“Well, I am grateful,” said Josephine, looking over her desk at Miss Luke and Miss Rosetti, who sat before her. “It is a load lifted, to feel that my husband’s work will be done, until I can fill his place, in the ways in which it must be filled.” She ended in a manner of forced cheerfulness. “We must be thankful that we can deal in such a healthy way with the gaps in life.”
“It is a privilege to do what we can, Mrs. Napier.”
“Well, that is another demand of your kindness, that I am afraid I do rather feel it a privilege,” said Josephine, with a touch of amusement at herself. “Even if I cannot be blamed for that, you miss your proportionate gratitude. And I fear you will miss it. I am not going to express suitable appreciation even now. You will be lenient towards my inevitable attitude?”
“The largest share of the work is falling on you, Mrs. Napier.”
“Well, I should hope so. I should not have much right to expect your help, if that did not go without saying. I am not so muddle-headed about the rights and wrongs of a case.”
“We shall have the practical advantage. We are not doing the work for love, not on an intangible basis, in a word, not for nothing,” said Miss Luke, amused by the final length to which she went.126
“My husband’s labour is surely worthy of its hire. Or do you not think, now that you come to experience it, that it is?”
“It seems, in other hands than his,” said Miss Rosetti, “hardly worthy of so much hire.”
“Well, that is perhaps another point on which I am adapting matters to my own feelings. I hope that you will allow me the indulgence? Believe me, I do not intend any overreaching of my place. If it is a convenience to you, I am glad; though I have not thought of it more than you have. And now you do not want the burden of my society at this particular juncture of my experience. I am under no delusions about it, though I may say that I have appreciated yours, and taken its lesson. As this nephew of mine appears to desire it, we will allow him to take the step over which he properly hesitates, and supplant you. I will not offer more thanks. I told you that you would not get your share. And now, young man, the next time you make your appearance with a lady, you will allow her to precede you, I hope.”
The women left the room as Gabriel entered it, leading Ruth by the hand.
“Well, amusing each other, like the good children of old friends? It is kind of Ruth, my boy, to adapt her leisure to yours.”
“We wanted to see you about something important, Mrs. Napier, or I should not have left my work.”
“I meant simply what I said, my dear, I do not communicate by implication. I am grateful for any happiness that you will give Gabriel just now, when the companion of his life is so little to be recommended.”
“In that case, you will be grateful to Ruth, Josephine,” said Gabriel, coming nearer with a stumble, to avoid lifting his head. “She is giving me a happiness greater than I had conceived.”127
“Then it must be on a generous scale indeed, indulged boy,” said Josephine, her tone out of accordance with the change in her eyes. “Let us hear about it before I resume my labours. Come to the point, and enunciate some demand of youth.”
“It is the demand that I was bound to make one day. It is naturally often a demand of youth. This breaking up of our life seemed the best time to make it. The lesser change must count less at the time of the greater. I make the demand with confidence, having been taught, as you will say, to make demands. I have said enough for you to understand me?”
“No,” said Josephine, in a quiet, conversational tone; “I don’t think so. You have not said anything definite, have you?”
“Mrs. Napier, Gabriel and I find that we belong to each other,” said Ruth, standing with clasped hands. “We are waiting to tell the world, until we have your sanction.”
“No, come, I don’t think so,” said Josephine, seeming to suppress a smile. “Quite apart from telling the world, which would never be necessary, what you imply would involve issues of which you have no understanding. I don’t want to snub youthful earnestness—you know I am not a person to do that; my life is based upon the significance of youth—but you will forgive me for not taking you very seriously? Silly little people!” She ended on a tender, final note, her hands trembling beneath her desk. “You would be nicely up a tree, if I did.”
Gabriel looked as if he had met what he feared, but Ruth shrank back and lifted her eyes to his.
“You must surely understand the feeling between a man and a woman, Josephine?”
“Well, let the feeling help you to do more for each other than it is doing, or it will not be at all the feeling between a man and a woman, that I understand. No, I have had understanding of a very 128different kind. Even in this break of my last and lasting experience of it, I can look back on the earlier ones”—Josephine raised her eyes and seemed to be counting on her fingers—“and see them unsullied by any simple grasping for self.”
“Early love may be the only love, Mrs. Napier.”
“No, my dear, it may not.”
“We are living our youth, of course, as we are young,” said Gabriel. “There must be something in the first love, that anyhow is its own.”
“Come, don’t be highfalutin. You will be sorry for extravagant speeches soon. You will look back and squirm over them. I remember my own youth.”
“Perhaps it would be as well if your own youth had borne more fruit,” said Gabriel. “I don’t remember any feeling between you and your husband, that can be taken as an example.”
“Don’t you, my dear, don’t you?” said Josephine with almost fervent hopelessness. “You think that that was not much, that daily feeling that you saw; that humdrum, tried affection that was before your eyes! You think that most married lives hold more; that this that you were trying to imagine, would hold more? Do you, poor boy, poor boy?”
“I am speaking as a man, Josephine.”
“Oh, no, you are not. When you refer to the person, whom from your childhood you have known as ‘Uncle Simon’, as my husband, you are speaking as the silly boy you are. It is natural: as you said, you are living your youth, and youth has its own ways of dealing with its setbacks, its innocence, its spleen.” Josephine spaced the last words, uttering them with quiet philosophy. “Ah, a man would know that there are many claims to be fulfilled, before a boy can take his place. No, be a boy a little longer; and you, my child, be satisfied with your youth; and presently find a 129partner more advanced to man’s estate, than this beardless boy of mine.”
“Of course I admit the appearance of ruthless egotism,” said Gabriel.
“No. Why should you admit that? There has not been much appearance of it, has there?”
“I mean the leaving you by yourself in your new loneliness.”
“Oh, I thought you said ‘appearance’. You meant reality, did you? The less said about that, the better. We certainly will not turn our eyes on the figure you cut in any real sense.”
“We are pledged to each other,” said Ruth. “We are not people who could break our faith.”
“Now, now, you know we none of us can take that stand. I, for one, should be ashamed of taking it, of resolving never to change. If we can never change, we can never learn. And that admission means more for me, than it would for you. Why, you have broken your promise to me, that you would throw yourself heart and soul into your work. You must have had a wandering mind of late, while I have been—well, also breaking my promises, and yielding to the claims of my own life. So I am not going to take you up hardly for it. We have to go back on promises too lightly or confidently made. We know there is a real promise to be made by both of you, by and by, and that this preliminary is better quickly put aside, if it is not to cast its shadow forward over the real thing that is to come. That is a tragedy we do not want for you.”
“Would you not like to see Gabriel’s children, Mrs. Napier?” said Ruth, in a pleading tone.
“Gabriel’s children?” said Josephine, with a little frown. “How do you mean, my dear? Do you—can you mean your children and his? Because it is not for me to refuse to follow you wherever you care to lead.”130
“Josephine, that is absurd,” said Gabriel. “It was a perfectly reasonable speech.”
“Yes, it was very reasonable,” said Josephine lightly. “As reasonable and tangible and practical as it could very well be. It was I who was not tangible enough, I quite agree.”
“You do not try to understand, Mrs. Napier.”
“My dear, I understand without trying,” said Josephine, almost tenderly. “It is a difficult moment for you, a moment that does call for courage. It must be, when we make a mistake in the deeper things, as we do in youth. We need the courage to admit the mistake to ourselves, and to see that what we thought we had attained, is still beyond. But you have it; you are your mother’s child. The spirit you show in holding to your purpose proves it. It is only the adjustment that is needed. Gabriel has not been unworthy of himself in his first stumble”—she gave Gabriel an almost radiant look—“of the many that are to come before the final steadying.”
“To refuse to accept a simple truth is neither moral nor reasonable,” said Gabriel.
“Well, may I ask what you will live on, since I am to be so reasonable? I admit that I was rather trying to be the other thing, by way of covering what needed covering, and saving the faces that required to be saved.”
“I shall get a post at my old school. They give a preference to old boys, and my degree is good. We shall be able to manage.”
“Well, well, manage then. I am glad you have the grit to face it all together; to meet the grinding daily round of contriving in pence, and cutting off amenities that have come to seem the decencies. For it does need character. I for one have never done it, or thought I could do it. I admit that for me life is dependent on a certain seemliness. If you can do more than I, be it so. Though it has never been so, has it, in our years together? And now you 131know that my work cannot wait, and that it is necessity and not indifference, that drives me to dismiss you. You can tell me the details presently, of all you have arranged. It must have been a complicated piece of planning; I feel how much you have had on you.”
Ruth and Gabriel found themselves in the hall, and breaking at once into talk, forgot where they stood, and before many minutes Josephine emerged and came towards them.
“Now,” she said, brushing past them with some letters in her hand, “let me pass, chattering pair. What are you doing blocking up the hall for people who need it? I suppose you think no one has more to do than you have. If that is your influence over each other, you must see that you do not exert it for too long.”
Her manner put them behind her in thought as well as in deed, but in a moment she turned her head and came to a pause. Then waving her letters to them, she went her way.