But Mary Ann had broken down under the touch of his hand and the gentleness of his tones.
"I was a dead leaf so long, I don't care!" she sobbed passionately. "Nobody never bothered to call me wicked then. Why should I bother now?"
Beneath the mingled emotions her words caused him was a sense of surprise at her recollection of his metaphor.
"Hush! You're a silly little child," he repeated sternly. "Hush! or Mrs. Leadbatter will hear you." He went to the door and closed it tightly. "Listen, Mary Ann! Let me tell you once for all, that even if you were fool enough to be willing to go with me, I wouldn't take you with me. It would be doing you a terrible wrong."
She interrupted him quietly,
"Why more now than before?"
He dropped her hand as if stung, and turned away. He knew he could not answer that to his own satisfaction, much less to hers.
"You're a silly little baby," he repeated resentfully. "I think you had better go down now. Missus will be wondering."
Mary Ann's sobs grew more spasmodic. "You are going away without me," she cried hysterically.
He went to the door again, as if apprehensive of an eavesdropper. The scene was becoming terrible. The passive personality had developed with a vengeance.
"Hush, hush!" he cried imperatively.
"You are going away without me. I shall never see you again."
"Be sensible, Mary Ann. You will be--"
"You won't take me with you."
"How can I take you with me?" he cried brutally, losing every vestige of tenderness for this distressful vixen. "Don't you understand that it's impossible-unless I marry you?" he concluded contemptuously.
Mary Ann's sobs ceased for a moment.
"Can't you marry me, then?" she said plaintively.
"You know it is impossible," he replied curtly.
"Why is it impossible?" she breathed.
"Because--" He saw her sobs were on the point of breaking out, and had not the courage to hear them afresh. He dared not wound her further by telling her straight out that, with all her money, she was ridiculously unfit to bear his name-that it was already a condescension for him to have offered her his companionship on any terms.
He resolved to temporise again.
"Go downstairs now, there's a good girl; and I'll tell you in the morning. I'll think it over. Go to bed early and have a long, nice sleep-missus will let you-now. It isn't Monday yet; we have plenty of time to talk it over."
She looked up at him with large, appealing eyes, uncertain, but calming down.
"Do, now, there's a dear." He stroked her wet cheek soothingly.
"Yessir," and almost instinctively she put up her lips for a good-night kiss. He brushed them hastily with his. She went out softly, drying her eyes. His own grew moist-he was touched by the pathos of her implicit trust. The soft warmth of her lips still thrilled him. How sweet and loving she was! The little dialogue rang in his brain.
"Can't you marry me, then?"
"You know it is impossible."
"Why is it impossible?"
"Because--"
"Because what?" an audacious voice whispered. Why should he not? He stilled the voice, but it refused to be silent-was obdurate, insistent, like Mary Ann herself. "Because-oh, because of a hundred things," he told it. "Because she is no fit mate for me-because she would degrade me, make me ridiculous-an unfortunate fortune-hunter, the butt of the witlings. How could I take her about as my wife? How could she receive my friends? For a housekeeper-a good, loving housekeeper-she is perfection, but for a wife-my wife-the companion of my soul-impossible!"
"Why is it impossible?" repeated the voice, catching up the cue. And then, from that point, the dialogue began afresh.
"Because this, and because that, and because the other-in short, because I am Lancelot and she is merely Mary Ann."
"But she is not merely Mary Ann any longer," urged the voice.
"Yes, for all her money, she is merely Mary Ann. And am I to sell myself for her money-I who have stood out so nobly, so high-mindedly, through all these years of privation and struggle! And her money is all in dollars. Pah! I smell the oil. Struck ile! Of all things in the world, her brother should just go and strike ile!" A great shudder traversed his form. "Everything seems to have been arranged out of pure cussedness, just to spite me. She would have been happier without the money, poor child-without the money, but with me. What will she do with all her riches? She will only be wretched-like me."
"Then why not be happy together?"
"Impossible."
"Why is it impossible?"
"Because her dollars would stick in my throat-the oil would make me sick. And what would Peter say, and my brother (not that I care what he says), and my acquaintances?"
"What does that matter to you? While you were a dead leaf nobody bothered to talk about you; they let you starve-you, with your genius-now you can let them talk-you, with your heiress. Five hundred thousand pounds. More than you will make with all your operas if you live a century. Fifteen thousand a year. Why, you could have all your works performed at your own expense, and for your own sole pleasure if you chose, as the King of Bavaria listened to Wagner's operas. You could devote your life to the highest art-nay, is it not a duty you owe to the world? Would it not be a crime against the future to draggle your wings with sordid cares, to sink to lower aims by refusing this heaven-sent boon?"
The thought clung to him. He rose and laid out heaps of muddled manuscript-opera disjecta-and turned their pages.
"Yes-yes-give us life!" they seemed to cry to him. "We are dead drops of ink, wake us to life and beauty. How much longer are we to lie here, dusty in death? We have waited so patiently-have pity on us, raise us up from our silent tomb, and we will fly abroad through the whole earth, chanting your glory; yea, the world shall be filled to eternity with the echoes of our music and the splendour of your name."
But he shook his head and sighed, and put them back in their niches, and placed the comic opera he had begun in the centre of the table.
"There lie the only dollars that will ever come my way," he said aloud. And, humming the opening bars of a lively polka from the manuscript, he took up his pen and added a few notes. Then he paused; the polka would not come-the other voice was louder.
"It would be a degradation," he repeated, to silence it. "It would be merely for her money. I don't love her."
"Are you so sure of that?"
"If I really loved her I shouldn't refuse to marry her."
"Are you so sure of that?"
"What's the use of all this wire-drawing?-the whole thing is impossible."
"Why is it impossible?"
He shrugged his shoulders impatiently, refusing to be drawn back into the eddy, and completed the bar of the polka.
Then he threw down his pen, rose and paced the room in desperation.
"Was ever any man in such a dilemma?" he cried aloud.
"Did ever any man get such a chance?" retorted his silent tormentor.
"Yes, but I mustn't seize the chance-it would be mean."
"It would be meaner not to. You're not thinking of that poor girl-only of yourself. To leave her now would be more cowardly than to have left her when she was merely Mary Ann. She needs you even more now that she will be surrounded by sharks and adventurers. Poor, poor Mary Ann. It is you who have the right to protect her now; you were kind to her when the world forgot her. You owe it to yourself to continue to be good to her."
"No, no, I won't humbug myself. If I married her it would only be for her money."
"No, no, don't humbug yourself. You like her. You care for her very much. You are thrilling at this very moment with the remembrance of her lips to-night. Think of what life will be with her-life full of all that is sweet and fair-love and riches, and leisure for the highest art, and fame and the promise of immortality. You are irritable, sensitive, delicately organised; these sordid, carking cares, these wretched struggles, these perpetual abasements of your highest self-a few more years of them-they will wreck and ruin you, body and soul. How many men of genius have married their housekeepers even-good clumsy, homely bodies, who have kept their husbands' brain calm and his pillow smooth. And again, a man of genius is the one man who can marry anybody. The world expects him to be eccentric. And Mary Ann is no coarse city weed, but a sweet country bud. How splendid will be her blossoming under the sun! Do not fear that she will ever shame you; she will look beautiful, and men will not ask her to talk. Nor will you want her to talk. She will sit silent in the cosy room where you are working, and every now and again you will glance up from your work at her and draw inspiration from her sweet presence. So pull yourself together, man; your troubles are over, and life henceforth one long blissful dream. Come, burn me that tinkling, inglorious comic opera, and let the whole sordid past mingle with its ashes."