The Emancipated Part 31

"It's very unlikely that I should think of touching on the matter to your sister. I shall make no promise."

"Have you seen Cecily herself?" Elgar asked, leaving the point aside in his eagerness to come to what concerned him more deeply.

"No."

"I have waited for your permission to visit her. Do you mean to refuse it?"

"No. If you call to-morrow morning, you will be admitted. Mrs.

Lessingham is willing that you should see her niece in private."

"Hearty thanks for that, Mallard! We haven't shaken hands yet, you remember. Forgive me for treating you so ill."

He held out his band cordially, and Mallard could not refuse it, though he would rather have thrust his fingers among red coals than feel that hot pressure.

"I believe I can be grateful," pursued Elgar, in a voice that quivered with transport. "I will do my best to prove it."

"Let us speak of things more to the point. What result do you foresee of this meeting to-morrow!"

The other hesitated.

"I shall ask Cecily when she will marry me."

"You may do so, of course, but the answer cannot depend upon herself alone."

"What delay do you think necessary?"

"Until she is of age, and her own mistress," replied Mallard, with quiet decision.

"Impossible! What need is there to wait all that time?"

"Why, there is this need, Elgar," returned the other, more vigorously than he had yet spoken. "There is need that you should prove to those who desire Miss Doran's welfare that you are something more than a young fellow fresh from a life of waste and idleness and everything that demonstrates or tends to untrustworthiness. It seems to me that a couple of years or so is not an over-long time for this, all things considered."

Elgar kept silent.

"You would have seen nothing objectionable in immediate marriage?" said Mallard.

"It is useless to pretend that I should."

"Not even from the point of view of Mrs. Lessingham and myself?"

"You yourself have never spoken plainly about such things in my hearing; but I find you in most things a man of your time. And it doesn't seem to me that Mrs. Lessingham is exactly conventional in her views."

"You imagine yourself worthy of such a wife at present?"

"Plainly, I do. It would be the merest hypocrisy if I said anything else. If Cecily loves me, my love for her is at least as strong. If we are equal in that, what else matters? I am not going to cry _Peccavi_ about the past. I have lived, and you know what that means in my language. In what am I inferior as a man to Cecily as a woman? Would you have me snivel, and talk about my impurity and her angelic qualities? You know that you would despise me if I did--or any other man who used the same empty old phrases."

"I grant you that," replied Mallard, deliberately. "I believe I am no more superst.i.tious with regard to these questions than you are, and I want to hear no cant. Let us take it on more open ground. Were Cecily Doran my daughter, I would resist her marrying you to the utmost of my power--not simply because you have lived laxly, but because of my conviction that the part of your life is to be a pattern of the whole.

I have no faith in you--no faith in your sense of honour, in your stability, not even in your mercy. Your wife will be, sooner or later, one of the unhappiest of women. Thinking of you in this way, and being in the place of a parent to Cecily, am I doing my duty or not in insisting that she shall not marry you hastily, that even in her own despite she shall have time to study you and herself, that she shall only take the irrevocable step when she clearly knows that it is done on her own responsibility? You may urge what you like; I am not so foolish as to suppose you capable of consideration for others in your present state of mind. I, however, shall defend myself from the girl's reproaches in after-years. There will be no marriage until she is twenty-one."

A silence of some duration followed. Elgar sat with bent head, twisting his moustaches. At length:

"I believe you are right, Mallard. Not in your judgment of me, but in your practical resolve."

Mallard examined him from under his eyebrows.

"You are prepared to wait?" he asked, in an uncertain voice.

"Prepared, no. But I grant the force of your arguments. I will try to bring myself to patience."

Mallard sat unmoving. His legs were crossed, and he held his soft felt hat crushed together in both his hands. Elgar glanced at him once or twice, expecting him to speak, but the other was mute.

"Your judgment of me," Elgar resumed, "is harsh and unfounded. I don't know how you have formed it. You know nothing of what it means to me to love such a girl as Cecily. Here I have found my rest. It supplies me with no new qualities, but it strengthens those I have. You picture me being unfaithful to Cecily--deserting her, becoming brutal to her?

There must be a strange prejudice in your mind to excite such images."

He examined Mallard's face. "Some day I will remind you of your prophecies."

Mallard regarded him, and spoke at length, in a strangely jarring, discordant voice.

"I said that hastily. I make no prophecies. I wished to say that those seemed to me the probabilities."

"Thank you for the small mercy, at all events," said Elgar, with a laugh.

"What do you intend to do?" Mallard proceeded to ask, changing his position.

"I can make no plans yet. I have pretended to only too often. You have no objection to my remaining here?"

"You must take your own course--with the understanding to which we have come."

"I wish I could make you look more cheerful, Mallard. I owe it to you, for you have given me more gladness than I can utter."

"You can do it."

"How?"

"See her to-morrow morning, and then go back to England, and make yourself some kind of reputable existence."

"Not yet. That is asking too much. Not so soon."

"As you please. We understand each other on the main point."

"Yes. Are you going back to Amalfi?"

"I don't know."

They talked for a few minutes more, in short sentences of this kind, but did not advance beyond the stage of mutual forbearance. Mallard lingered, as though not sure that he had fulfilled his mission. In the end he went away abruptly.