“I understand you very well. Your engagement with Miss S-Sutherland — she always pronounced this name with difficulty— “is not yet broken off?”
“Not explicitly. But if you need—”
“Hear me, Monsieur Herbert I will not come between her and her lover. But if you can affirm on your honor as an English gentleman that she no longer loves you, go and obtain an assurance from her that it is so.”
“And then?”
“And then — Come back to me; and we shall see. But I do not think she will release you.”
“She will. Would I have spoken to you if I had any doubts left? For, if she holds me to my word, I am, as you say, an English gentleman, and must keep it. But she will not.”
“You will nevertheless go to her, and renew your offer.”
“Do you mean my offer to you — or to her?”
“My God! he does not understand! Listen to me, Monsieur Herbert.” Here Aurélie again resorted to the English tongue. “You must go to her and say, ‘Marie: I come to fulfill my engagement.’ If she reply, ‘No, Monsieur Adrian, I no longer wish it,’ then — then, as I have said, we shall see. But if she say ‘yes,’ then you must never any more come back.”
“But—”
“No, no, no,” murmured Aurélie, turning away her head. “It must be exactly as I have said.”
“I will undertake to learn her true mind, Aurélie, and to abide by it. That I promise. But were I to follow your instructions literally, she too would hold herself bound by her word, and would say ‘yes,’ in spite of her heart. We should sacrifice each other and ourselves to a false sense of honor.” Aurélie twisted a button of her chair, and shook her head, unconvinced. “Aurélie,” he added gravely: “are you anxious to see her accept me? If so, it would be kinder to tell me so at once. Would you be so cruel as to involve me in an unhappy marriage merely to escape the unpleasantness of uttering a downright refusal?”
“Ah” she said, raising her head again, but still not looking at him, “I will not answer you. You seek to entrap me — you ask too much.” Then, after a pause, “Have I not told you that if she releases you, you may return here?”
“And I may infer from that — ?”
She clasped hands with a gesture of despair. “And they say these Englishmen think much of themselves! You will not believe it possible that a woman should care for you!” He hesitated even yet, until she made a sudden movement towards the door, when he seized her hand and kissed it. She drew it away quickly, checked him easily by begging him to excuse her, bowed, and left the room.
He went out elated, and had walked as far as Portland Place before he began to consider what he should say for himself at Cavendish Square, where Mary was staying with Mrs Phipson. At Fitzroy Square he had been helped by the necessity of speaking French, in which language he found it natural and easy to say many things which in English would have sounded extravagant to him. He had kissed Aurélie’s hand, as it were, in French. To kiss Mary’s hand would, he felt, be a ridiculous ceremony, unworthy of a civilized Englishman. A proposal to jilt her, which was the substance of his business with her now, was not easy to frame acceptably in any language.
When he reached the house he found her with her hat on and a workbag in her hand.
“I am waiting” for Miss Cairns, she said. “She is coming with me on an expedition. Guess what it is.”
“I cannot. I did not know that Miss Cairns was in town.”
“We have decided that the condition of Mr. Jack’s wardrobe is no longer tolerable. He is away at Birmingham today; and we are going to make a descent on his lodgings with a store of buttons and darning cotton, and a bottle of benzine. We shall make his garments respectable, and he will be none the wiser. Now, Adrian, do not look serious. You are worse than an old woman on questions of propriety.”
“It is a matter of taste,” said Herbert, shrugging his shoulders. “Is your expedition too important to be postponed for half an hour? I want to speak to you rather particularly.”
“If you wish,” said Mary slowly, her face lengthening a little. She was in the humor to sally out and play a prank on Jack, not to sit down and be serious with Herbert.
“It is possible,” he said, noticing this with some mortification, though it strung him up a little, too, “that when you have heard what I have to say, you will go on your expedition with a lighter heart. Nevertheless, I am sorry to detain you.”
“You need not apologize,” she said, irritated. “I am quite willing to wait, Adrian. What is the matter?”
“Are you quite sure we shall not be disturbed here, even by Miss Cairns?”
“If it is so particular as that, we had better go out into the Square. I cannot very well barricade myself in Mrs Phipson’ drawing room. There is hardly anybody in the Square at this hour.”
“Very well,” said Herbert, trying to repress a sensation of annoyance which he also began to experience. They left the house together in silence, opened the gate of the circular enclosure which occupies the centre of Cavendish Square, and found it deserted except for themselves and a few children. Mary walked beside him with knitted brows, waiting for him to begin.
“Mary: if I were asking you now for the first time the question I put to you that day when we rowed on the Serpentine, would you give me the same answer?”
She stopped, bewildered by this unexpected challenge.
“If you had not put that question before today, would you put it at all?” she said, walking on again.
“For Heaven’s sake,” he said, angry at at being being parried, “do not let us begin to argue. I did not mean to reproach you,”
Mary thought it better not to reply. Her temper was so far under control that she could suppress the bitter speeches which suggested themselves to her, but she could not think of any soft answers, and so she had either to retort or be silent.
“I have noticed — or at least I fancy so” — he said quietly, after a pause, “that our engagement has not been so pleasant a topic as it once was.”
“I am perfectly ready to fulfill it,” said Mary steadfastly.
“So am I,” said Adrian in the same tone. Another interval of silence ensued.
“The question is,” he said then, “whether you are willing as well as ready You would do me a cruel injustice if, having promised me your heart, you were to redeem that promise with your hand alone.”
“What have you to complain of, Adrian? I know that you are sensitive; but I have taken such pains to avoid giving you the least uneasiness during the last two years that I do not think you can reasonably reproach me. You agreed with me that my painting was mere waste of time, and that I was right to give it up.”
“Since you no longer cared for it.”
“I did not know that you felt sore about it.”
“Nor do I, Mary.”
“Then what is the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter, if you are satisfied.”
“And is that all you had to say to me, Adrian?” This with an attempt at gaiety.
Adrian mused awhile. “Mary,” he said: “I wish you in the first place to understand that I am not jealous of Mr Jack.” She opened her eyes widely, and looked at him. “But,” he continued, “I never was so happy with you as when we were merely friends. Since that time, I have become your professed lover; and Mr Jack has succeeded