Part 48 (2/2)
”You needn't tell me there's somebody else. I don't believe it. Though you feel only fondness for me, I know that you are not in love with anybody else. When one is in love, there is no room in life for such warm and dear friends.h.i.+p as you have frankly shown me. It's that, after all, which has given me courage.”
”No, no; there's n.o.body else.”
”Well, then, why can't you? Why won't you?”
”I--” She hesitated, as if to think. There was a silence. Then she asked slowly, like one who finds some difficulty in laying her tongue on the right words: ”Do you remember all those things you said that evening in the garden, the night you came in to meet Tom for the first time? How you wouldn't for anything in the whole world let yourself get tangled up again with caring for a person?”
”Perfectly. I could only picture it as meaning more of trouble and unrest. But things change, dear. We change. There has taken place in me since that, no matter for what reason, an increase of self-confidence and confidence in fate such as turns men into nuisances or makes them successful. In the last twenty-four hours particularly. Now, as I look at the inconvenience of getting tangled up again with caring for a person, I find I don't mean at all to suffer. I mean to bother you until you say yes, and then to be happy. You could never wilfully torment me, I know; you are incapable of it. Then, when you have graciously consented to marry me, I feel as if I might build up my life on new lines.”
”I can't, Geraldino; I can't.”
”You can't. So you have said. And I have asked you to tell me your reasons, that I may combat them one by one.”
”It's no use. We're too different.”
”That we are different, thank G.o.d! is a reason for and not against.”
”No, no; not when it's such a huge difference. We're like--a bird and a fish.”
”Don't call me a fish. I object.”
”We don't think the same about hardly anything.”
”But we feel alike on everything of importance.”
”There's hardly a thing I do that's quite right as you see it. No, don't take the trouble to contradict me; let me do the talking for a minute.
You're so critical and so conventional and so correct! No matter how much you say you aren't, you _are_. And while we're like this I don't have to care. I rather enjoy shocking you. And while I'm none of your business, you don't have to care what I do or what I'm like. We can have our fun and be awfully fond of each other, and it's all serene and right. But if I were Mrs. Gerald Fane, all my faults and shortcomings, my not knowing the things that everybody in your society knows, my not having any elegant accomplishments, would show up so glaring that I should know you must be mortified. You couldn't help it.”
”Stop, dear! You enrage me. You put me beside myself. You are so superficial. And dense. And you hold me up to myself in the features of a beastly cad! I won't have it. For one thing, let me tell you that if I were the Lord Ronald Macdonald of that song we've heard Miss Felixson sing, and you were that canny la.s.s Leezie Lindsay, I should know jolly well that after I'd carried you off to the Hielands my bride and my darling to be, it would be a very short time before Lady Ronald Macdonald had all the airs and tricks of speech of my sisters and cousins. That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace sitting among the wheat-sheaves, what would it matter that she had not been educated at a fas.h.i.+onable boarding-school? Let her just breathe and be,--beautiful, benign, and any man not utterly a fool will prefer to lie at her knees, keeping still while her silence appeases and reconciles him, to hearing the most brilliant conversation of a lady novelist.”
”You can talk beautifully, Gerald, that's one sure thing; but talk me over you can't. Seems to me I should have to be crazy to forget all in a moment what I've said over and over to myself, and drilled myself not to lose sight of. After you asked me the other day, though I knew it was just on the spur of the moment, I thought it all out in the night as much as if it had been serious, and I saw what would be the one safe course for little me. I mustn't; that's all there is to it. Everything is wrong for it to turn out happy in the end. I'm terribly fond of you, but I should be scared to death of you, simply scared to death, as a husband. We're not the same kind. If I could forget it on my own account, I have only to remember how it would strike Estelle. And Estelle's got no end of horse sense. It's according to horse sense we must act when it comes to settling the real things of life. I expect”--she had the effect of turning a page or a corner; she dropped from heights of argument to low plains--”I expect I shall be big as a mountain by and by. I don't see any help for it. I starve myself, I drink hot water, I take exercise,--nearly walk my legs off,--and the next time I get weighed I've gained three pounds! What's the use? Then, I'm older than you.”
”Not at all. I'm older than the everlasting hills; you are the youngest thing that lives.”
”That's all right, but you were twenty-eight your last birthday, and I'm thirty. I'm afraid my character's already pretty well fixed in its present form. When it comes over me, for instance, to play the clown, I've got to do it or burst. And you're naturally a tyrant, you know.”
”I am. I am critical, carping, conventional, and a tyrant, everything you say, but just because I am those things, you ought to be able to see, dear Aurora--because I am those things and know it, they are the things least to be feared in me. Do you suppose Marcus Aurelius was really calm and philosophical? Because he, on the contrary, was anxious and pa.s.sionate, he wrote those maxims to try to live by. When you _would_ go and be a negress, did I make a scene? I gnashed my teeth and gnawed my knuckles, but when I saw you afterward, wasn't I decently decent?”
”Yes, but you took to your bed. If I were Mrs. Gerald, and the Pope of Rome sent for me to do Lew Dockstader for him and his cardinals, you know you wouldn't let me go.”
”You are wrong. I should make a point of it. I should only ask to be permitted to retire into solitude until all the vulgar people had stopped talking about it.”
”Ah, you're a dear, funny boy; but put it out of your mind, Geraldino, do, dear, when we're so happy as it is. Let's go on just as we've been going; you know yourself that it's the wisest, and what really you would prefer. If you've asked me to-day--mind, I don't say you _have_; but if you have--to save my vanity and back up the proposal you didn't really mean the other day,--because you're always such a gentleman; you'd rather die than not behave like a gentleman,--let it go at that.
But if you should feel now that you've got to back up your declaration that you're going to persist and follow this up, just ask me over again every few days to show there's no unkind feeling, and I promise it will be safe; I'll refuse you every time. It'll be our little standing joke.
For don't you go dreaming that I'm going to let go of you! You can call me pudgy if I let you get away. I love you too dearly. Wasn't everything all right and lovely until the other day when you came out with that stilted speech, 'doing you the honor'? We'll take up again just where we left off, and bimeby make fun of all this. You who've read all the books ever written, don't you know of cases where two like us went on being just friends, and taking comfort in each other on and on to the end of the tale?”
”There have been examples, yes, a very few, and not on the whole encouraging.”
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