“I shall assuredly not marry you,” observed Miss Hamlyn, “until you have at least asked me to do so. And besides, how dared she throw you over—!”
“But I don’t intend to ask you, for I have not a single bribe to offer. I merely intend to marry you. I am a ne’er-do-well, a debauchee, a tippler, a compendium of all the vices you care to mention. I am not a bit in love with you, and as any woman will forewarn you, I am sure to make you a vile husband. Your solitary chance is to bully me into temperance and propriety and common sense, with precisely seven million probabilities against you, because I am a seasoned and accomplished liar. Can you do that bullying, Bettie—and keep it up, I mean?”
And she was silent for a while. “Robin,” she said, at last, “you’ll never understand why women like you. You will always think it is because they admire you for some quality or another. It is really because they pity you. You are such a baby, riding for a fall—No, I don’t mean the boyishness you trade upon. I have known for a long while all that was just put on. And, oh, how hard you’ve tried to be a boy of late!”
“And I thought I had fooled you, Bettie! Well, I never could. I am sorry, though, if I have been annoyingly clumsy—”
“But you were doing it for me,” she said. “You were doing it because you thought I’d like it. Oh, can’t you understand that I know you are worthless, and that you have never loved any human being in all your life except that flibbertigibbet Stella Blagden, and that I know, too, you have so rarely failed me! If you were an admirable person, or a person with commendable instincts, or an unselfish person, or if you were even in love with me, it wouldn’t count of course. It is because you are none of these things that it counts for so much to see you honest with me—sometimes—and even to see you scheming and playacting—and so transparently!—just to bring about a little pleasure for me. Oh, Robin, I am afraid that nowadays I love you because of your vices!”
“And I you because of your virtues,” said I; “so that there is no possible apprehension of either affection ever going into bankruptcy. Therefore the affair is settled; and we will be married in November.”
“Well,” Bettie said, “I suppose that somebody has to break you of this habit of getting married next November—”
Then, and only then, my hands were lifted from her shoulders. And we began to talk composedly of more impersonal matters.
V
It was two days later that John Charteris came to Fairhaven; and I met him the same afternoon upon Cambridge street. The little man stopped short and in full view of the public achieved what, had he been a child, were most properly describable as making a face at me.
“That,” he explained, “expresses the involuntary confusion of Belial on re-encountering the anchorite who escaped his diabolical machinations. But, oh, dear me! haven’t you been translated yet? Why, I thought the carriage would have called long ago, just as it did for Elijah.”
“Now, don’t be an ass, John. I was rather idiotic, I suppose—”
“Of course you were,” he said, as we shook hands. “It is your unfailing charm. You silly boy, I came from the pleasantest sort of house-party at Matocton because I heard you were here, and I have been foolish enough to miss you. Anne and the others don’t arrive until October. Oh, you adorable child, I have read the last book, and every one of the short stories as well, and I want to tell you that in their own peculiar line the two volumes are masterpieces. Anne wept and chuckled over them, and so did I, with an equal lack of restraint; only it was over the noble and self-sacrificing portions that Anne wept, and she laughed at the places where you were droll intentionally. Whereas I—!! Well, we will let the aposiopesis stand.”
“Of course,” I sulkily observed, “if you have simply come to Fairhaven to make fun of me, I can only pity your limitations.”
He spoke in quite another voice. “You silly boy, it was not at all for that. I think you must know I have read what you have published thus far with something more than interest; but I wanted to tell you this in so many words. Afield is not perhaps an impeccable masterwork, if one may be thus brutally frank; but the woman—modeled after discretion will not inquire whom—is distinctly good. And what, with you only twenty-five, does Afield not promise! Child, you have found your métier. Now I shall look forward to the accomplishment of what I have always felt sure that you could do. I am very, very glad. More so than I can say. And I had thought you must know this without my saying it.”
The man was sincere. And I was very much pleased, and remembered what invaluable help he could give me on my unfinished book, and what fun it would be to go over the manuscript with him. And, in fine, we became again, upon the spot as it were, the very best of friends.
VI
It was excellent to have Charteris to talk against. The little man had many tales to tell me of those dissolute gay people we had known and frolicked with; indeed, I think that he was trying to allure me back to the old circles, for he preoccupied his life by scheming to bring about by underhand methods some perfectly unimportant consummation, which very often a plain word would have secured at once. But now he swore he was not “making tea.”
That had always been a byword between us, by the way, since I applied to him the phrase first used of Alexander Pope—“that he could
