“If you like,” he answered, saying to himself that if she knew what was in his mind and intended to deny him, then the cruelty of her present tormenting winsomeness was beyond belief. No. She could not be so base—she must know what he was about to say to her. But failure had grown into the very marrow of his bones, so it was with unspeakably hopeless hope that he went on. “If you like. Well, Dorothy, it will be no news to you—this that I am now to tell you—I love you. I am sure you must have known this for a long time. You have also known, I trust, why I have remained silent. I had the best possible of all reasons for not speaking—I was a beggar without a penny, without a lucrative calling and without prospects.”
“Oh, Dick, Dick,” Mrs. March broke in, taking his hand in both of hers; “are you going to spoil our dear old partnership in this way? I’m so sorry! Be a dear, good boy, tell me of your new play. Have you finished it yet? I’m sure it will prove a tremendous success.”
“No,” he returned rather sharply, “no; you must hear me, Dorothy. No man can associate with you long without growing to think of you as a woman altogether different from others. You are the cleverest woman in London. You fascinate because you puzzle and mystify men. Even women cannot resist you. They are attracted to you much as the men are—because they do not comprehend you, because they find you different. But, Dorothy, my love for you draws its inspiration from a source wholly unguessed by your other friends. I love you because you are the one woman in my world who sees the pathos and the meaning of life—my life and any life that fails and drowns and dies in the rush and the madness of existence. I have discovered the real you—the you behind the clever, fashionable, worldly Mrs. March—and I claim you by right of discovery.”
“Why, Dick, what nonsense!” she cried, with a not very successful effort to smile down the tears that his searching look and his throbbing words had brought to those great hazel eyes of hers. “What nonsense! I am only an ambitious woman of the world, happy in the possession of social influence. I am hard and cold and calculating—and anyhow, really, dear, dear boy, you must not think of this any more. I mean it.”
“To some you may seem worldly,” he went on, ignoring her protest; “but I know you. And I was forgetting to justify myself by telling you that I now have the right to speak. I am no longer penniless, Dorothy. I am now in a position to ask you to share my life on the plane to which you are accustomed. Will you listen?”
“I must not—I cannot—don’t be cruel, Dick,” she answered. “And aren’t you a bit hard on me when you imply that I would listen to you now, but that I would not have done so when you were poor? Am I so mercenary?”
“No,” he said warmly; “but I should have despised myself had I spoken when I had not the means to support you. Dorothy, my love for you began the night you had that poor Bohemian boy play the violin at your little party. The idiots who crowded your rooms gambled all the time the marvelous lad was playing; but I saw you whisper to him when he finished one sublime number, and noted how his thin, white face lighted up with gratitude and hope at whatever it was you said to him. Well, you know he died of consumption in my chambers a few months afterward. Among his papers I found the letter you wrote him inclosing ten pounds. That letter revealed you to me. It was glorious! It was you! From that time I have loved you with a love passing the love of women. Poverty, which until that time had seemed rather a welcome refuge and protection to me, now became a hell, for it alone barred me from the hope of speaking to you. But today I am a comparatively rich man. Dorothy, be my wife.”
“Oh, Dick, Dick, this is awful—don’t!” she cried, shrinking from him. “Pray, pray, stop—really you must not go on!”
But Travers had waited too long and too yearningly for this hour to be lightly deterred from stating his whole case. So he proceeded eagerly: “You heard last night of Fair’s phenomenal success? Well, he told me after you had gone that it had also made me rich. Some time ago he bought my poor father’s library from me—more to assist me than from any need of those particular books—and I left the money with him for investment. He now tells me that he bought Empire Mines shares with it and that my profits amount to fifty thousand pounds sterling. Of course I thought that this was merely a bit of his wonderful generosity and altogether an afterthought—the result of that erratic and impulsive unselfishness which puzzles all who know him—but he assures me that he can prove from his broker’s books that he bought stock for my account at the time that he purchased his own, before it was at all certain that it would turn out such a staggering success. At all events, there the money is to my credit at Burton’s bank.”
“Oh, I am so glad, dear fellow!” cried Mrs. March. “What a king he is!”