‘Wouldn’t it be better if you found a way of letting Mr Jedwood know the truth?’
‘Perhaps you are right.’
Jasper was very grateful for the suggestion. In that moment he had reflected how rash it would be to write to Alfred Yule on such a subject, with whatever prudence in expressing himself. Such a letter, coming under the notice of the great Fadge, might do its writer serious harm.
‘Yes, you are right,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll stop that rumour at its source. I can’t guess how it started; for aught I know, some enemy hath done this, though I don’t quite discern the motive. Thank you very much for telling me, and still more for refusing to believe that I could treat Mr Yule in that way, even as a matter of business. When I said that I was despicable, I didn’t mean that I could sink quite to such a point as that. If only because it was your father—’
He checked himself and they walked on for several yards without speaking.
‘In that case,’ Jasper resumed at length, ‘your father doesn’t think of me in a very friendly way?’
‘He scarcely could—’
‘No, no. And I quite understand that the mere fact of my working for Fadge would prejudice him against me. But that’s no reason, I hope, why you and I shouldn’t be friends?’
‘I hope not.’
‘I don’t know that my friendship is worth much,’ Jasper continued, talking into the upper air, a habit of his when he discussed his own character. ‘I shall go on as I have begun, and fight for some of the good things of life. But your friendship is valuable. If I am sure of it, I shall be at all events within sight of the better ideals.’
Marian walked on with her eyes upon the ground. To her surprise she discovered presently that they had all but reached St Paul’s Crescent.
‘Thank you for having come so far,’ she said, pausing.
‘Ah, you are nearly home. Why, it seems only a few minutes since we left the girls. Now I’ll run back to the whisky of which Maud disapproves.’
‘May it do you good!’ said Marian with a laugh.
A speech of this kind seemed unusual upon her lips. Jasper smiled as he held her hand and regarded her.
‘Then you can speak in a joking way?’
‘Do I seem so very dull?’
‘Dull, by no means. But sage and sober and reticent—and exactly what I like in my friend, because it contrasts with my own habits. All the better that merriment lies below it. Goodnight, Miss Yule.’
He strode off and in a minute or two turned his head to look at the slight figure passing into darkness.
Marian’s hand trembled as she tried to insert her latch-key. When she had closed the door very quietly behind her she went to the sitting-room; Mrs Yule was just laying aside the sewing on which she had occupied herself throughout the lonely evening.
‘I’m rather late,’ said the girl, in a voice of subdued joyousness.
‘Yes; I was getting a little uneasy, dear.’
‘Oh, there’s no danger.’
‘You have been enjoying yourself, I can see.’
‘I have had a pleasant evening.’
In the retrospect it seemed the pleasantest she had yet spent with her friends, though she had set out in such a different mood. Her mind was relieved of two anxieties; she felt sure that the girls had not taken ill what she told them, and there was no longer the least doubt concerning the authorship of that review in The Current.
She could confess to herself now that the assurance from Jasper’s lips was not superfluous. He might have weighed profit against other considerations, and have written in that way of her father; she had not felt that absolute confidence which defies every argument from human frailty. And now she asked herself if faith of that unassailable kind is ever possible; is it not only the poet’s dream, the far ideal?
Marian often went thus far in her speculation. Her candour was allied with clear insight into the possibilities of falsehood; she was not readily the victim of illusion; thinking much, and speaking little, she had not come to her twenty-third year without perceiving what a distance lay between a girl’s dream of life as it might be and life as it is. Had she invariably disclosed her thoughts, she would have earned the repute of a very sceptical and slightly cynical person.
But with what rapturous tumult of the heart she could abandon herself to a belief in human virtues when their suggestion seemed to promise her a future of happiness!
Alone in her room she sat down only to think of Jasper Milvain, and extract from the memory of his words, his looks, new sustenance for her hungry heart. Jasper was the first man who had ever evinced a man’s interest in her. Until she met him she had not known a look of compliment or a word addressed to her emotions. He was as far as possible from representing the lover of her imagination, but from the day of that long talk in the fields near Wattleborough the thought of him had supplanted dreams. On that day she said to herself: I could love him if he cared to seek my love. Premature, perhaps; why, yes, but one who is starving is not wont to feel reluctance at the suggestion of food. The first man who had approached her with display of feeling and energy and youthful self- confidence; handsome too, it seemed to her. Her womanhood went eagerly to meet him.
Since then she had made careful study of his faults. Each conversation had revealed to her new weakness and follies. With the result that her love had grown to a reality.
He was so human, and a youth of all but monastic seclusion had prepared her to love the man who aimed with frank energy at the joys of life. A taint of pedantry would have repelled her. She did not ask for high intellect or great attainments; but vivacity, courage, determination to succeed, were delightful to her senses. Her ideal would not have been a literary man at all; certainly not a man likely to be prominent in journalism; rather a man of action,
