She did not answer for a long time. It was as if everything in the world had drawn to the breaking point, and in a minute must certainly break.
"Yes," she said, at last, "I know."
Abruptly, by some impalpable sign, he knew what the answer would be, and he remained still.
She bent down over him and softened to her wonderful smile.
"Promise me," she insisted.
He promised with his still face.
"If _I_ do not hold you cheap, you will never hold yourself cheap----"
"If you do not hold me cheap, you mean?"
She bent down quite close beside him. "I hold you," she said, and then whispered, "_dear_."
"Me?"
She laughed aloud.
He was astonished beyond measure. He stipulated, lest there might be some misconception, "You will marry me?"
She was laughing, inundated by the sense of bountiful power, of possession and success. He looked quite a nice little man to have.
"Yes," she laughed. "What else could I mean?" and, "Yes."
He felt as a praying hermit might have felt, snatched from the midst of his quiet devotions, his modest sackcloth and ashes, and hurled neck and crop over the glittering gates of Paradise, smack among the iridescent wings, the bright-eyed Cherubim. He felt like some lowly and righteous man dynamited into Bliss....
His hand tightened upon the rope that steadies one upon the stairs of stone. He was for kissing her hand and did not.
He said not a word more. He turned about, and with something very like a scared expression on his face led the way into the obscurity of their descent.
--3
Everyone seemed to understand. Nothing was said, nothing was explained, the merest touch of the eyes sufficed. As they clustered in the castle gateway Coote, Kipps remembered afterwards, laid hold of his arm as if by chance and pressed it. It was quite evident he knew. His eyes, his nose, shone with benevolent congratulations, shone, too, with the sense of a good thing conducted to its climax. Mrs. Walshingham, who had seemed a little fatigued by the hill, recovered, and was even obviously stirred by affection for her daughter. There was, in passing, a motherly caress. She asked Kipps to give her his arm in walking down the steep.
Kipps in a sort of dream obeyed. He found himself trying to attend to her, and soon he was attending.
She and Kipps talked like sober, responsible people and went slowly, while the others drifted down the hill together, a loose little group of four. He wondered momentarily what they would talk about and then sank into his conversation with Mrs. Walshingham. He conversed, as it were, out of his superficial personality, and his inner self lay stunned in unsuspected depths within. It had an air of being an interesting and friendly talk, almost their first long talk together. Hitherto he had had a sort of fear of Mrs. Walshingham, as of a person possibly satirical, but she proved a soul of sense and sentiment, and Kipps, for all of his abstraction, got on with her unexpectedly well. They talked a little upon scenery and the inevitable melancholy attaching to the old ruins and the thought of vanished generations.
"Perhaps they jousted here," said Mrs. Walshingham.
"They was up to all sorts of things," said Kipps, and then the two came round to Helen. She spoke of her daughter's literary ambitions. "She will do something, I feel sure. You know, Mr. Kipps, it's a great responsibility to a mother to feel her daughter is--exceptionally clever."
"I dessay it is," said Kipps. "There's no mistake about that."
She spoke, too, of her son--almost like Helen's twin--alike, yet different. She made Kipps feel quite fatherly. "They are so quick, so artistic," she said, "so full of ideas. Almost they frighten me. One feels they need opportunities--as other people need air."
She spoke of Helen's writing. "Even when she was quite a little dot she wrote verse."
(Kipps, sensation.)
"Her father had just the same tastes----" Mrs. Walshingham turned a little beam of half-pathetic reminiscence on the past. "He was more artist than business man. That was the trouble.... He was misled by his partner, and when the crash came everyone blamed him.... Well, it doesn't do to dwell on horrid things--especially to-day. There are bright days, Mr. Kipps, and dark days. And mine have not always been bright."
Kipps presented a face of Coote-like sympathy.
She diverged to talk of flowers, and Kipps' mind was filled with the picture of Helen bending down towards him in the Keep....
They spread the tea under the trees before the little inn, and at a certain moment Kipps became aware that everyone in the party was simultaneously and furtively glancing at him. There might have been a certain tension had it not been first of all for Coote and his tact, and afterwards for a number of wasps. Coote was resolved to make this memorable day pass off well, and displayed an almost boisterous sense of fun. Then young Walshingham began talking of the Roman remains below Lympne, intending to lead up to the Overman. "These old Roman chaps," he said, and then the wasps arrived. They killed three in the jam alone.
Kipps killed wasps, as if it were in a dream, and handed things to the wrong people, and maintained a thin surface of ordinary intelligence with the utmost difficulty. At times he became aware, aware with an extraordinary vividness, of Helen. Helen was carefully not looking at him and behaving with amazing coolness and ease. But just for that one time there was the faintest suggestion of pink beneath the ivory of her cheeks....
Tacitly the others conceded to Kipps the right to paddle back with Helen; he helped her into the canoe and took his paddle, and, paddling slowly, dropped behind the others. And now his inner self stirred again.
He said nothing to her. How could he ever say anything to her again? She spoke to him at rare intervals about reflections and the flowers and the trees, and he nodded in reply. But his mind moved very slowly forward now from the point at which it had fallen stunned in the Lympne Keep, moving forward to the beginnings of realisation. As yet he did not say even in the recesses of his heart that she was his. But he perceived that the goddess had come from her altar amazingly, and had taken him by the hand!
The sky was a vast splendour, and then close to them were the dark, protecting trees and the shining, smooth, still water. He was an erect, black outline to her; he plied his paddle with no unskilful gesture, the water broke to snaky silver and glittered far behind his strokes.
Indeed, he did not seem bad to her. Youth calls to youth the wide world through, and her soul rose in triumph over his subjection. And behind him was money and opportunity, freedom and London, a great background of seductively indistinct hopes. To him her face was a warm dimness. In truth, he could not see her eyes, but it seemed to his love-witched brain he did and that they shone out at him like dusky stars.
All the world that evening was no more than a shadowy frame of darkling sky and water and dripping bows about Helen. He seemed to see through things with an extraordinary clearness; she was revealed to him certainly, as the cause and essence of it all.
He was indeed at his Heart's Desire. It was one of those times when there seems to be no future, when Time has stopped and we are at an end.
Kipps, that evening, could not have imagined a to-morrow, all that his imagination had pointed towards was attained. His mind stood still and took the moments as they came.
--4
About nine that night Coote came around to Kipps' new apartment in the Upper Sandgate Road--the house on the Leas had been let furnished--and Kipps made an effort toward realisation. He was discovered sitting at the open window and without a lamp, quite still. Coote was deeply moved, and he pressed Kipps' palm and laid a knobby, white hand on his shoulder and displayed the sort of tenderness becoming in a crisis. Kipps was too moved that night, and treated Coote like a very dear brother.
"She's splendid," said Coote, coming to it abruptly.
"Isn't she?" said Kipps.
"I couldn't help noticing her face," said Coote.... "You know, my dear Kipps, that this is better than a legacy."
"I don't deserve it," said Kipps.
"You can't say that."
"I don't. I can't 'ardly believe it. I can't believe it at all. No!"
There followed an expressive stillness.
"It's wonderful," said Kipps. "It takes me like that."
Coote made a faint blowing noise, and so again they came for a time of silence.
"And it began--before your money?"
"When I was in 'er class," said Kipps, solemnly.