‘And even if I do?’ Selah asked. ‘What then?’
‘Why, then, Selah,’ Ronald answered confidently, taking her hand boldly in his own and actually kissing her—yes, kissing her; ‘why, then, Selah, suppose we say Monday fortnight?’
‘It’s awfully soon,’ Selah replied, half grumbling. ‘You don’t give a body time to think it over.’
‘Certainly not,’ Ronald responded, quickly, taking the handsome face firmly between his two spare hands, and kissing her lips half a dozen times over in rapid succession.
‘Let me go, Ronald,’ Selah cried, struggling to be free, and trying in vain to tear down his thin wiry arms with her own strong shapely hands. ‘Let me go at once,—there’s a good boy, and I’ll marry you on Monday fortnight, or do anything else you like, just to keep you quiet. After all, you’re a kind-hearted fellow enough, and you want looking after and taking care of, and if you insist upon it, I don’t mind giving way to you in this small matter.’
Ronald stepped back a pace or two, and stood looking at her a little sadly with his hands folded. ‘Oh, Selah,’ he cried in a tone of bitter disappointment, ‘don’t speak like that to me, don’t, please. Don’t, don’t tell me that you don’t really love me—that you’re going to marry me for nothing else but out of mere compassion for my weakness and helplessness!’
Selah burst at once into a wild flood of uncontrollable tears: ‘Oh, Ronald,’ she cried in her old almost fiercely passionate manner, flinging her arms around his neck and covering him with kisses; ‘Oh, Ronald, how can you ever ask me whether I really really love you! You know I love you! You know I love you! You’ve given me back life and everything that’s dear in it, and I never want to live for anything any longer except to love you, and wait upon you, and make you happy. I’m stronger than you, Ronald, and I shall be able to do a little to make you happy, I do believe. My ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts your thoughts, my darling; but I love you all the better for that, Ronald, I love you all the better for that; and if you were to kick me, beat me, trample on me now, Ronald, I should love you, love you, love you for ever still.’
So they two were quietly married, with no audience save Ernest and Edie, on that very Monday fortnight.
When Herbert Le Breton heard of it from his mother a few days later, he went home at once to his own eminently cultured home and told Mrs. Le Breton the news, of course without much detailed allusion to Selah’s earlier antecedents. ‘And do you know, Ethel,’ he added significantly, ‘I think it was an excellent thing that you decided not to call after all upon Ernest’s wife, for I’m sure it’ll be a great deal safer for you and me to have nothing to say in any way to the whole faction of them. A greengrocer’s daughter, you know—quite unpresentable. They’ll be all mixed up together in future, which’ll make it quite impossible to know the one without at the same time knowing the other. Now, it’d be just practicable for you to call upon Mrs. Ernest, I must admit, but to call upon Mrs. Ronald would be really and truly too inconceivable.’
At the end of the first year of the ‘Social Reformer,’ the annual balance was duly audited, and it showed a very considerable and solid surplus to go into the pocket of the enterprising Radical proprietor. Ernest and Herr Max scanned it closely together, and even Ernest could not refrain from a smile of pleasure when he saw how thoroughly successful the doubtful venture had finally turned out. ‘And yet,’ he said regretfully, as he looked at the heavy balance-sheet, ‘what a strange occupation after all for the author of “Gold and the Proletariate,” to be looking carefully over the sum-total of a capitalist’s final balance! To think, too, that all that money has come out of the hard-earned scraped-up pennies of the toiling poor! I often wish, Herr Max, that even so I had been brought up an honest shoemaker! But whether I’m really earning my salt at the hands of humanity now or not is a deep problem I often have many an uncomfortable internal sigh over to this day.’