“May I say,” she said, “in return for what, in its way, is a compliment, that I like you very much. I would take care of you, and I shall perhaps not live more than a year or two.”
The tremor of her voice touched him. The £15,000 a year pulled at his will. In that instant he saw the broad glades of waving bracken, the big trees of the park, the sober face of the great house he might inherit, looking out over the smooth green lawns. He looked again at the little lady. After all, he was more than thirty. The world would laugh—well, they laughed best who laughed last. And, after a few years, there would be Sylvia—pretty, charming, enchanting Sylvia. He put the thought of her roughly away. Not because he was ashamed of it, but because it hurt him. The thought that Sylvia should wait for a dead woman’s shoes had seemed natural; what hurt him was that she herself should see nothing unnatural in such waiting.
The silence had grown to the limit that spells discomfort; the ticking of the tall clock, the rustle of the plane tree’s leaves outside the window, the discords of Fleet Street harmonised by distance, all deepened the silence and italicised it. She spoke.
“Well?” she said.
The plane tree’s leaves murmured eloquently of the great oaks in the park. The old lady’s eyes looked at him appealingly through the pale-smoked glasses. How she would like that old place! And his debts—he could pay them all.
“I will,” he said suddenly; “if you will, I will; and I pray you may never regret it.”
“I don’t think you will regret it,” she said gently; “it is a truly kind act to me.”
Bank and solicitor, duly consulted, testified to Miss Thrale’s respectability and to her income—the requisite hundred a year in Consols. And on a certain day in June Michael Wood woke from a feverish dream, in which obstinacy and the longing for money had fought with many better things and worsted them, to find himself married to a white-haired woman of sixty.
The awakening took place in his rooms in the Temple. He had yielded to the little old lady’s entreaties, and consented, most willingly, to forego the “wedding journey,” in this case so sad a mockery.
The set was a large one—five rooms; it seemed that they might live here, and neither irk the other.