“I don’t seek payment ... fer what I done.” A 195 gasp caught her breath and silenced her for a little but she overcame it and finished almost inaudibly. “It was ... a free-will gift.”
John Spurrier rose and sat on the side of the bed. His voice was electrified by the thrill of his feeling; a feeling purged of all artificiality by the rough shoulder touch of death.
“I’m asking another gift, now, Glory; the greatest gift of all. I’m asking yourself. Don’t try to talk—only listen to me because I need you desperately. Except for you they would have killed me to-day—but my life’s not worth saving if I lose you after all. I’m two men, dearest, rolled into one—and one of those men perhaps doesn’t deserve much consideration, but there’s some good in the other and that good can’t prevail without you any more than a plant can grow without sun.”
With full realization, he was pitching his whole argument to the note of his own selfish needs and wishes, and yet he was guided by a sure insight into her heart. Brother Hawkins had said she had no wish to live and would make no fight, and he knew that he might plead endlessly and in vain unless he overcame her belief that he was actuated merely by pity for her. If she could be convinced that it was genuinely he who needed her more than she needed him, her woman quality of enveloping in supporting love the man who leaned on her, would bring consent.
“I sought to strengthen myself for success in life,” he went on, “by strangling out every human emotion that stood in the way of material results. I serve men who sneer at everything on God’s earth except the 196 practical, and I had come to the point where I let those men shape me and govern even my character.”
She had been listening with lowered lids and as he paused, she raised them and smiled wanly, yet without any sign of yielding to his supplications.
“The picture that you saw,” he swept on torrentially, “was that of a girl whose father employs me. He’s a leader in big affairs and to be his son-in-law meant, in a business sense, to be raised to royalty. Vivien is a splendid woman and yet I doubt if either of us has——” he fumbled a bit for his next words and then floundered on with self-conscious awkwardness, “has thought of the other with real sentiment. Until now, I haven’t known what real sentiment meant. Until now I haven’t appreciated the true values. I discovered them out there in the road when you came into my arms—and into my heart. From now on my arms will always ache for you—and my heart will be empty without you.’”
“But—,” Glory’s eyes were deeper than ever as she whispered laboriously, “but if you’re plighted to her——”
“I’m not,” he protested hotly. “There is no engagement except a sort of understanding with her father: a sort of condescending and tacit willingness on his part to let his successor be his son-in-law as well.”
She lay for a space with the heavy masses of her hair on the rough pillow framing the pale and exquisite oval of her face, and her vivid eyes troubled with the longing to be convinced. Then her lips shaped themselves in a rather pitiful smile that lifted them only at one corner.