Under One Flag Part 25

"Blame? You have not been free from blame? I will not have you say that you have been to blame in anything, I will not let you say it, Ronald."

"But--"

"But me no buts! If there has been blame, then it has been wholly mine.

But, Ronald, you will not blame me--now?"

"If you will permit me to explain--"

"Oh, yes, I will permit you to explain. Will you do it standing up? I would rather, since you ask my permission, that you make your explanation sitting at my side. I would rather, Ronald, have it so?"

It was maddening. Did she mean to compel him to play the brute?

"Lady Griswold, I--I must really beg you to hear me, without interruption, to an end."

"Ronald! Is that your House of Commons manner when the Opposition won't be still?"

He was a man whom it was notoriously, exceedingly difficult to irritate. But he was beginning then to be conscious of an unwonted feeling of irritation.

"I am simply here, Lady Griswold, to inform you that I propose to marry."

"Propose to marry! Is that the way in which you speak of it? And you do really think that it is news to me--after all your letters? Ronald!

Ronald!"

It was inconceivable that a woman could be such a fool. Yet it was so.

There was a rapturous suggestion in her voice which, literally, frightened him. The devil fly away with those letters of his! If ever he even dropped so much as a shadow of a hint again! She actually began to woo him. She came to him, she took both his hands in hers, she looked into his eyes--how she looked into his eyes! And he--he almost wished that he had no eyes to look into.

"Ronald! Ronald!" With what an unspoken eloquence of meaning she p.r.o.nounced his name. "News to me? Rather--I will say it, after all these years--tidings of great joy. News to me! I will make you my confession, sir, in full." Why did he not nip her confession in the bud? Why did he stand there as if spellbound? He was speechless. A bolt seemed to have come out of the blue, and to have struck him dumb. And she went on,--

"For eighteen years, my lord, I have dreamed of this--this one hour. I cannot tell whether I am a wicked woman, or whether I am not. I tell you just how it has been with me. I have done what seemed to me to be my duty, from day to day, from month to month, yes, from year to year, and I do not think that anyone has ever heard me once repine. But all the time it has seemed that I, my own self, have been far away, and I watched and waited till I could join my own self--where you were. I knew that this day would come. I knew it, with a sure and a certain knowledge, all along. You see, Ronald, I knew you. I think it is that knowledge which kept me young. For I am young. I still am young, Ronald, in every sense. Indeed, I have sometimes feared that I am too young to be a fitting mate for a leader among men. Ronald, love of my life, speak to me, my dear."

He was looking away--down at the floor. He was standing in front of her, wearing the hang-dog air of a convicted criminal. He spoke to her.

"It is Inez." That is what he said.

She did not catch his meaning. Perhaps she did not distinctly catch his words. "Inez? What is Inez? Inez has nothing to do with us, my dear."

"Whom I am going to marry."

She looked at him as if she were dimly trying to realise what, by any possibility, could be his meaning. She seemed almost to think that great joy had caused him to lose his mental equilibrium, as it most certainly had caused her to lose hers. She put out her hands, as if he were a child, and advanced them towards his face.

"Ronald--kiss me,--after all these years."

Then the man blazed up. He seized her wrists just as her fingers touched his cheeks. He broke into a fury. "Don't."

She looked at him askance.

"Ronald--won't you kiss me?"

Still he could not tell it to her, not face to face. He roughly dropped her hands. He turned away. She looked at him in wondering amazement.

"Ronald, what do you mean?"

Then he turned to her. On his face there was that expression of resolution with which, in certain of his moods, the House of Commons was beginning to be very well acquainted.

"Lady Griswold, the purpose of my visit was to inform you that, with your permission, I propose to do myself the honour of marrying your daughter Inez."

Still she did not understand him.

"Ronald, what--what do you mean?"

She compelled him to be brutal, or, at least, it seemed to him that she compelled him.

"Lady Griswold, you must forgive my saying that you have made what I had hoped would be the happiest hour of my life one of the bitterest.

If you had permitted me to speak at first you would have spared us both much pain. It would be absurd for me to pretend that I do not understand your meaning. You seem to take it for granted that things are to be with us as they were before the war. You appear to be wholly oblivious of the fact that eighteen--or is it nineteen?--years ago you jilted me."

"Jilted you? I--Ronald--I--I jilted you?"

"It is always my desire to use the most courteous and the gentlest language which will adequately convey my meaning. I know not how you may gloze it to yourself. To me it seems simply that--you promised to marry me, and you married Sir Matthew Griswold."

"But--Ronald--I--I have explained--just--how it was."

"Madam, did I require your explanation?"

She shrunk away, cowering as if she were some wild, frightened thing.

"But--but you wrote and asked me to come home."

"Lady Griswold, if you will refer to the letters of mine to which you are alluding, you will perceive that I merely suggested that it was possible that you might find more congenial surroundings in England than in Mexico."

"You--you meant more than that. And, Ronald--Ronald, I haven't ceased to love you all the time!"

"Lady Griswold, you compel me to use what may seem to be the language of discourtesy. How was I to know that, married to one man, you loved another? When you married him you died to me. I thought that, for me, all love was dead. But when I saw your daughter Inez--I have a const.i.tutional objection to use the language of violence, or of pa.s.sion. It is a plain statement of the naked truth that, when I saw your daughter Inez, that instant I knew that for me all love was not yet dead. It may appear to you that I have known her but a short time.

Too short a time for knowledge. But I will say to you what I would not say to all the world. I seem to have known her--yes, certainly for years. I must certainly have known her in my dreams. I could have drawn her portrait, which would have been her very duplicate, instinct with all but life before she came into this room."

"Indeed. Is--is that so, Ronald?"

"I must have loved her in the spirit before I met her in the flesh. I must have done. And the strangest part of it all is that she seems, also, to have loved me."

"I do not think that that is strange, though the whole affair is, perhaps, a little strange."

"So, Lady Griswold, I have come to crave your permission to make your child my wife."

"I see. You want to marry Inez. Now--now I understand. Well, Ronald, I think I have known you long enough to be able to trust you with my child." The door opened to admit Miss Griswold. "Inez, the strangest thing has happened, which I am sure will overwhelm you with surprise.

Mr Ferguson actually tells me that he loves you."

How we can smile, some of us, both men and women, when our very hearts are weeping gouts of blood. It is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the dual personality which is in each of us.

"My dear mother, that is no news. I know he loves me!"