures--and that, I hasten to grant, is any lady's right. There's no disputing about tastes, but that isn't true about principles. You want the adventure to have been, or necessarily to be, of the species most marked and determined by our climate, our geographical position, our political institutions, our social circumstances and our national character. It seems to me you see lines drawn remarkably sharp, but, allowing you that, I repeat that you strike me as having but to take your choice. The cow-boy," he suggested, "of middle-age, say----"

But she had now interrupted--as if for commiseration. "I don't even yet know what a cowboy is!"

It was at all events her seeing him gracelessly astray that she made him most feel. "There am _I_ for you then. I don't know what anyone is who leads the life of action--so little am I such a creature myself." And straight--though he was sore for it--he looked the whole thing in the face. "It's my type itself that's impossible to you. I shouldn't even here," he averred, "be able to meet your views or do what you require. I'd be a brute for it if I could--as indeed I often wish I _were_ one; but I'll be hanged if I see my way. My adventures are all in a very small circle"--and our young man tapped the seat of his brain. He thought it out at the moment almost as much for himself as for Aurora. "If it weren't that I'm trying to equip myself without disgrace in _this_ one, I should doubt if in a fix of the kind that for you makes the hero I could be rightly counted on to know what to do. There you have me. Yes, it comes home to me: I only know what to do in thought or, as you might say, imagination--and but the least little bit even there; also without any firm confidence of doing it. So that if none but a ranchman need apply----!" he could in fine, while they dropped, with this, into their longest break, but look about for his hat. "I suppose it's no use my saying," he went on when he had found this article, "that if it interests you at all I may just possibly before long come in for something in England." He waited a little for her to take him up on it, but to the simple increase of his sense of her leaving him now to flounder as he would. He floundered accordingly an instant longer. "To me--to my mind of course I mean--such a windfall, in the shape of a bit of old property, an old house, a piece of suggestive concrete antiquity, easily represents, as you can conceive, rather a 'treat.' But I don't dream it's a thing to dazzle you with." He felt as soon as he had spoken, or rather as soon as her own silence had again marked itself, as if he had seen a vulgar bribe fall flat; and he was equally aware that what he next said deepened this appearance. "Of course there's nothing of that sort that can mean much to you to-day. You've seen everything again and again."

"Oh," she answered at last, "I've seen a great deal. But not what you will. You'll know so much better how. You've work cut out, but you're to be envied."

He put out his hand to her. "Good-bye--till next year."

For a moment she kept it. "Why do you talk so foolishly?"

"I say nothing more foolish than that I shall by that time see you again."

At this she slowly released him. "Of course it will be comparatively easy for you, but it won't really be worth your while to come back to spite me.

"I shall come back," said Ralph, "because I shall want to."

She had another of those weighted headshakes which, as if determined less from within than from without, suggested the perfect working of her beauty rather than that of her thought. "No--it's there that you're wrong and that I'm so right. I'm not such an idiot as not to know that there will always be a steamer and that you can always pay your passage. When I said that if you go you'll never come back I meant that you'll never wish to. Of course you can come back without wishing as much as you like. But that," she blandly remarked, "won't do for me."

"How well you know what I wish," he exhaled, "and how much every way you know about everything!"

"Well," she patiently replied before he had time finally to leave her, "it's not wholly my fault if an expression you once used to me has much worked in me. I remembered it as soon as I saw you to-day, and it would have made a folly of my talking to you of my conditions if I had done that with any other practical view than to call your attention to our impossibilities. You used it on one occasion when I was last at home in a way that has made me never forget it."

Ralph wondered. "I've used doubtless plenty of expressions and in plenty of absurd ways. But what in the world was this one?"

She brought it responsibly out. "'The sense of the past'."

He wondered still more. "Is that all?"

"You said it was the thing in life you desired most to arrive at, and that wherever you had found it--even where it was supposed to be most vivid and inspired--it had struck you as deplorably lacking intensity. At the intensity required, as you said, by any proper respect for itself, you proposed if possible yourself to arrive--art, research, curiosity, passion, the historic passion, as you called it, helping you. From that moment," she went on, "I saw. The sense of the past _is_ your sense."

He attended with a cold eye. "I haven't an idea what trash I may have talked."

"Don't be dishonest," she returned after a moment.

It brought, almost as a blow, a flush to his cheek. "Dishonest?"

"Don't deny yourself. Don't deny your ambition. Don't deny your genius."

He looked at her over it strangely, and then as if light had really broken, "Are _those_ things what you hate me for?" he almost gasped.