Part 82 (1/2)
This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery--it could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous secrecies--that, to feel the game up and his interview over, he had no need to see the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in the dusk with a sportive, vexatious vagueness. Evidently Miriam's warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited her anxious mother at the garden door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced herself--had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and muddled calculations had drawn her from a feast as yet too imperfectly commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and rattling up to Saint John's Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had wished to be in time she had also desired not to be impertinent, and would have been still more embarra.s.sed to say what she aspired to promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and justifiably--the small hours having come--to see what her young charges were ”up to.” She would probably have gathered that they were quarrelling, and she appeared now to be motioning to Peter to know if it were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he only felt that before he made way for the poor, odious lady there was one small spark he might strike from Miriam's flint.
Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned again to his companion, half-expecting she would have taken her chance to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.
”Don't let us part so harshly,” she said--”with your trying to make me feel as if I were merely disobliging. It's no use talking--we only hurt each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our business. It isn't as if you hadn't any cure--when you've such a capital one. Try it, try it, my dear friend--you'll see! I wish you the highest promotion and the quickest--every success and every reward. When you've got them all, some day, and I've become a great swell too, we'll meet on that solid basis and you'll be glad I've been dreadful now.”
”Surely before I leave you I've a right to ask you this,” he answered, holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell she had chosen finally to torment him with. ”Are you ready to follow up by a definite promise your implied a.s.surance that I've a remedy?”
”A definite promise?” Miriam benignly gazed--it was the perfection of indirectness. ”I don't 'imply' that you've a remedy. I declare it on the house-tops. That delightful girl--”
”I'm not talking of any delightful girl but you!” he broke in with a voice that, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Rooth's ears in the garden with affright. ”I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said ten minutes ago.”
”Ah I've said so many things! One has to do that to get rid of you. You rather hurt my hand,” she added--and jerked it away in a manner showing that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself.
”As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my profession?” Peter pursued. ”If I break with everything, my prospects, my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie--if after further reflexion I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your precious hand?”
”I don't think you've any right to put the question to me now,” she returned with a prompt.i.tude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut form his solemn speech had given--there was a charm in the sound of it--to each item of his enumeration. ”The case is so very contingent, so dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflexion. While you really reserve everything you ask me to commit myself. If it's a question of further reflexion why did you drag me up here? And then,”
she added, ”I'm so far from wis.h.i.+ng you to take any such monstrous step.”
”Monstrous you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime.”
”Sublime if it's done with spontaneity, with pa.s.sion; ridiculous if it's done 'after further reflexion.' As you said, perfectly, a while ago, it isn't a thing to reason about.”
”Ah what a help you'd be to me in diplomacy!” Peter yearningly cried.
”Will you give me a year to consider?”
”Would you trust _me_ for a year?”
”Why not, if I'm ready to trust you for life?”
”Oh I shouldn't be free then, worse luck. And how much you seem to take for granted one must like you!”
”Remember,” he could immediately say, ”that you've made a great point of your liking me. Wouldn't you do so still more if I were heroic?”
She showed him, for all her high impatience now, the interest of a long look. ”I think I should pity you in such a cause. Give it all to _her_; don't throw away a real happiness!”
”Ah you can't back out of your position with a few vague and even rather impertinent words!” Peter protested. ”You accuse me of swallowing my opinions, but you swallow your pledges. You've painted in heavenly colours the sacrifice I'm talking of, and now you must take the consequences.”
”The consequences?”
”Why my coming back in a year to square you.”
”Ah you're a bore!”--she let him have it at last. ”Come back when you like. I don't wonder you've grown desperate, but fancy _me_ then!” she added as she looked past him at a new interlocutor.
”Yes, but if he'll square you!” Peter heard Mrs. Rooth's voice respond all persuasively behind him. She had stolen up to the window now, had pa.s.sed the threshold, was in the room, but her daughter had not been startled. ”What is it he wants to do, dear?” she continued to Miriam.
”To induce me to marry him if he'll go upon the stage. He'll practise over there--where he's going--and then come back and appear. Isn't it too dreadful? Talk him out of it, stay with him, soothe him!” the girl hurried on. ”You'll find some drinks and some biscuits in the cupboard--keep him with you, pacify him, give him _his_ little supper.