Franklin Kane

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Helen had pondered deeply in the moments before his departure. Franklin had never kissed her; the time would come when he must kiss her. The time would come when a kiss of farewell or greeting must, however rare, be a facile, marital custom. How would Franklin—trembling on that verge of a self-recognition that might make a chaos of his life—how and when would he initiate that custom? How could it be initiated by him at all unless with an emotion that would not only reveal him to himself, but make it known to him that he was revealed to her. The revelation, if it came, must come gradually; they must both have time to get used to it, she to having a husband she did not love in love with her; he to loving a wife who would never love him back. She shrank from the thought of emotional revelations. It was her part to initiate and to make a kiss an easy thing. Yet she found, sitting there, writing the last notes, with Franklin beside her, that it was not an easy thing to contemplate. The thought of her own cowardice spurred her on. When Franklin rose at last, gave her his hand, said that he'd come back that evening, Helen rose too, resolved. 'Good-bye,' she said. 'Don't forget the tickets for that concert.'

'No, indeed,' said Franklin.

'And I think, don't you? that we might put the announcement in the papers to-morrow. Aunt Grizel wants, I am sure, to see me safely Morning Posted.'

'So do I,' smiled Franklin.

Helen was summoning her courage. 'Good-bye,' she repeated, and now she smiled with a new sweetness. 'I think we ought to kiss each other good-bye, don't you? We are such an old engaged couple.'

Resolved, and firm in her resolve, though knowing commotion of soul, she leaned to him and kissed his forehead and turned her cheek to him. Franklin had kept her hand, and in the pause, where she did not see his face, she felt his tighten on it; but he did not kiss her. Smiling a little nervously, she raised her head and looked at him. He was gazing at her with a shaken, stricken look.

'You must kiss me good-bye,' said Helen, speaking as she would have spoken to a departing child. 'Why, we have no right to be put in the Morning Post unless we've given each other a kiss.'

And, really like the child, Franklin said: 'Must I?'

He kissed her then, gently, and spoke no further word. But she knew, when he had gone, and when thinking over the meaning of his face as it only came to her when the daze of her own daring faded and left her able to think, that she had hardly helped Franklin over a difficulty; she had made him aware of it rather; she had shown him what his task must be. And it could not reassure her, for Franklin, that his face, after that stricken moment, and with a wonderful swiftness of delicacy, had promised her that it should be accomplished. It promised her that there should be no emotions, or, if there were, that they should be mastered ones; it promised her that she should see nothing in him to make her feel that she was refusing anything, nothing to make her feel that she was giving pain by a refusal. It seemed to say that he knew, now, at last, what the burden was that he laid upon her and that it should be as light as he could make it. It did not show her that he saw his own burden; but Helen saw it for him. She, too, made herself promises as she stood after his departure, taking a long breath over her discovery; she was not afraid in looking forward. All that she was afraid of—and it was of this that she was thinking as she now stood leaning her arm upon the mantelshelf and looking into the fire,—all that she was afraid of was of looking back. It was for Gerald that she was waiting and it was Gerald's note that hung from her hand against her knee, and since that note had come, not long after Franklin had left her, her thoughts had been centred on the coming interview. Gerald had not written to her from the country; she had expected to have an answer to her announcement that morning, but none had come. This note had been brought by hand, and it said that if he could not find her at four would she kindly name some other hour when he might do so. She had answered that he would find her, and it was now five minutes to the hour.

Gerald's note had not said much more, and yet, in the little it did say, it had contrived to be tense and cool. It seemed to intimate that he reserved a great deal to say to her, and that, perhaps more, he reserved a great deal to think and not to say. It was a note that had startled her and that then had filled her with a bitterness of heart greater than any she had ever known. For that she would not accept, not that tone from Gerald. That it should be Gerald—Gerald of all the people in the world—to adopt that tone to her! The exceeding irony of it brought a laugh to her lips. She was on edge. Her strength had only just taken her through the morning and its revelations, there was none left now for patience and evasion. Gerald must be careful, was the thought that followed the laugh.