William nodded and Rupert looked at him with a puzzled face. “Damn it, it’s true,” he said wonderingly. “May I sign that letter, Uncle William?”
CHAPTER XI—STAITHLEY EDGE
RUPERT in the office had been all that Mary had dared to hope, and that was the danger of it. She watched him almost distrusting her eyes as she might have watched a sudden conversion at a Salvation Army meeting, as a spectacle that was too fantastic to be accepted at face value. She had an idea that somebody suffered when the penitent reacted from the emotion of the bench.
“Always a catch in everything,” she had thought when she avowed her origin to Rupert, though she feared to lose him by the confession, and now she was adventuring again in skepticism, she was hunting the catch, the flaw latent in human happiness. She had won a victory and she expected to pay the price.
William invited them to the Hall and Rupert deferred to her with conventional politeness which seemed to her bleak menace. He froze her by his courtesy after he had so pointedly ignored her presence except for the pained surprise with which he had welcomed her, but she tried to believe that she was hypersensitive.
She had butted in, into an affair of men, and even if he recognized that she had done the one thing possible, she could hardly expect him to applaud her meddling. Men were not grateful to meddling women. Heaven knew she did not want him to eat the leek for her; and often there were understandings which were better left unspoken. If that was it, if they were tacitly to agree that her trespass was extreme but justified, then she could do very well without more words. She could exult in his silent approbation; but silent resentment would be terrible.
It would be terrible but bearable: she was thinking too much of herself and too little of him. She loved, and what mattered in love was not what one got out of it but what one put into it. By a treachery, if he liked to take that view of her interference, she had put more into her love than she had ever put before, she had taken a greater risk and he was signally the gainer by it. He was going to Hepplestall’s, he was a greater Rupert now.
She couldn’t have it both ways and what had been wrong in London was that he had loved her too much, in the sense that he had spent his life upon her and on things which came into his life only through his relationship with her. To be beautiful, love must have proportion and his had grown unshapely. If all her loss were to be loss of superfluity, her price of victory would be low indeed. He would not in Staithley be the great lover he had been in London, but there was double edge to that phrase “great lover”: the great lovers were too often the little men. Certainly and healthily he would love her less uxoriously now, and that must be all to the good.