The Business of Life

What else was he – except a trained animal, sufficiently educated to keep out of jail? What had he done with his inheritance? His body was sane and healthy; he had been at pains to cultivate that. How was it with his mind? How was it with his spiritual beliefs? Had he cultivated and added to either? He had been endowed with a brain. Had he made of it anything except an instrument for idle caprice and indolent passions to play upon?

"Do you understand me now?" she whispered, touching wet lashes with her handkerchief.

He replied impetuously, hotly; her hands dropped from her face and she looked up at him with sweet, confused eyes, blushing vividly under his praise of her.

He spoke of himself, too, with all the quick, impassioned impulse of youthful emotion, not sparing himself, promising better things, vowing them before the shrine of her innocence. Yet, a stronger character might have registered such vows in silence. And his fervour and incoherence left her mute; and after he had ceased to protest too much she stood quiet for a while, striving to search herself so that nothing unworthy should remain – so that heart and soul should be clean under the magic veil of happiness descending before her enraptured eyes.

Gently his arms encircled her; her clasped hands rested on his shoulder, and she gazed out at the blue sky and sun-warmed snow as at a corner of paradise revealed.

Later, when the household was astir, she went out with him into the greenhouse, where the enchanted stillness of growing things thrilled her, and the fragrance and sunlight made the mystery of love and its miracle even more exquisitely unreal to her.

At first they did not speak; her hand lay loosely in his, her blue eyes remained remote; and together they slowly paced the long, glass-sheeted galleries between misty, scented mounds of bloom, to and fro, under the flood of pallid winter sunshine, pale as the yellow jasmine flowers overhead.

After a while a fat gardener came into one of the further wings. Presently the sound of shovelled coal from the furnace-pit aroused them from their dream; and they looked at each other gravely.

After a moment, he said: "Does it make a difference to you, Jacqueline, what I was before I knew you?"

"No."

"I was only wondering what you really think of me."

"You know already, Jim."

He shook his head slowly.

"Jim! Of course you know!" she insisted hotly. "What you may have been before I knew you I refuse to consider. Anyway, it was you– part of you – and belongs to me now! Because I choose to make it mine – all that you were and are – good and evil! For I won't give up one atom of you – even to the devil himself!"

He tried to laugh: "What a fierce little partisan you are," he said.

"Very – where it concerns you," she said, unsmiling.

"Dear – I had better tell you now; you may hear things about me – "

"I won't listen to them!"

"No; but one sometimes hears without listening. People may say things. They will say things. I wish I could spare you. If I had known – if I had only known – that you were in the world – "

"Don't, Jim! It – it isn't best for me to hear. It doesn't concern me," she insisted excitedly. "And if anybody dares say one word to me – "

"Wait, dear. All I want to be sure of is that you do love me enough to – to go on loving me. I want to be certain, and I want you to be certain before you are a bride – "

She was growing very much excited, and suddenly near to tears, for the one thing that endangered her self-control seemed to be his doubt of her.

"There is nothing that I haven't forgiven you," she said. "Nothing! There is nothing I won't forgive – except – one thing – "

"What?"

"I can't say it. I can't even think it. All I know is that now I couldn't forgive it." Suddenly she became perfectly quiet.

"I know what you mean," he said.

"Yes. It is what no wife can forgive." She looked at him, clear eyed, intelligent, calm; for the moment without any illusion; and he seemed to feel that, in the light of what she knew of him, she was coolly weighing the danger of the experiment. Never had he seen so cold and lustrous a brow, such limpid clarity of eye, searching, fearless, direct. Then, in an instant, it all seemed to melt into flushed and winsome loveliness; and she was murmuring that she loved him, and asking pardon for even one second's hesitation.

"It never could be; it is unthinkable," she whispered. "And it is too late anyway for me – I would love you now, whatever you killed in me. Because I must go on loving you, Jim; for that is the way it is with me, and I know it now. As long as there is life in me I'll strive for you in my own fashion – even against yourself – to keep you for mine, to please you, to be to you and to the world what you wish me to be – for your honour and your happiness – which also must be my own – the only happiness, now, that I can ever understand."

He held her in his arms, smoothing the bright hair, touching the white brow with his lips at moments, happy because he was so deeply in love, fearful because of it – and, deep in his soul, miserable, afraid lest aught out of his past life return again to mock her – lest some echo of folly offend her ears – some shadow fall – some phantom of dead days rise from their future hearth to stand between them.

It is that way with a man who has lived idly and irresponsibly, and who has gone lightly about the pleasure of life and not its business. For sometimes there arrives an hour of unbidden clairvoyance – not necessarily a spiritual awakening – but a moment of balanced intelligence and sanity and clear vision. And when it arrives, the road to yesterday suddenly becomes visible for its entire length; and when a man looks back he sees it stretching away behind him, peopled with every shape that has ever traversed it, and every spectre that ever has haunted it.

Sorrow for what need not have been, regret and shame for what had been – and the bitterness of the folly – the knowledge, too late, of what he could have been to the girl he held now in his arms – how he could have met her on more equal terms had he saved his youth and strength and innocence and pride for her alone – how he could have given it unsullied into her keeping. All this Desboro was beginning to realise now. And many men have realised it when the tardy understanding came too late. For what has been is still and will be always; and shall appear here or hereafter, or after that – somewhere, sometime, inevitably, inexorably. There is no such thing as expunging what has been, or of erasing what is to be. All records stand; hope lies only in lengthening the endless chapters – chapters which will not be finished when the sun dies, and the moon fails, and the stars go out forever.

Walking slowly back together, they passed Herrendene in the wing hall, and his fine and somewhat melancholy face lighted up at the encounter.

"I'm so sorry you are going to-day," said Jacqueline, with all her impulsive and sweet sincerity. "Everybody will miss you and wish you here again."

"To be regretted is one of the few real pleasures in life," he said, smiling. His quick eye had rested on Desboro and then reverted to her, and his intuition was warning him with all the brutality and finality of reason that his last hope of her must end.

Desboro said: "I hate to have you go, Herrendene, but I suppose you must."

"Must you?" echoed Jacqueline, wistful for the moment. But the irresistible radiance of happiness had subtly transfigured her, and Herrendene looked into her eyes and saw the new-born beauty in them, shyly apparent.

"Yes," he said, "I must be about the business of life – the business of life, Miss Nevers. Everybody is engaged in it; it has many names, but it's all the same business. You, for example, pass judgment on beautiful things; Desboro, here, is a farmer, and I play soldier with sword and drum. But it's all the same business – the business of life; and one can work at it or idle through it, but never escape it, because, at the last, every soul in the world must die in harness. And the idlest are the heaviest laden." He laughed. "That's quite a sermon, isn't it, Miss Nevers? And shall I make my adieux now? Were you going anywhere? You see I am leaving Silverwood directly after breakfast – "

"As though Mr. Desboro and I would go off anywhere and not say good-bye to you!" she exclaimed indignantly, quite unconscious of being too obvious.

So they all three returned to the breakfast room together, where Clydesdale, who had come over from the Hammertons' for breakfast, was already tramping hungrily around the covered dishes on the sideboard, hot plate in hand, evidently meditating a wholesale assault. He grinned affably as Jacqueline and Desboro came in, and they all helped themselves from the warmers, returning laden to the table with whatever suited their fancy. Other guests, to whom no trays had been sent, arrived one after another to prowl around the browse and join in the conversation if they chose, or sulk, as is the fashion with some perfectly worthy souls at breakfast-tide.

"This thaw settles the skating for good and all," remarked Reggie Ledyard. "Will you go fishing with me, Miss Nevers? It's our last day, you know."

Cairns growled over his grape-fruit: "You can't make dates with Miss Nevers at the breakfast table. It isn't done. I was going to ask her to do something with me, anyway."

"I hate breakfast," said Van Alstyne. "When I see it I always wish I were dead or that everybody else was. Zooks! This cocktail helps some! Try one, Miss Nevers."

"There's reason in your grouch," remarked Bertie Barkley, with his hard-eyed smile, "considering what Aunt Hannah and I did to you and Helsa at auction last night."

"Aunt Hannah will live in luxury for a year on it," added Cairns maliciously. "Doesn't it make you happy, Stuyve?"

"Oh – blub!" muttered Van Alstyne, hating everybody and himself – and most of all hating to think of his losses and of the lady who caused them. Only the really rich know how card losses rankle.

Cairns glanced banteringly across at Jacqueline. It was his form of wit to quiz her because she neither indulged in cocktails nor cigarettes, nor played cards for stakes. He lifted his eyebrows and tapped the frosted shaker beside him significantly.

"I've a new kind of mountain dew, warranted to wake the dead, Miss Nevers. I call it the 'Aunt Hannah,' in her honour – honour to whom honour is dew," he added impudently. "Won't you let me make you a cocktail?"

"Wait until Aunt Hannah hears how you have honoured her and tempted me," laughed Jacqueline.

"I never tempted maid or wife
Or suffragette in all my life – "

sang Ledyard, beating time on Van Alstyne, who silently scowled his displeasure.