Vaughan’s expression was that of a man to whom nothing now mattered. “Oh, yes,” he answered wearily, “that commends itself to me. That strikes me as very sensible indeed.”
The complete discouragement in his tone caused Carleton to eye him keenly. “One other thing,” he said, hastening to shift the topic with unusual abruptness, “about the book. I don’t want you to feel in the least cast down. We’ll find a publisher yet; I’m confident of it. And this next time, let’s start fair and square. Give me the manuscript, and let me try negotiations in my own way. I think I may almost promise that you’ll not find yourself disappointed.”
The expression on Vaughan’s face did not seem to indicate that he by any means shared Carleton’s confidence. “We can’t do worse,” he said, perhaps a little ungraciously. “If you think there’s any good in going ahead, why, all right. My confidence is gone. I’ll send the great work over to you to-morrow; and you can send it off on its travels again, or burn it. I don’t know which would be the more sensible of the two.”
Henry Carleton shook his head reprovingly. “Oh, come now,” he protested, “don’t insult yourself that way. We’ll show them yet.” He extended a benevolent hand as he spoke. Some one had once described Carleton’s method of getting rid of his callers as imperceptible, but inevitable. “And run out and see Rose soon,” he added kindly, “have a good long talk with her, and fully explain your side of the case. She won’t fail to grasp it, I’m sure. She’s nobody’s fool, if her own father does say so.”
Somehow Vaughan found himself outside the office, outside the building itself, walking along the street in a kind of maze, before his ordinary powers of intellect again asserted themselves. Curiously enough, for one who had agreed so readily and so entirely with everything that Henry Carleton had proposed, he now appeared to be actuated by a certain feeling of resentment against that worthiest of men. “Confound him,” he muttered disrespectfully. “How on earth does he manage it? He can turn me around like a weathercock. I never make such a fool of myself as I do when I talk with him. I never saw such a man. I can think of twenty things now that I might have said, but when I needed them, I’ll be hanged if I could lay a finger on one. And if I had, I don’t doubt but what the next minute he’d have shown me where I was wrong. He’s always right. That’s the puzzle about him. He’s so fair and just about things; you can’t dispute him; and yet, for all it seems like such an idiotic thing to say, he’s right, and you know all the time he’s wrong. Confound the man. He’s one too many for me.”
His talk with Rose came an evening or so later on the broad piazza at The Birches. For half an hour Vaughan had sought vainly to bring himself to make a beginning, with his attention in the meantime miserably distracted from all that Rose Carleton had to say, finding it indeed hard to assent with any great degree of pleasure to plans for a future which he now felt was for ever barred to him. So noticeable and so unlike himself did his inattention finally become that the girl stopped short in something she was saying to turn his face toward hers, scrutinizing it as though she sought to read the trouble there. “What’s gone wrong, Arthur?” she asked, “nothing that I’ve done to displease you?”
Vaughan’s answer to the latter part of the question was not made in words. And then, as he again raised his head, at last he made his explanation. “It’s this, dear,” he said. “I happened to go in to see your father the other day about the book—to bother him with more bad news—and he began to talk, apropos of that, about ourselves. He was very pleasant—very fair—I must acknowledge that—but—he thinks that for a man with no more prospects than I have, that I have no right to hold you to anything like an engagement; that it isn’t fair to you; and all that. I suppose, though he was too polite to put it in just that way, the implication would be that I ought never to have spoken to you at all. And so—I didn’t see, for the life of me, just what there was for me to say. He asked me if I didn’t agree with him—it was an awkward question, sort of a ‘you’ll be damned if you don’t; you’ll be damned if you do’ sort of affair—and between being a fool or appearing to be a knave, I chose the rôle that seems to come so easily to me always; I chose to be the fool, and stammered out that I supposed I did. And now I don’t know what to do; in a way I’ve given him my word not to visit you as if we were engaged; in a way it seems as if he were right, too; and yet—” the unfinished sentence was eloquent of all his doubt and misery.
He might have been prepared for almost any answer other than the girl’s laugh of real amusement. And on the instant, wrought up and perplexed as he was, the surprise of it made him draw himself up with offended dignity. Reading his mood with all a woman’s skill, the girl drew closer to him, and raised her face to his. “Kiss me,” she cried imperiously, and when, with a rather ill-grace, he had complied, “There,” she said, “that’s better; don’t imagine you can get rid of me as easily as you think. My affections aren’t to be trifled with like that, I’ll have you know.”
Half vexed still, yet with a feeling of immense relief, he gazed at her with a certain pathos of indecision. “Then you don’t think—” he began.