Elizabeth's Campaign Part 48

She put it away in the drawer of her writing-table, which had been brought back to its old place only that morning. The Squire himself went to his own desk.

'Will you sit there?' He pointed to her chair. 'I want to speak to you.'

Then after a pause he added slowly, 'Will you tell me--what you think I can now do with my time?'

His voice had a curious monotony--unlike its usual tone. But Elizabeth divined a coming crisis. She went very white.

'Dear Mr. Mannering--I don't know what to say--except that the country seems to want everything that each one of us can do.'

'Have you read Haig's Order of the Day?'

'Yes, I have just read it.'

The Squire's eyes, fixed upon her, had a strange intensity.

'You and I have never known--never dreamt--of anything like this.'

'No--never. But England has had her back to the wall before!'

She sat proudly erect, her hands quietly crossed. But he seemed to hear the beating of her heart.

'You mean when Pitt said, "Roll up the map of Europe"? Yes--that too was vital. But the people at home scarcely knew it--and it was not a war of machines.'

'No matter! England will never yield.'

'Till Germany is on her knees?' His long bony face, more lined, more emaciated than ever, seemed to catch a sombre glow from hers.

'Yes--though it last ten years! But the Americans are hurrying.'

'Are all women like you?'

Her mouth trembled into scorn.

'Oh, think of the women whose shoe-strings I am not worthy to unloose!--the nurses, the French peasant-women, the women who have given their husbands--their sons.'

His look showed his agitation.

'So we are to be saved--by boys like Desmond--and women like you?'

'Oh, I am a cypher--a nothing!' There was a pa.s.sionate humiliation in her voice. 'I should be nursing in France--'

'If it weren't for your mother and your sister?'

She nodded. There was a pause. Then the Squire said, in a different tone,

'But you have not answered my question. I should be obliged if you would answer it. How am I, being I--how is a man of my kind to fill his time--and live his life? If the country is in deadly peril--if the ground is shaking beneath our feet--if we are to go on fighting for years, with "our backs to the wall," even I can't go on cataloguing Greek vases. I acknowledge that now. So much I grant you. But what else am I good for?'

The colour flushed in her fair skin, and her eyes filled again with tears.

'Come and help!' she said simply. 'There is so much to do. And for you--a large landowner--there is everything to do.'

His face darkened.

'Yes, if I had the courage for it. But morally I am a weakling--you know it. Do you remember that I once said to you if Desmond fell, I should go with him--or after him?'

She waited a moment before replying, and then said with energy, 'That would be just desertion!--_he_ would tell you so.'

Their eyes met, and the pa.s.sion in hers subdued him. It was a strange dialogue, as though between two souls bared and stripped of everything but the realities of feeling.

'Would it be? That might be argued. But anyway I should have done it--the very night Desmond died--but for you!'

'For me?' she said, shading her eyes with a hand that trembled. 'No, Mr. Mannering, you could not have done such a thing!--for your honour's sake--for your children's sake.'

'Neither would have restrained me. I was held to life by one thread--one hope only--'

She was silent.

'--the hope that if I was to put my whole life to school again--to burn what I had adored, and adore what I had burned--the one human being in the world who could teach me such a lesson--who had begun to teach it me--would stand by me--would put her hand in mine--and lead me.'

His voice broke down. Elizabeth, shaken from head to foot, could only hide her face and wait. Even the strength to protest--'Not now!--not yet!' seemed to have gone from her. He went on vehemently:

'Oh, don't imagine that I am making you an ordinary proposal--or that I am going to repeat to you the things I said to you--like a fool--in Cross Wood. Then I offered you a bargain--and I see now that you despised me as a huckster! You were to help my hobby; I was to help yours. That was all I could find to say. I didn't know how to tell you that all the happiness of my life depended on your staying at Mannering. I was unwilling to acknowledge it even to myself. I have been accustomed to put sentiment aside--to try and ignore it. To _feel_ as I did was itself so strange a thing to me, that I struggled to express it as prosaically as possible. Well, then, you were astonished--and repelled. That I saw--I realized it indeed more and more. I saw that I had perhaps done a fatal thing, and I spent much time brooding and thinking. I felt an acute distress, such as I had never felt in my life before--so much so that I began even to avoid you, because I used to say to myself--"She will go away some day--perhaps soon--and I must accustom myself to it." And yet--'

He lifted the hand that shaded his eyes, and gave her a long touching look.

'Yet I felt sometimes that you knew what was happening in me--and were sorry for me. Then came the news of Desmond. Of those days while he lay here--of the days since--I seem to know now hardly anything in detail. One of the officers at the front said to me that on the Somme he often lost all count of time, of the days of the week, of the sequence of things. It seemed to be all one present--one awful and torturing _now_. So it is with me. Desmond is always here'--he pointed to the vacant s.p.a.ce by the window--'and you are always sitting by him. And I know that if you go away--and I am left alone with my poor boy--though I shall never cease to hear the things he said to me--the things he asked me to do--I shall have no strength to do them. I cannot rise and walk--unless you help me.'

Elizabeth could hardly speak. She was in presence of that tremendous thing in human experience--the emergence of a man's inmost self.

That the Squire could speak so--could feel so--that the man whose pupil and bond-slave she had been in those early weeks should be making this piteous claim upon her, throwing upon her the weight of his whole future life, of his sorrow, of his reaction against himself, overwhelmed her. It appealed to that instinctive, that boundless tenderness which lies so deep in the true woman.

But her will seemed paralysed. She did not know how to act--she could find no words that pleased her. The Squire saw it, and began to speak again in the same low measured voice, as though he groped his way along, from point to point. He sat with his eyes on the floor, his hands loosely clasped before him.

'I don't, of course, dare to ask you to say--at once--if you will be my wife. I dread to ask it--for I am tolerably certain that you would still say no. But if only now you would say, "I will go on with my work here--I will help a man who is weak where I am strong--I will show him new points of view--give him new reasons for living--"'

Elizabeth could only just check the sobs in her throat. The sad humility of the words pierced her heart.

The Squire raised himself a little, and spoke more firmly.

'Why should there be any change yet awhile? Only stay with us. Use my land--use me and all I possess--for the country--for what Desmond would have helped in--and done. Show me what to do. I shall do it ill. But what matter? Every little helps. "We have our backs to the wall." I have the power to give _you_ power. Teach me.'

Then reaching out, he took her hand in his. His voice deepened and strengthened.

'Elizabeth!--be my friend--my children's friend. Bring your poor mother here--and your sister--till Pamela goes. Then tell me--what you decide. You shall give me no pledge--no promise. You shall be absolutely free. But together let us do a bit of work, a bit of service.'

She looked up. The emotion, the sweetness in her face dazzled him.

'Yes,' she said gravely--'I will stay.'