CHAPTER XIII.
A COMPROMISE WITH CONVENTIONALITY.
MARLOWE was as responsible for Emily’s self-exaggeration as was Emily herself. He had been enveloping her in an atmosphere of adulation, through which she could see clearly and sensibly neither him nor herself nor her affairs.
When she first appeared he was deeply entangled elsewhere. But at once with the adroitness of experience, he extricated himself and boldly advanced into the new and unprecedently attractive net which fate was spreading for him. He was of those men who do not go far on the journey without a woman, or long with the same woman. He abhorred monotony both in work and in love; a typical impressionist, he soon found one subject, whether for his mind or for his heart, exhausted and wearisome.
Emily in her loneliness and youth, yearning for love and companionship, was so frankly attracted that he at first thought her as easy a conquest as had been the women who dwelt in the many and brief chapters of the annals of his conquering career. But he, and she also, to her great surprise, discovered that, while she had cast aside most conventionality in practice and all conventionality in theory there remained an immovable remnant. And this, fast anchored in unreasoning inherited instinct, stubbornly resisted their joint attack. In former instances of somewhat similar discoveries, he had winged swiftly, and gracefully, away; now, to his astonishment, he found that his wings were snared. Without intention on his part, without effort on her part, he was fairly caught. Nor was he struggling against the toils.
They had been together many times since the return from Furnaceville. And usually it was just he and she, dining in the open air, or taking long drives or walks, or sailing the river or the bay. But their perplexed state of mind had kept them from all but subtle reference to the one subject of which both were thinking more and more intently and intensely. One night they were driving in a hansom after a dinner on the Savoy balcony—he suddenly bent and kissed the long sleeve of her thin summer dress at the wrist. “You light a flame that goes dancing through my veins,” he said. “I wish I could find new words to put it in. But I’ve only the old ones, Emily—I love you and I want your love—I want you. This is an unconditional surrender and I’m begging you to receive it. You won’t say no, will you, Emily?”
Her eyes were brilliant and her cheeks pale. But she succeeded in controlling her voice so that she could put a little mockery into her tone when she said: “What—you! You, who are notoriously opposed to unconditional surrender. I never expected to live to see the day when you would praise treason and proclaim yourself a traitor.”
“I love you,” he said—“that’s all the answer I can make.”
“And only a few days ago some one was repeating to me a remark of yours—let me see, how did you put it? Oh, yes—‘love is a bird that does not sing well in a cage.’”
“I said it—and I meant it,” he replied. “And I love you—that’s all. I still believe what I said, but—please, Emily, dear—bring the cage!”
The mockery in her face gave place to a serious look. “I wonder,” she said, “does love sing at all in a cage? I’ve never known an instance, though I’ve read and heard of them. But they’re almost all a long way off, or a long time ago, or among old-fashioned people.”
“But I’m old-fashioned, I find—and won’t you be, dear? And I think we might teach our wild bird to sing in a cage, don’t you?”
Emily made no answer but continued to watch the dark trees, that closed in on either side of the shining drive.
“Since I’ve known you, Emily, I’ve found a new side to my nature—one I did not suspect the existence of. Perhaps it didn’t exist until I knew you.”
“It has been so with me,” she said. She had been surprised and even disquieted by the upbursting of springs of tenderness and gentleness and longing since she had known Marlowe.
“Do you care—a little, dear?” he asked.
She nodded. “But what were you going to say?”
“I’ve always disliked the idea of marriage,” he went on. “There’s something in me—not peculiar to me, I imagine, but in most men as well—that revolts at the idea of a bond of any kind. A man falls in love with a woman or a woman with a man. And heretofore I’ve always said to myself, how can they know that love will last?”
“They can’t know it,” replied Emily. “And when they pledge themselves to keep on loving and honouring, they must know, if they are capable of thinking, that they’ve promised something they had no right to promise. I hate to be bound. I love to be free. Nothing, nothing, could induce me to give up my freedom.”
Marlowe had expected that she would gladly put aside her idea of freedom the moment he announced that he was willing to sacrifice his own. Her earnestness disconcerted, alarmed him. “Emily!” he said in a low, intense tone, putting his hand upon hers. “Tell me”— She had turned her head and they were now looking each into the other’s eyes—“do you—can’t you—care for me?” He wondered at the appeal in his voice, at the anxiety with which he waited for her answer. “I cannot live without you, Emily.”
“But if I were tied to you,” she said, “if I felt compelled, if I felt that you were being compelled, to keep on with me—well, I’m not sure that I could continue to care or to believe that you cared.”
“Then”—he interrupted.
“But,” she went on, “I’m not great enough or wise enough, or perhaps I was too long trained to conventionality, or am too recently and incompletely freed,—to——”
“It isn’t necessary,” he began, as she hesitated and cast about for a phrase. “Perhaps—in some circumstances—I’d have hoped that it would be so. But with you—it’s different. I can’t explain myself even to myself. All I know is that my theories have gone down the wind and that—I want you. I want you on the world’s terms—for better or for worse, for ever and a day. Dear, can’t you care enough for me to take the risk?”
He put his arm round her and kissed her. She said in a faint voice, hardly more than a murmur, “I think so—yes.”
“Will you marry me, Emily?” he asked eagerly, and then he smiled with a little self-mockery. “I’ve always loathed that word ‘marry’—and all other words that mean finality. I’ve always wished to be free to change my mind and my course at any moment. And now——”
She pushed him from her, but left her hand on his shoulder. “Yes, dear, but it isn’t a finality with us. We go through a ceremony because—say, because it is convenient. But if we—either of us—cease to love, each must feel free to go. If I ever found out that you had kissed me once, merely because you thought it was expected of you, I’d despise myself—and you. If I promise to marry you, dear, you must promise to leave me free.”
“Since I could not hold you—the real you—an instant longer than you wished—I promise.” He caught her in his arms and kissed her again and again. “But you’ll never call on me to redeem my promise, will you, dear?”
“That’s why I ask you to make it. If we’re both free, we may not ever care to test it,” she answered. The words came from her mind, but with them came a tone and a look from the heart that were an answer to his.
“We—you talk the new wisdom,” he said, “but—” and he kissed her once more “feel the old wisdom, or folly—which is it? No matter—I love you.”
“The road is very bright here and carriages are coming,” she answered, sitting up and releasing herself from him. And then they both laughed at their sensitiveness to conventions.
Marlowe was all for flinging their theories overboard in the mass and accepting the routine as it is marked out for the married. But Emily refused. She could not entertain the idea of becoming a dependent upon him, absorbed in his personality. “I wish to continue to love him,” she said to herself. “And also I’d be very foolish to bind him, though he wishes to be bound. The chances are, he’d grow weary long before I did. A man’s life is fuller than a woman’s, even than a working-woman’s. And he has more temptations to wander.”
“We will marry,” she said to him, “but we will not ‘settle down’.”
“I should hope not,” he answered, with energy, as before his eyes rose a vision of himself yawning in carpet-slippers with a perambulator in the front hall.
“We will compromise with conventionality,” she went on. “We will marry, but we won’t tell anybody. And I’ll take an apartment with Joan Gresham and will go on with my work. And— Dearest, I don’t wish to become an old story to you—at least not so long as we’re young. I don’t want you as my husband. I want you to be my lover. And I want to be always, every time we meet, new and interesting to you.”
“But—why, I’d be little more than a stranger.”
“Do you think so?” She put her arms about his neck and looked him full in the eyes. “You know it wouldn’t be so.”
He thought a moment. “I see what you mean,” he said. “I suppose it is familiarity that drives love out of marriage. Whatever you wish, Strange Lady—anything, everything. We can easily try your plan.”
“And if it fails, we can ‘settle down’ just like other people, where, if we ‘settled down’ first and failed at that, we’d have nothing left to try.”
“You are so—so different from any other woman that ever was,” he said. “No wonder I love you in the way that a man loves only once.”
“And I’m determined that you shall keep on loving me.”
“I can see that you are getting ready to lead me a wild life.” There was foreboding as well as jest in his tone.