“This,” he said, “is the first time I have caught you. Let it be the last.”
Was this the little man she had so long despised, and so superciliously served? His very smallness gave him an air of concentrated force. She remembered having read that all the greatest men in history had been of less than the middle height. And—oh, her heart leapt—here was the one man who had scorned to die for Miss Dobson. He alone had held out against the folly of his fellows. Sole and splendid survivor he stood, rock-footed, before her. And impulsively she abased herself, kneeling at his feet as at the great double altar of some dark new faith.
“You are great, sir, you are wonderful,” she said, gazing up to him, rapt. It was the first time she had ever called him “sir.”
It is easier, as Michelet suggested, for a woman to change her opinion of a man than for him to change his opinion of himself. Noaks, despite the presence of mind he had shown a few moments ago, still saw himself as he had seen himself during the past hours: that is, as an arrant little coward—one who by his fear to die had put himself outside the pale of decent manhood. He had meant to escape from the house at dead of night and, under an assumed name, work his passage out to Australia—a land which had always made strong appeal to his imagination. No one, he had reflected, would suppose because his body was not retrieved from the water that he had not perished with the rest. And he had looked to Australia to make a man of him yet: in Encounter Bay, perhaps, or in the Gulf of Carpentaria, he might yet end nobly.
Thus Katie’s behaviour was as much an embarrassment as a relief; and he asked her in what way he was great and wonderful.
“Modest, like all heroes!” she cried, and, still kneeling, proceeded to sing his praises with a so infectious fervour that Noaks did begin to feel he had done a fine thing in not dying. After all, was it not moral cowardice as much as love that had tempted him to die? He had wrestled with it, thrown it. “Yes,” said he, when her rhapsody was over, “perhaps I am modest.”
“And that is why you hid yourself just now?”
“Yes,” he gladly said. “I hid myself for the same reason,” he added, “when I heard your mother’s footstep.”
“But,” she faltered, with a sudden doubt, “that bit of writing which Mother found on the table—”
“That? Oh, that was only a general reflection, copied out of a book.”
“Oh, won’t poor Mother be glad when she knows!”
“I don’t want her to know,” said Noaks, with a return of nervousness. “You mustn’t tell anyone. I—the fact is—”
“Ah, that is so like you!” the girl said tenderly. “I suppose it was your modesty that all this while blinded me. Please, sir, I have a confession to make to you. Never till tonight have I loved you.”
Exquisite was the shock of these words to one who, not without reason, had always assumed that no woman would ever love him. Before he knew what he was doing, he had bent down and kissed the sweet upturned face. It was the first kiss he had ever given outside his family circle. It was an artless and a resounding kiss.
He started back, dazed. What manner of man, he wondered, was he? A coward, piling profligacy on poltroonery? Or a hero, claiming exemption from moral law? What was done could not be undone; but it could be righted. He drew off from the little finger of his left hand that iron ring which, after a twinge of rheumatism, he had today resumed.
“Wear it,” he said.
“You mean—?” She leapt to her feet.
“That we are engaged. I hope you don’t think we have any choice?”
She clapped her hands, like the child she was, and adjusted the ring.
“It is very pretty,” she said.
“It is very simple,” he answered lightly. “But,” he added, with a change of tone, “it is very durable. And that is the important thing. For I shall not be in a position to marry before I am forty.”
A shadow of disappointment hovered over Katie’s clear young brow, but was instantly chased away by the thought that to be engaged was almost as splendid as to be married.
“Recently,” said her lover, “I meditated leaving Oxford for Australia. But now that you have come into my life, I am compelled to drop that notion, and to carve out the career I had first set for myself. A year hence, if I get a Second in Greats—and I shall,” he said, with a fierce look that entranced her—“I shall have a very good chance of an assistant-mastership in a good private school. In eighteen years, if I am careful—and, with you waiting for me, I shall be careful—my savings will enable me to start a small school of my own, and to take a wife. Even then it would be more prudent to wait another five years, no doubt. But there was always a streak of madness in the Noakses. I say ‘Prudence to the winds!’ ”
“Ah, don’t say that!” exclaimed Katie, laying a hand on his sleeve.
“You are right. Never hesitate to curb me. And,” he said, touching the ring, “an idea has just occurred to me. When the time comes, let this be the wedding-ring. Gold is gaudy—not at all the thing for a schoolmaster’s bride. It is a pity,” he muttered, examining her through his spectacles, “that your hair is so golden. A schoolmaster’s bride should—Good heavens! Those earrings! Where did you get them?”
“They were given to me today,” Katie faltered. “The Duke gave me them.”
“Indeed?”
“Please, sir, he gave me them as a memento.”
“And
