“None of my family has ever taken charity of any man!”
“Charity?” He did not dare to look at her, but he knew just how high she was holding her head and just how her eyes were flashing. “It wasn’t that. Believe me—please believe me when I say it wasn’t that. It never struck me in that way.” He was on the point of telling her how he had caught Chitta red-handed in a theft, and how this had led to his enlightenment; but he realized in time that such an explanation would only deepen the wound that he had inflicted on the Lady’s pride. “I merely thought,” he concluded, “that it was one comrade—one neighbor—helping another.”
“How much have you given that wretched woman?”
“I haven’t the least idea.”
“You must know!” She stamped her foot. “Or are you, after all, one of those rich Americans that do not have to count their money, and that are proud of insulting the people of older and poorer countries by flinging it at them?”
It was a bitter thing to say. He received it with head still bent, and his answer was scarcely a whisper:
“I am not quite rich.”
“Then count. Recollect yourself, sir, and count. Tell me, and you shall be repaid. Within three days you shall be repaid.”
It never occurred to him further to humiliate her by seeking sympathy through a reference to his own poverty. He looked up. In her clenched hands and parted lips, in her hot eyes and face, he saw the tokens of the blow that he had dealt her. He came toward her with outstretched hands, petitioning.
“Can’t you guess why I did this?” he asked her. His amazement, even his sorrow, left him. In their place was only the sublimation of a worthy tenderness, the masterfulness of a firm resolve. His face was tense. “Listen,” he said: “I don’t want you to answer me; I wouldn’t say this if I were going to allow you to make any reply. I don’t want pity; I don’t deserve it. Anything else I wouldn’t ask, because I don’t deserve anything else, either, and don’t hope for it. I just want to make my action clear to you. Perhaps I should have done for any neighbor what I did for—what little I have been doing; I trust so; I don’t know. But the reason I did it in this case was a reason that I’ve never had in all my life before. Remember, I’m hopeless and I shan’t let you reply to me: I did this because”—his unswerving glance was on hers now—“because I love you.”