The Finer Grain Part 11

At this he did get up; that was easier than to say--at least with responsive simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in silence at his letter; which at last, however, raising his eyes to her own for the act, while he masked their conscious ruefulness, to his utmost, in some air of a.s.surance, he slipped into the inner pocket of his coat, letting it settle there securely. "You're too wonderful." But he frowned at her with it as never in his life. "Where does it all come from?"

"The wonder of poor me?" Kate Cookham said. "It comes from _you_."

He shook his head slowly--feeling, with his letter there against his heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. "I mean so _much_ money--so extraordinarily much."

Well, she held him a while blank. "Does it seem to you extraordinarily much--twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know," she added, "it's all."

"It's enough!" he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness somehow on his cheek.

"It's enough? Thank you then!" she rather oddly went on.

He s.h.i.+fted a little his posture. "It was more than a hundred a year--for you to get together."

"Yes," she a.s.sented, "that was what year by year I tried for."

"But that you could live all the while and save that--!" Yes, he was at liberty, as he hadn't been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered--and didn't the change mean that here again was the social relation?

"Ah, I didn't live as you saw me the other day."

"Yes," he answered--and didn't he the next instant feel he must fairly have smiled with it?--"the other day you _were_ going it!"

"For once in my life," said Kate Cookham. "I've left the hotel," she after a moment added.

"Ah, you're in--a--lodgings?" he found himself inquiring as for positive sociability.

She had apparently a slight shade of hesitation, but in an instant it was all right; as what he showed he wanted to know she seemed mostly to give him. "Yes--but far of course from here. Up on the hill." To which, after another instant, "At The Mount, Castle Terrace," she subjoined.

"Oh, I _know_ The Mount. And Castle Terrace is awfully sunny and nice."

"Awfully sunny and nice," Kate Cookham took from him.

"So that if it isn't," he pursued, "like the Royal, why you're at least comfortable."

"I shall be comfortable anywhere now," she replied with a certain dryness.

It was astonis.h.i.+ng, however, what had become of his own. "Because I've accepted----?"

"Call it that!" she dimly smiled.

"I hope then at any rate," he returned, "you can now thoroughly rest" He spoke as for a cheerful conclusion and moved again also to smile, though as with a poor grimace, no doubt; since what he seemed most clearly to feel was that since he "accepted" he mustn't, for his last note, have accepted in sulkiness or gloom. With that, at the same time, he couldn't but know, in all his fibres, that with such a still-watching face as the dotty veil didn't disguise for him there was no possible concluding, at least on his part On hers, on hers it was--as he had so often for a week had reflectively to p.r.o.nounce things--another affair. Ah, somehow, both formidably and helpfully, her face concluded--yet in a sense so strangely enshrouded in things she didn't tell him. What _must_ she, what mustn't she, have done? What she had said--and she had really told him nothing--was no account of her life; in the midst of which conflict of opposed recognitions, at any rate, it was as if, for all he could do, he himself now considerably floundered. "But I can't think--I can't think----!"

"You can't think I can have made so much money in the time and been honest?"

"Oh, you've been _honest!_" Herbert Dodd distinctly allowed.

It moved her stillness to a gesture--which, however, she had as promptly checked; and she went on the next instant as for further generosity to his failure of thought. "Everything was possible, under my stress, with my hatred."

"Your hatred--?" For she had paused as if it were after all too difficult.

"Of what I should for so long have been doing to you."

With this, for all his failures, a greater light than any yet shone upon him. "It made you think of ways----?"

"It made me think of everything. It made me work," said Kate Cookham.

She added, however, the next moment: "But that's my story."

"And I mayn't hear it?"

"No--because I mayn't hear yours."

"Oh, mine--!" he said with the strangest, saddest, yet after all most resigned sense of surrender of it; which he tried to make sound as if he couldn't have told it, for its splendor of sacrifice and of misery, even if he would.

It seemed to move in her a little, exactly, that sense of the invidious.

"Ah, mine too, I a.s.sure you----!"

He rallied at once to the interest. "Oh, we _can_ talk then?"

"Never," she all oddly replied. "Never," said Kate Cookham.

They remained so, face to face; the effect of which for him was that he had after a little understood why. That was fundamental. "Well, I see."

Thus confronted they stayed; and then, as he saw with a contentment that came up from deeper still, it was indeed she who, with her worn fine face, would conclude. "But I can take care of you."

"You _have!_" he said as with nothing left of him but a beautiful appreciative candour.

"Oh, but you'll want it now in a way--!" she responsibly answered.

He waited a moment, dropping again on the seat. So, while she still stood, he looked up at her; with the sense somehow that there were too many things and that they were all together, terribly, irresistibly, doubtless blessedly, in her eyes and her whole person; which thus affected him for the moment as more than he could bear. He leaned forward, dropping his elbows to his knees and pressing his head on his hands. So he stayed, saying nothing; only, with the sense of her own sustained, renewed and wonderful action, knowing that an arm had pa.s.sed round him and that he was held. She was beside him on the bench of desolation.