The tears stood dim in Rue’s swimming eyes. She looked at him steadily, and let them trickle one by one down her cheeks, unheeded. “Dear Will,” she answered him back, with equal frankness, “it was kind of you to speak, and I’m glad you’ve spoken. It’ll make our relations all the easier in future! I guessed how you felt; I guessed it all long ago; but I’m glad, all the same, to have heard from your own lips the actual facts of it. And, Will, you quite rightly interpret my feelings. I’m an American at heart, and, you know, we Americans are very exacting in matters of affection. Some savage strain of monopoly exists in us still. I can’t help it. I acknowledge it. I won’t deny to you”—and she stretched out her hand quite frankly, and let him hold it in his own for a few brief moments—“I won’t deny that I’m very very fond indeed of you. If you could have given me your whole heart, I would have accepted it gratefully. I admired you with a deep admiration from the very first day I ever met you. I loved you from the time we sat together on the Lanser Kopf that afternoon at Innsbruck. I’m not ashamed to tell you so—nay, rather, dear, I’m proud of it; for, Will, you’re a man any woman might be proud to waste her love upon. But much as I love you, much as I admire you, I never could accept you if you feel like that. As an American born, with my monopolist instincts, I must have a whole man to myself all alone—or I won’t have any of him.”
“I knew it,” Will answered, caressing her hand with his fingers, and bending over it chivalrously. “And that’s why I never have ventured to ask you. But I’ve loved you all the same, Rue—as one loves the woman who stands best of all . . . save one . . . in one’s affections.”
Rue withdrew her hand gently. Her tears were falling faster. “Well, now,” she said, with a quiet sigh, “we can be friends in future—all the better, I hope, for this little explanation. I’m rich, of course, Will; and a great many men, circumstanced as you were, would have been glad to marry me for the sake of my money. I liked you all the more, I like you the more to-day, in that that has never counted for one moment with you. If you’d been a mercenary man, you’d have dissembled and pretended; you need never have let me see how much you loved that girl; or, if you had, you might have led me to suppose you had gradually forgotten her. . . . Dear friend”—and she turned to him once more with a sudden burst of uncontrollable feeling—“we are man and woman, as you say, not boy and girl; so why should I be ashamed to open my whole heart to you? You’ve told me the truth, like a man; why shouldn’t I tell you the truth, in return, like a woman? I will. I can’t help it. I have waited and watched and thought often to myself, ‘In time, he must surely, surely get over it. He must cease to love her; he can never really have loved her so much as he imagines; he must turn at last to me, when he forgets all about her.’ So I waited and watched, and, month after month, I thought at last you must surely begin to forget her. But, month after month, I have seen you loved her still; and while you loved her still, . . . Will, Will, dear Will, I didn’t want you to ask me.”
Will seized her hand once more, and kissed it tenderly. “Oh, how good you are!” he cried, in a very melting voice. “Rue, do you know, when you talk like that, you make me love you!”
“But not better than her?” Rue murmured, softly.
Will couldn’t lie to her. “No; not better than her,” he answered slowly, in a very low voice. “If it were otherwise, I’d have asked you this very minute, dear sister.”
Rue rose and faced him. The firelight flickered red on her soft white dress; he could see by its bright glow the tears still trickling slow down those full round cheeks of hers. “After this, Will, I must go,” she said. “Don’t come again to-morrow. Next week, you may call if you like, some afternoon, casually; but for Heaven’s sake, please, don’t refer to this interview. I have only one thing to say, and when I’ve said it, I must run from you. Remember, I’m a woman; my pride is fighting hard against my love to-night—and, if I let love win, I should for ever despise myself. As long as you live, don’t speak to me of this matter again, unless you speak to say, ‘Rue, Rue, I’ve forgotten her.’ If ever that day comes—” and she flushed rosy red—“you have my answer already; you know you can claim me.”
She moved over to the door, with hurried step and beating heart, hardly able to trust herself. With a true sense of delicacy, Will abstained from opening it. He stood on the hearth-rug, irresolute, and just watched her depart; he felt, in the circumstances, that course was the more respectful.
With her fingers on the handle, Rue paused, and looked round again. “I wouldn’t have said so much, even now,” she faltered, “if it weren’t for this—that I feel you’re the one man I’ve ever met in my life to whom the question of my money was as dust in the balance. You speak the truth, and I know I can trust you. If ever you can say to me, ‘I love you better now, Rue, than I ever loved anyone,’ I am yours: then, take me! But till that day comes, if come it ever does, let us only be friends. Never speak to me again, for Heaven’s sake, never speak, as we have spoken this evening.”
She opened the door and passed out, all tremulous. Will waited a moment, and then, with a throbbing heart, went slowly down the stairs. As he did so, something moist fell suddenly on his hand that grasped the bannister. To his immense surprise, he found it was a tear from his own eyelids—for he too was crying. Poet that he was, he felt more than half-inclined, while he stood there, hesitating, to rush after her as she went, and seize her in his strong arms, and cover her with warm kisses that very minute. For a poet is a man even more than the rest of us. But could he tell her with truth he had quite forgotten Linnet? Oh, no, no, no; Linnet’s image on his heart remained graven, even then, quite as deeply as ever. We men are built so.