They walked back slowly along the road. They were silent. From time to time she knew that he looked at her with solicitude; but she could not return his look. The memory of her own words was with her, a strange, new, menacing fact in life. She had said them, and they had altered everything. Henceforth she depended on his pity, on his loyalty, on his sense of duty to a task undertaken. Their bond was recognised as an unequal one. Once or twice, in the dull chaos of her mind, a flicker of pride rose up. Could she not emulate Helen? Helen was to marry a man who did not love her. Helen was to marry rationally, with open eyes, a man who was her friend. But Helen did not love the man who did not love her. She was not his thrall. She gained, she did not lose, her freedom.
CHAPTER XXV.
A week was gone since Helen had given her consent to Franklin, and again she was in her little sitting-room and again waiting, though not for Franklin. Franklin had been with her all the morning; and he had been constantly with her through the week, and she had found the closer companionship, until to-day, strangely easy. Franklin's very lacks endeared him to her. It was wonderful to see any one so devoid of any glamour, of any adventitious aid from nature, who yet so beamed. This beaming quality was, for Helen, his chief characteristic. There was certainly no brilliancy in Franklin's light; it was hardly a ray and it emitted never a sparkle; but it was a mild, diffused effulgence, and she always felt more peaceful and restored for coming within its radius.
It had wrapped her around all the week, and it had remained so unchanged that their relation, too, had seemed unchanged and her friend only a little nearer, a little more solicitous. They had gone about together; they had taken walks in the parks; they had made plans while strolling beside the banks of the Serpentine or leaning on the bridge in St. James's Park, to watch the ducks being fed. Already she and Franklin and the deeply triumphant Aunt Grizel had gone on a journey down to the country to look at a beautiful old house in order to see if it would do as one of Helen's 'establishments.' Already Franklin had brought her a milky string of perfect pearls, saying mildly, as he had said of the box of sweets, 'I don't approve of them, but I hope you do.' And on her finger was Franklin's ring, a noble emerald that they had selected together.
Helen had been pleased to feel in herself a capacity for satisfaction in these possessions, actual and potential. She liked to look at the great blot of green on her hand and to see the string of pearls sliding to her waist. She liked to ponder on the Jacobean house with its splendid rise of park and fall of sward. She didn't at all dislike it, either, when Franklin, as calmly possessed as ever with a clear sense of his duties, discussed with her the larger and more impersonal uses of their fortune. She found that she had ideas for him there; that the thinking and active self, so long inert, could be roused to very good purpose; that it was interesting, and very interesting, to plan, with millions at one's disposal, for the furtherance of the just and the beautiful. And she found, too, in spite of her warnings to Franklin, that though she might be a hard, a selfish, and a broken-hearted woman, she was a woman with a very definite idea of her own responsibilities. It did not suit her at all to be the mere passive receiver; it did not suit her to be greedy. She turned her mind at once, carefully and consistently, to Franklin's interests. She found atoms and kinetics rather confusing at first, but Franklin's delighted and deliberate elucidations made a light for her that promised by degrees to illuminate these dark subjects. Yes; already life had taken hold of her and, ironically, yet not unwillingly, she followed it along the appointed path. Yesterday, however, and to-day, especially, a complication, subtle yet emphatic, had stolen upon her consciousness.
All the week long, in spite of something mastered and controlled in his bearing, she had seen that he was happy, and though not imaginative as to Franklin's past, she had guessed that he had never in all his life been so happy, and that never had life so taken hold of him. He enjoyed the pearls, he enjoyed the emerald, he enjoyed the Jacobean house and going over it with her and Aunt Grizel; above all he enjoyed herself as a thinking and acting being, the turning of her attention to atoms, her grave, steady penetration of his life. And in this happiness the something controlled and mastered had melted more and more; she had intended that it should melt. She had guessed at the pain, the anxiety for her that had underlain the dear little man's imperturbability, and she had determined that as far as in her lay Franklin should think her happy, should think that, at all events, she was serene and without qualms or misgivings. And she had accomplished this. It was as if she saw him breathing more deeply, more easily; as if, with a long sigh of relief, he smiled at her and said, with a new accent of confidence: 'All right.' And then, after the sigh of relief, she saw that he became too happy. It was only yesterday that she began to see it; it was to-day that she had clearly seen that Franklin had fallen in love with her.
It wasn't that, in any blindness to what she meant, he came nearer and made mistakes. He did not come a step nearer, and, in his happiness, his unconscious happiness, he was further from the possibility of mistakes than before. He did not draw near. He stood and gazed. Men had loved Helen before, yet, she felt it, no man had loved her as Franklin did. She could not have analysed the difference between his love and that of other men, yet she felt it dimly. Franklin stood and gazed; but it was not at charm or beauty that he gazed; whether he was really deeply aware of them she could not tell; the only words she could find with which to express her predicament and its cause sounded silly to her, but she could find no others. Franklin was gazing at her soul. She couldn't imagine what he found to fix him in it; he had certainly said that she was the honestest woman he had known; she gloomily made out that she was, she supposed, 'straight'; she liked clear, firm things, and she liked to keep a bargain. It didn't seem to her a very arresting array of virtues; but then—no, she couldn't settle Franklin's case so glibly as that; if it wasn't what she might have of charm that he had fallen in love with, it wasn't what she might have of virtue either. Perhaps one's soul hadn't much to do with either charm or virtue. And, after all, whatever it was, he was gazing at it, rapt, smiling, grave, in the lover's trance. He saw her, and only her. And she saw him, and a great many other things besides.
The immediate hope that came to her was that Franklin, perhaps, might really never know just what had happened to him. If he never recognised it, it might never become explicit; it might be managed; it could of course be managed in any case; but how she should hate having him made conscious of pain. If he never said to himself, and far less to her, that he had fallen in love with her, he might not really suffer in the strange, ill-adjusted union before them. She did not think that he had yet said it to himself; but she feared that he was hovering on the verge of self-recognition. His very guilelessness in the realm of the emotions exposed him to her, and with her perplexity went a yearning of pity as she witnessed the soft, the hesitant, the delicate unfolding.
For more had come than the tranced gaze. That morning, writing notes, with Franklin beside her, her hand had inadvertently touched his once or twice in taking the papers from him, and Helen then had seen that Franklin blushed. Twice, also, looking up, she had found his eyes fixed on her with the lover's dwelling tenderness, and both times he had quickly averted his glance in a manner very new in him.