The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton Part 24

"A little later on, by all means, my dear Edith," Mr. Bomford declared.

"A little later on, certainly. Your father has kindly invited me to stay and dine. It will give me very much pleasure. Perhaps we could go for a short distance in--say three-quarters of an hour's time?"

Edith went slowly back to the house. Burton watched her disappear. The professor and Mr. Bomford drew their chairs a little closer. The professor cleared his throat.

"Mr. Burton," he began, "Mr. Bomford and I have a proposition to lay before you. May I beg for your undivided attention?"

Burton withdrew his eyes from the French window through which Edith had vanished.

"I am quite at your service," he answered quietly. "Please let me hear exactly what it is that you have to say."

CHAPTER XVII

BURTON DECLINES

The professor cleared his throat.

"In the first place, Mr. Burton," he said, "I feel that I owe you an apology. I have taken a great liberty. Mr. Bomford here is one of my oldest and most intimate friends. I have spoken to him of the ma.n.u.script you brought me to translate. I have told him your story."

Mr. Bomford scratched his side whiskers and nodded patronizingly.

"It is a very remarkable story," he declared, "a very remarkable story indeed. I can a.s.sure you, Mr.--Mr. Burton, that I never listened to anything so amazing. If any one else except my old friend here had told me of it, I should have laughed. I should have dismissed the whole thing at once as incredible and preposterous. Even now, I must admit that I find it almost impossible to accept the story in its entirety."

Burton looked him coldly in the eyes. Mr. Bomford did not please him.

"The story is perfectly true," he said. "There is not the slightest necessity for you to believe it--in fact, so far as I am concerned, it does not matter in the least whether you do or not."

"Mr. Burton," the professor interposed, "I beg that you will not misunderstand Mr. Bomford. His is not a militant disbelief, it is simply a case of suspended judgment. In the meantime, a.s.suming the truth of what you have told us--and I for one, you must remember, Mr.

Burton, have every faith in your story--a.s.suming its truth, Mr. Bomford has made a most interesting proposition."

Burton, with half-closed eyes, was listening to the singing of a thrush and watching the suns.h.i.+ne creep through the dark foliage of the cedar trees. He was only slightly interested.

"A proposition?" he murmured.

"Precisely," Mr. Cowper a.s.sented. "We have an appeal to make to you, an appeal on behalf of science, an appeal on behalf of your fellow-creatures, an appeal on behalf of yourself. Your amazing experience is one which should be a.n.a.lyzed and given to the world."

"What you want, I suppose," Burton remarked, "is one of my beans."

"Exactly," the professor admitted, eagerly.

"I have already," Burton said, "done my best to make you understand my feelings in this matter. Those beans represent everything to me.

Nothing would induce me to part with a single one."

"We can understand that," the professor agreed. "We are approaching you with regard to them in an altogether different manner. Mr. Bomford is a man of business. It is our wish to make you an offer."

"You mean that you would like to buy one?"

"Precisely," the professor replied. "We are prepared to give you, between us, a thousand pounds for one of those beans."

Burton shook his head. The conversation appeared to be totally devoid of interest to him.

"A thousand pounds," he said, "is, I suppose, a great deal of money. I have never owned so much in my life. But money, after all, is only valuable for what it can buy. Each one of my beans means two months, perhaps more, of real life. No money could buy that."

"My young friend," the professor insisted solemnly, "you are looking at this matter from a selfish point of view. Experiences such as you have pa.s.sed through, belong to the world. You are merely the agent, the fortunate medium, through which they have materialized."

Burton shrugged his shoulders.

"So far," he replied, "I owe no debt to humanity. The longer I live and the wiser I get, the more I realize the absolute importance of self-care. Individualism is the only real and logical creed. No one else looks after your interests. No one else in the world save yourself is of any real account."

"A thousand pounds," Mr. Bomford interposed, "is a great deal of money for a young man in your position."

"It is a very great deal," Burton admitted. "But what you and Mr.

Cowper both seem to forget is the very small part that money plays in the acquisition of real happiness. Money will not buy the joy which makes life worth living, it will not buy the power to appreciate, the power to discriminate. It will not buy taste or the finer feelings, without the possession of which one becomes a dolt, a thing that creeps about the face of the world. I thank you for your offer, professor, and Mr. Bomford, but I have nothing to sell. If you would excuse me!"

He half rose from his chair but Mr. Cowper thrust him back again.

"We have not finished yet, my dear Mr. Burton," he said eagerly. "You are making up your mind too hastily."

"A thousand pounds," Mr. Bomford repeated, condescendingly, "is a very useful sum. Those peculiar gifts of yours may vanish. Take the advice of a business man. Remember that you will still have two or three beans left. It is only one we ask for. I want to put the matter on as broad a basis as possible. We make our appeal on behalf of the cause of science. You must not refuse us." Burton rose to his feet determinedly.

"Not only do I refuse," he said, "but it is not a matter which I am inclined to discuss any longer. I am sorry if you are disappointed, but my story was really told to Mr. Cowper here in confidence." He left them both sitting there. He found Edith in a corner of the long drawing-room. She was pretending to read.

"Whatever is the matter?" she asked. "I did not expect you so soon. I thought that Mr. Bomford and father wanted to talk to you." "So they did," he replied. "They made me a foolish offer. It was Mr. Bomford's idea, I am sure, not your father's. I am tired, Edith. Come and walk with me."--She glanced out of the window.

"I think," she said demurely, "that I am expected to go for a ride with Mr. Bomford."

"Then please disappoint him," he pleaded. "I do not like your friend Mr. Bomford. He is an egotistical and ignorant person. We will go across the moors, we will climb our little hill. Perhaps we might even wait there until the sunset."

"I am quite sure," she said decidedly, "that Mr. Bomford would not like that."

"What does it matter?" he answered. "A man like Mr. Bomford has no right to have any authority over you at all. You are of a different clay. I am sure that you will never marry him. If you will not walk with me, I shall work, and I am not in the humor for work. I shall probably spoil one of my best chapters."

She rose to her feet.

"In the interests of your novel!" she murmured. "Come! Only we had better go out by the back door."

Like children they stole out of the house. They climbed the rolling moorland till they reached the hill on the further side of the valley.

She sat down, breathless, with her back against the trunk of a small Scotch fir. Burton threw himself on to the ground by her side.

"We think too much always of consequences," he said "After this evening, what does anything matter? The gorse is a flaming yellow; do you see how it looks like a field of gold there in the distance? Only the haze separates it from the blue sky. Look down where I am pointing, Edith.

It was there by the side of the road that I first looked into the garden and saw you."

"It was not you who looked," she objected, shaking her head. "It was the other man."

"What part is it that survives?" he asked, a little bitterly. "Why should the new man be cursed with memory? Don't you think that even then there must have been two of me, one struggling against the other--one seeking for the big things, one laying hold of the lower? We are all like that, Edith! Even now I sometimes feel the tug, although it leads in other directions."

"To Garden Green?" she murmured.

"Never that," he answered fiercely, "and you know it. There are lower heights, though, in the most cultured of lives. There are moments of madness, moments that carry one off one's feet, which come alike to the slave and his master. Dear Edith, up here one can talk. It is such a beautiful world. One can open one's eyes, one can breathe, one can look around him. It is the joy of simple things, the real true joy of life which beats in our veins. Do you think that we were made for unhappiness in such a world, Edith?"