“You are a dear boy,” she murmured.
She did not interrupt him with the hundred questions that thronged into her mind. He was giving his own twist to the facts of their earlier relationship and his own escape from her mother’s net; but she correctly surmised that he was deceiving himself and she was in a mood to aid and abet deception. She had drunk her tea and rested her arms on the table, urging him on with her eyes. The flame had warmed her cheeks to a bright colour and was finding and brightening the bronze in her hair.
“You deserve the best; you have a right to happiness,” he went on. “I mean to stand between you and unhappiness.”
“You are very good to me, Wayne!”
He placed his hand lightly on hers that lay near—and removed it instantly, afraid to risk too much. “That first afternoon, when I went home just to see you, it was because my old feeling for you had risen in me strong at the sight of you again. When you begged me to let you alone that day, I obeyed you. You had come with fine ideals of your duty and an ambition to fill your place in my father’s house worthily. You wanted to live up to his own dignity. I saw all that.”
She nodded her head once or twice at the soothing combination of praise and sympathy. She waited for what further he had to say with confidence that it would be agreeable to hear. It was apparent that he had deliberately made this opportunity; he had planned their ride with this bright, glowing hearth as its goal; and she experienced the pleasurable sense of being a figure in a little drama, herself its chief character, with a setting of the stage at once adequate and satisfying.
He had always been plausible with women and he was playing the situation for what it was worth. He could almost believe in his own sincerity. He was conscious that he was managing the affair well; he even enjoyed his own speeches which he uttered so glibly that he wondered at his fluency.
“The appeal you made to me that first afternoon did you credit; it was like you. A man of iron could not have failed to be touched by what you said to me. I knew as no one else in town ever could know what you were trying to escape, and how you had set up my father as a splendid big god to worship. He was to be your strength and your refuge, and you were horror-struck at the thought of our going back to our old basis. I wanted to make love to you and you would not have it. I felt the scorn you heaped on me—it burned me like hot coals, but I waited; I waited because I knew the time would come when you would want and need me. I knew how it would be because I, too, had knelt before the same glittering god. I’m going to be honest about all this: at first I thought it was your mother who had cheated him, and I was glad of it; then I saw that it was the other way around—that you had been deceived and cheated, and that you would have to pay for it. When I saw that that was the way of it, and that you were trusting him to end your long campaign against the world, my sympathy went out to you, and all my old feeling for you came back. You were never so precious to me as you are to-day—no one ever meant to me what you mean. You are dear to me, dearer and more precious than any words can tell you, Addie.”
He had spoken rapidly, in a low vibrant voice. She made no reply, but turned her head slightly away; but when he again touched her hand she suffered him to hold it; it slipped into his palm and rested there at the table’s edge.
“I understood that whole matter of your changed decision about going to Boston. It was so perfectly plain that it was funny. Father didn’t want you to go to the Brodericks. To put it plainly, he’s the rankest kind of snob. He was a little bit afraid you weren’t quite up to their level. He had been crazy for years to be invited there, and the chance was not to be missed. He would have thrown over my own mother in the same fashion if he had played at being a great reformer in her day. I remember, when I was a child, that Fanny and I used to play with two dolls we called king and queen, and we sat them up on a throne and worshipped them; but the king sprang a leak one day and the sawdust came out and that was the end of the king business for me. I was about fifteen when I began to find out that father was stuffed with sawdust. It came about from his title of Colonel. A lot of us boys were bragging one day about what our fathers had done in the Civil War and I had silenced the other youngsters by announcing that my father was so brave that he had been made a colonel, and one of the others came back at me the next day with news he had got at home that my father had never been in the war at all—and it was true! And all this philanthropic work and these meetings he addresses so beautifully—it all comes of the cheapest kind of vanity. It isn’t the thing itself he’s interested in; it’s his own name in the newspapers, the glory of his after-dinner speeches at the Waldorf, and quiet committee meetings at Old Point Comfort about the time the shad are beginning to run, and when it’s nice and comfortable to meet the spring down there, and issue open letters to presidents and governors about any old thing, just so it’s far enough away from home. When they come round and ask father to go in for reform in Pittsburg he can’t hear them talking; he sympathizes with the work, and is annoyed when the muck-raker writes us up, but press of other affairs prevents him, and so forth. The fact is that he’s a coward when it comes to getting out on the firing line to be shot at. He wants the Indians in Wyoming to be protected and the Negro to be educated, but he’s afraid to go up against the gang at home. With cowardice and vanity as the chief elements of his character—bah! you see it all—you don’t need to go into the case any deeper. You thought you were solving all your problems by marrying a fine, chivalrous gentleman, respected and admired by all the world, but you have already got a taste of his real character. He’s begun to leak sawdust. He likes you because you are pretty and gentle and biddable, but chiefly because you listen so charmingly when he talks!”