Chapter XXI: Envoy Plenipotentiary

I trailed back to my hotel, surely the most abject soul in Venice. Michaela’s misapprehension of my motives I did not resent; the American eagle in my breast had scarce a flap left—a more draggle-plumed bird I had seldom seen. But all was at an end. I had lost my Romeo.

My interview with the first of the two delinquents whom I had engaged to lure back to the path of rectitude I got over quickly on my way home. It was not a hard one. The culprit, sitting meekly on the penitent’s bench, listened to all my blame with a contrite heart; and in consideration of her contrition I condoned her evil deeds. It was easy to condone, for here I knew all, and to know all is to forgive all. Michaela would have forgiven had she seen into that poor mangled heart as I did.

Looking back over my life dispassionately from the calm height of twenty-three, as if I were looking at some other woman’s life, I think I can say I have never acted wrong—grossly and unforgivably wrong—given the circumstances. It is those alone that others fail to understand. If they understood, they must sympathise where now they blame us.

Could Michaela have watched, stage by stage, the slow organic growth of my love for Romeo; could she have felt the inevitability, the consecutiveness of the way it unfolded; could she have realised its foregone certainty as an outcome of two natures, I think, dear little soul, even she would have hesitated to call me “that horrid woman.”

But it was all past now, and she had regained her Romeo.

One culprit had recanted. I had still to face my embassy to the second high contracting party.

I sat by the balconied open window of my bedroom and looked down into the canal. It was almost the hour for Romeo’s daily passage. Slow barges with firewood drifted lazily by, then a boat-load of purple egg-fruit and heaped golden melons, with a gondola or two loitering on the look out for passengers, like our London crawlers.

At last my heart began to beat, not high as it had beaten the two previous mornings, but with a low foreboding. Another gondola swung with a graceful curve round the huge bosses of the corner palace; in it, a familiar crush Tyrolese hat, and beneath the hat, Romeo.

He gazed up at me, smiled, and waved one hand; but his look was anxious.

I leaned out and called to him: “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!”

He rose and glanced at me with checked breath and eager eyes.

“Come up here,” I faltered; “I want to speak with you.”

“In your room?” he cried, hesitating.

I felt it was no moment to stand on false convention. “Yes, in my room,” I answered. “Have I not told you I have confidence in myself and my guardian angel?”

He waved the gondolier to the steps, leaped lightly out, English athlete that he was, and was with me in a moment.

I might have treated the situation melodramatically and hissed out at him “Traitor!” (But then, it is true, I unconsciously shared his treachery.) Instead of that I treated it like a woman, and burst into tears before him.

He drew a chair by my side. His white face quivered. “You have seen Meta?” he faltered out.

I could feel his heart throb.

“Yes,” I answered, “I have seen her, and—I find I know her. Romeo, we were all wrong. We were deceiving our own hearts with specious sophisms. She said to me in her soft small voice, all choked with tears, ‘The years must count; the years must count!’—and—she was right when she said it!”

He flung himself upon me. “Juliet!” he cried, “dear Juliet, I too have suffered. I have battled with my own soul. The beast has fought the angel and the angel the man in me. When I see her, when I am with her—so gentle, so childish, so cruelly hurt by my coldness, or what she thinks my coldness—how can I have the heart to break to her the resolution we formed? Yet the moment I leave her I know it is the right one. It would be wrong of me to marry her now, having found my true mate—wrong for her own sake. ‘The whole man—body, soul, and spirit—or nothing.’ Do not go back on your own words. It would be treason to the eternal cause of woman.”

He spoke so vehemently that I faltered.

Then Michaela’s pale face, with the gentle blue eyes swollen red from weeping, came up like a mist before me. “You shall not wrong that child!” I cried. “Much as I love you, Romeo, not even for my sake will I allow you to wrong her. She is right and we are wrong; the years must count. She has grown up with your love inextricably twined by rootlets and tendrils through the fibre of her being; to tear it away now were to tear her very heart out. She lives on your affection. To see is to understand; before I saw her I thought as we thought at the Lido. Now I know better. I will not allow you to wrong her.”

He drew away a step and looked me over with his keen eyes from head to foot. I quailed before his glance, so full it was of admiration. “My Juliet!” he cried. “Why talk? I love you for _this_ better than I have ever loved you! That you can contemplate such a sacrifice for honour’s sake and for justice—the greater to the less, you to Meta—shows me you are more worthy to be loved than even I thought you. I _cannot_ marry anyone but you. You, you, you! O, God,” he flung himself upon me in an ecstasy, “to think that in a world which holds such a woman as you they should call upon me to content myself with that wax doll of a Meta!”

I untwined his arms quietly. I was fighting now the battle of my sex, and I almost forgot myself in my advocacy of Michaela. “You shall not speak so of her!” I cried; “the girl whom you have loved for years—the girl to whom you have uttered such vows, on whom you have bestowed such kisses. It is an insult to our sex. The years must count—the years and the endearments.”

He stood away and began again. “Juliet,” he murmured, in caressing tones, and in his flute-like voice, as if he loved to repeat my name, “there is one woman in the world supremely fitted for me. She has courage, she has wit, imagination, fancy. She can hold her own; vivacious, brave, strenuous. One of her stray black elf-locks is worth all Meta’s loose gold. Yet she has high purpose enough to plead another woman’s cause against her own heart, her own happiness. Her brain is alert; her eye electric; her soul womanly. The more she argues, the more does she make me admire her, reverence her, worship her. Go on pleading if you will, dear heart; I love to hear you, to watch you; but every word you say, every hand you move, for Meta, only strengthens my resolve that you I will have, or I will have nobody. Against your will, I will make you happy.”

He sat down by my side again, and bent towards me coaxingly. In his low sweet voice he began to reason. I listened while he said over again every argument we had used together by the shrine of St. Nicholas, with others like them. If he married Meta, how could she hold his heart? She would be the mistress of his house, a sort of superior pet bird, to be tricked out in fine feathers, to be coaxed, stroked, fondled; but not a wife. If he married me, we should go through the world together, equally paired, soul-wedded, each mirroring the other’s mind, each respecting, admiring, reinforcing the other. We two were natural complements. Why seek to throw him back from the higher upon the lower?

I listened and trembled. What he said was so flattering to one’s own inner vanity, seemed so exactly what one thought in private when one dared to be frank with oneself, had such a show of eternal and immutable reason, that the temptation to go back on my word and accept his argument as true was almost irresistible. If I had not seen Michaela, I think I should have yielded. Love, one’s own heart, the man one adores at one’s feet, these are dangerous assailants. But I closed my eyes, and there Michaela’s blue eyes rose up, appealing to me in the gondola, with that piteous cry, “The years must count; the years must count!” wailed out ever from her heart; and I knew I was fighting the common battle of womanhood. If I were to turn traitor now, I should turn traitor to whatever I had within me best worth calling a conviction.

He seized my hand and kissed it. When the lips of the man you love touch you, it is hard to refuse. But I drew the hand away. He followed it up. His breath was warm upon my cheek. My bosom rose in a tumult. I began to fear I had presumed too much upon my guardian angel. If Romeo pressed me hard now, I must throw Michaela overboard—I must forget his honour, the years that count, the battle of my sex, all that is sacred on earth, everything save myself and Romeo. If he asked me, I must say, “Yes; let the white girl go; I will be yours, my Romeo.”

Then, conscious of my own weakness—with an impulse as if from without, of a sudden I flung myself on my knees, and prayed silently and earnestly for strength to do right, strength to refrain from betraying Michaela.

Romeo stood off with clasped hands, observing me in dead silence.

I rose from my knees another woman. The soul of womanhood found voice within me. “Romeo, dear Romeo,” I cried, facing him, and speaking like one inspired, “it is not a question for you; it is a question for me. I love you with all my soul; but I refuse to marry you. I will not be a traitor; the years must count: go back to Meta!”

He caught my hand in his. I let it lie like a stone. “Do not send me away,” he implored. “Let me stop with you a little!”

I sank into a chair. He did the same. “But remember,” I gasped, between two sighs, “this is final.”

Tears rose to his eyes. He began to speak once more. “You must not think, dearest,” he said, “I have not felt for Meta. Not all these nights have I slept; but, honestly, in the dark, I thought it out, and I came to the conclusion it would be best in the end—even for Meta.”

“Romeo,” I said, raising my eyes, “do you love me?”

He made a hasty gesture as if he would fling himself upon me once more.

I waved him off with one open palm. “Then promise me, promise me, you will go back to Meta.”

“I cannot!” he cried. “I love you.”

“Will you go back to Meta?”

It was a hard, long struggle. We parried, thrust, marched, countermarched, evaded; but I had taken it in hand, and I determined to finish it. Inch by inch falling back, but still fighting, he gave way. He saw I was in earnest. Behind each line of defence, each logical hedge, he tried to argue it out again. I cut him short with a hasty gesture. “A man, yes, he can forget the years; but a woman—never!”

At last, worn out, he promised. In the agony of my excitement I took his yielding as a personal triumph. I had asked of my lover a difficult gift, and by dint of woman’s armoury, had prevailed on him to grant it.

“But—you will stop on at the office?” he asked at last, holding his breath.

I turned on him. “How could I? For Meta’s sake, impossible; for my own, an infamy.”

“And—I must never see you again?”

I bowed my head. “These things are made so. It is _yes_ or _no_. If _yes_, for life; if _no_, then never.”

He advanced towards me, with his lips trembling visibly. “I may say good-bye?” he faltered.

My heart leaped to break its strings. I knew not what to say. At last—“Yes, if it is good-bye, and if you go back to Meta.”

He seized me in his arms. I will not deny that for one whole minute I lay there sobbing, happy. It is little, for a lifetime. Then I moved him away softly. He clung to me, panting. “Now you must go,” I whispered. “Do not tell her it was _I_. Keep my secret!”

I opened the door. For a second he lingered. I waved him away. I could endure it no longer. Looking back and breathing hard, he passed through into the passage. I turned the key in the lock to satisfy myself that that embassy was fulfilled; then I fell on the bed, and cried a low cry, “Romeo! Romeo!”