THE odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to come to her, and when he came she told him of her engagement.
“But no one knows of it as yet except yourself,” she added; “and no one is to know, for the present. I want it kept a secret.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Benoliel, looking at her curiously. “And why?”
“There will be a certain amount of ill-natured talk,” Cynthia returned in a confusion. “And I want the time for it to be as short as possible. It will cease after we are married.”
“People will say that Rames is an adventurer, who is marrying you for your money,” said Mr. Benoliel bluntly, and Cynthia turned on him with spirit.
“Lord Helmsdale’s mother will, and other mothers would have said the same of Lord Helmsdale if I had married him.”
“So it’s to spare the feelings of Harry Rames that you are keeping your engagement secret,” said Mr. Benoliel with an ironical wonder. “I should never have suspected him of such delicate susceptibilities.”
“Well, I should be uncomfortable too!” cried Cynthia, bending puzzled and indignant brows at him. “I think you are quite horrid.”
Benoliel sustained her indignation unabashed.
“Is that the only reason, Cynthia?” he asked.
“You wanted me married,” Cynthia continued. “You ought to be very, very pleased.”
Mr. Benoliel, however, was not to be lured from his question into a discussion upon the propriety of his feelings. He repeated it.
“Is fear of gossip the only reason, Cynthia, which makes you keep your engagement secret?”
Cynthia again showed signs of confusion. Mr. Benoliel wore his air of omniscience. She sat down upon a chair.
“What do you mean, Mr. Benoliel?”
“This,” said he. “I have noticed that the young ladies who keep their engagements secret are not, as a rule, very much in love with the men they are engaged to. They leave themselves a loop-hole of escape.”
Cynthia’s cheeks flamed. Certainly she had intended to spare Harry Rames and herself some uncomfortable weeks. But would she have minded those weeks had she cared for him? The question came swiftly, and as swiftly was answered. Had she cared for him she would have wanted to wear him like a ribbon on her breast for all the world to see. She realized it with a pang. She would have run quickly forward to meet the gossip and do battle. But she had not run forward. It was true that she had left herself a pathway of retreat, and rather by instinct than from any deliberate plan. Her wariness had prompted her. Once more she had wanted to be safe. But nothing of this was she going to acknowledge to Mr. Benoliel.
“I think you are extraordinarily horrid,” she said again with a cold dignity, and hoped that her stateliness would crush her inquisitor.
“When do you propose to marry, then?” he asked.
“Just before Whitsuntide. The House will rise for ten days, I hear, at the least. We shall announce the marriage just before the House rises;” and that indeed was the plan upon which she had agreed only that morning with Harry Rames.
“Then there is no hurry,” said Mr. Benoliel. “Perhaps you and Captain Rames will pay me a visit in the country before Whitsuntide comes.”
He spoke as though he accepted the situation, and turned to other subjects, fearing to confirm Cynthia in obstinacy by any show of opposition.
“Certainly,” she said; “we shall be pleased to come;” and a month later she and Harry Rames came one Friday afternoon to Culver.
The house stood within hearing of the bells of Ludsey, but on that side of the city opposite to the White House. Benoliel had built it himself, and to those who knew the man but slightly it was an astonishing production. Captain Rames, for instance, whose taste was not very meticulous, never ceased to marvel at it. Even this Friday afternoon, as the car swung round a turn of the country road and the thing stood before him, he contemplated it with amazement. It was nothing but a monstrous new villa of red and yellow brick, a pretentious ghastliness of towers and flashing glass rising from the middle of a small bare field within twenty yards of the roadway. An avenue of fir-trees not yet shoulder-high wound to the front door, and there was no need for it to wind. Circular beds of glaring flowers disfigured the new lawns, and little bushes of evergreens, which would one distant day make an effort to be shrubberies, gave to the house a most desolate and suburban look. It seemed wonderful to Harry Rames that so nice and delicate a person as Mr. Benoliel could bear to live in it at all; and still more wonderful that with a dozen of the most beautiful houses in England bosomed in deep meadows and whispered to by immemorial elms, within an easy motor-ride to choose from as his models, he should have devised this unconscionable edifice.
Sir James Burrell, the surgeon, however, who was sitting opposite to Harry Rames in the car, and next to Cynthia, took a different view. He gazed at the house with satisfaction. For it would add yet another subtle paragraph to his character sketch of Mr. Benoliel.
“How extraordinary,” he cried, “and yet how like the man! That’s just the house which Benoliel would have built. Only one had not the insight to guess it. I love it!” and he leaned his head out of the window and chuckled at the building’s grotesqueness. “Yes, I love it. The fitness of things appeals to me.” And he turned to the astonished Captain Rames. “You don’t see the exquisite appropriateness of that—let us not call it a house—that detached residence to Isaac Benoliel?”
“Well, I don’t,” said Harry Rames. “He always seemed to me to set up as a lover of beautiful things.”
“And the love is genuine,” said Sir James, fairly off at a gallop upon his hobby. “He doesn’t set up. The love is almost a quality of his race. Yes, but his race doesn’t always know what things are beautiful. There’s the explanation of that building—race, which confounds logic and is quite untroubled by inconsistencies. There’s Benoliel’s race in every line of it. He’s of the Orient. He loves flamboyancy and gaudiness. He may conceal it carefully from us. But every now and then it must break out, and it has run riot here. Does the East repair and mend? No, it lets its old buildings decay and builds afresh. That’s why Mr. Benoliel passes by your stately houses all up for sale in their parks and builds this villa. Remember, Captain Rames, though Mr. Benoliel talks with you and walks with you, he doesn’t think with you. Behind those old tired eyes of his, he thinks as the East thinks.”
Thus Sir James Burrell, and the car stopped at the front door before he could utter another word. He was not sorry, nor indeed were the other occupants of the carriage. He was merely trying his new paragraph on the dog, so to speak. He needed time to eliminate the unnecessary, and make it vivid with the single word, and fix it up with a nice juxtaposition of paradoxes and altogether to furbish it for presentation.
“He does talk!” said Harry Rames to Cynthia.
“Yes, doesn’t he,” she replied with a laugh, and then grew serious. “But I wonder whether he’s right. I wonder whether Mr. Benoliel thinks and judges from principles which are true to him, but not true to us.” Her eyes rested with a strange and thoughtful scrutiny on Harry’s face.
“Why should you trouble?” said Harry Rames.
“It makes a little difference to me,” said Cynthia. “Perhaps more than a little.”
For old Daventry’s last words weighed upon her. He had bidden her in troubles and difficulties to seek advice from Isaac Benoliel. He had thought much of his wisdom. She had herself accepted it as a thing beyond question, and a timely help. Now, she began to ask herself, was his wisdom, if it was born of the East and tempered by the instincts of his race, fit for service in her generation and for her people? She pondered the question during the next two days, and leaned more and more to Sir James Burrell’s way of thinking from a trivial reason; the inside of Culver agreed so completely with its exterior. Its flamboyancy set the eyes aching. Its wall papers were indigestibly rich with colored flowers, and never was there a blue so vividly blue as the blue of his velvet curtains and triple-pile carpets. It is true that there were treasures of art in Culver, glowing pictures of the early Flemish school, with their crowds of figures, each one a finished miniature, and behind the crowds the clear sky and translucent air; there were marvels of jade, and glorious little statues of silver and marble, but their delicate beauty was spoilt and lost in the riot of gorgeousness which framed them.
One homely place alone there was in that building. The great hall, all colonnades and galleries, occupied the centre of the house. But on each side of the wide chimney, where of an evening, even in the summer, a fire usually burned, a great screen was drawn; and these screens enclosed a space before the fire set about with comfortable chairs, a sofa or two, and little mahogany tables, and made of it a place of comfort. In this space on the Sunday night Cynthia came to grips with Isaac Benoliel, and understood at last his life, and something of his philosophy.
It was eleven o’clock, or a little later. The ladies were retiring for the night. Cynthia herself had her foot upon the lowest step of the stair, and was thinking that after all she was to be spared an argument, when Mr. Benoliel came from the corridor of the smoking-room where he had left the men.
“Will you give me a few minutes, Cynthia?” he asked, and she turned at once and walked to the fire. She stood with a foot upon the rail of the hearth and a hand upon the mantel-shelf, quiet but mutinous. Mr. Benoliel followed her and sat down in a straight-backed arm-chair, facing the fire, and a little way behind her.
“You have not yet announced your engagement, Cynthia?” he began.
“No.”
“Yet Whitsuntide is very close. Perhaps you have thought better of it?”
“No.”
Mr. Benoliel looked at her as she stood, aggressively showing him her back, and smiled at her, with some amusement, a great deal of affection, and a little pity.
“Of course,” he said, “I have not much right to interfere, and yet I should like you to hear, Cynthia, what I have to say. Otherwise I shall fail your father.”
Cynthia turned about at once, and her manner toward him changed with her movement. The appeal of his voice and words had its effect upon her, and not that alone. Mr. Benoliel was so neat and supple, he sat with so upright a figure in his chair, his hair was so black and sleek and thick that she was seldom really conscious of his age. But at times, as now, when by chance she looked straight into his eyes and noticed their fatigue and their patience, and how the light had quite gone out of them, it came upon her almost as a shock that this was an old, old man; and because she was surprised she exaggerated his age, and gave to him in return for his pity the cruel pity of youth. She was in the mood almost to admit his right to interfere. But her gift of silence and the weariness which had become instinctive checked her. She moved forward to him with a gracious deference—that was all—and said, standing in front of him:
“I am glad of course to hear anything you have to say, Mr. Benoliel. You disapprove of my marriage.”
“Yes.”
“Yet you wanted me married.”
“To the right person.”
“Lord Helmsdale,” said Cynthia, with a little pout of disdain.
“Youth should marry youth,” returned Mr. Benoliel.
He looked the girl over from head to foot. She stood in front of him in her delicate frock of soft white satin and lace, long-limbed and slender, with the gloss of youth upon the heavy curls of her fair hair, and the rose of youth on her cheeks, and the sheen of youth upon her white and pretty shoulders. She was the color of a flower, and had the freshness of a flower upon a morning of dew. From the tip of her slim satin slipper to the ribbon in her hair, she was dressed with a daintiness which set her beauty proudly off. To Mr. Benoliel she was radiant and wonderful with youth.
“Yes,” he repeated, “youth should marry youth, Cynthia, especially when it is such rare youth as yours.”
Cynthia was pleased. She knew a compliment when she heard it.
“You have shifted your ground, Mr. Benoliel,” she said, smiling down at him.
“No,” he answered.
“It was social position, which you wanted me to marry in Lord Helmsdale.”
“That, too. Yes. I don’t make light of it. I am old enough not to blow a trumpet round the walls of Jericho in these days,” he said. “But I did not tell you all my thought. I am an old man, and there are certain things I am shy of talking about. I am like you in that, Cynthia, eh? We neither of us wear our hearts upon our sleeves or are fond of talking sentiment. But I am compelled to to-night. I think the most beautiful thing in the world is a couple of young lovers facing all the unknown future, hand in hand, high of hope and courage, and serious with the uplifting seriousness of love. Now you are not in love, Cynthia, and he’s not young. So, from my point of view, on both sides this marriage falls short of the marriage which should be.”
“Captain Rames is not old,” replied Cynthia. She omitted all reference to the point in which she herself failed according to Benoliel’s standard. Isaac Benoliel noticed her admission, and, though he made no comment, he became still more determined to prevent the marriage if by any means he could. He had drawn his bow at a venture. With that touch of charlatanism which made him delight in posing as omniscient, he had stated as a fact what he only suspected. But she would have denied the suggestion, and indignantly, had it been false. He was sure now that she did not care for Harry Rames as a young woman should care for the man she is to marry. Moreover there had been a note of involuntary regret in Cynthia’s voice as she had answered him. It seemed that she too agreed with him as to what should have been, and grieved that it was not to be.
“No,” he conceded, “Captain Rames is not old. But neither is he young. He is forty, or thereabouts. He has lived by eighteen years longer than you have. And so—I will tell you the truth, Cynthia”—and he leaned forward with his hands upon his knees and his eyes shrewdly watching her face—“and so I am afraid. Yes, I look forward into your future, and I am afraid.”
He saw Cynthia wince. So often had she spoken just such words to herself. Ever since she had crouched by the door in the dark room at the estancia, fear had walked at her heels with its shadow thrown upon the road beyond her feet. Was it to lie in front of her all her life? Here was her chosen adviser thinking her thoughts. She was not to be comforted by Sir James Burrell’s reasonings. Mr. Benoliel might be altogether compact of the Orient. None the less his words knocked shrewdly at her heart. She sank down at the end of a sofa close at Mr. Benoliel’s side, her face all troubled and discouraged.
“But I accepted Harry so that I might be safe,” she cried tremulously, “so that I might no longer be afraid,” and then sat with her cheeks afire, conscious that she had betrayed herself.
“I mean—” she corrected herself hastily.
“Just what you said, Cynthia,” rejoined Mr. Benoliel. Once more he had shot his arrow at a venture and reached the mark. He had now for the first time the key to her. Much was explained to him. But he spoke as though the explanation had long been known to him.
“Yes, ever since I have known you, you have lived in fear, Cynthia,” he said.
Cynthia did not again deny the truth. She found a better argument in the recollection of old Mr. Daventry’s death-bed.
“But there was no reason for the fear,” she cried. “It was groundless. I tortured myself for nothing. It was all due to a foolish mistake.” She hesitated, choosing her words so that they might carry some sort of conviction and yet reveal nothing. “The mistake arose because—people—were silent—and they were silent because they wished to spare, and thought that knowledge would hurt. It was the silence which hurt.”
“This time,” said Mr. Benoliel, “silence shall not do harm. Nor shall a thought to spare. I will be frank with you as to why I am afraid, if you will listen to me. I shall have to tell you a little about myself. I shall not spare myself.”
He spoke with reluctance. For he was reticent about himself. Cynthia realized suddenly how very little she knew of him, though she probably knew him more intimately than any one else, except the separated wife in Eaton Square. He had kept his secrets better than she had kept hers. Now he was going to reveal himself, and certainly to open old wounds for her sake.
“Thank you,” she said gently. “I shall know of what you are afraid, of something perhaps which I may now be able to avert. But I ought to tell you at once, that nothing which you say can change me.”
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