第139章

"N-no," he replied, deliberately."I guess--I won't.""You won't?" Lady Joan repeated after him."Then I will."He made a stride forward and laid his hand on her arm.

"No.Not on your life.You won't, either--if I can help it.And you're going to LET me help it."Almost any one but herself--any one, at least, who did not resent his very existence--would have felt the drop in his voice which suddenly struck the note of boyish, friendly appeal in the last sentence.

"You're going to LET me," he repeated.

She stood looking down at the daring, unconscious hand on her arm.

"I suppose," she said, with cutting slowness, "that you do not even _know_ that you are insolent.Take your hand away," in arrogant command.

He removed it with an unabashed half-smile.

"I beg your pardon," he said."I didn't even know I'd put it there.It was a break--but I wanted to keep you."That he not only wanted to keep her, but intended to do so was apparent.His air was neither rough nor brutal, but he had ingeniously placed himself in the outlet between the big table and the way to the door.He put his hands in his pockets in his vulgar, unconscious way, and watched her.

"Say, Lady Joan!" he broke forth, in the frank outburst of a man who wants to get something over."I should be a fool if I didn't see that you're up against it--hard! What's the matter?" His voice dropped again.

There was something in the drop this time which--perhaps because of her recent emotion--sounded to her almost as if he were asking the question with the protecting sympathy of the tone one would use in speaking to a child.How dare he! But it came home to her that Jem had once said "What's the matter?" to her in the same way.

"Do you think it likely that I should confide in you?" she said, and inwardly quaked at the memory as she said it.

"No," he answered, considering the matter gravely."It's not likely--the way things look to you now.But if you knew me better perhaps it would be likely.""I once explained to you that I do not intend to know you better," she gave answer.

He nodded acquiescently.

"Yes.I got on to that.And it's because it's up to me that I came out here to tell you something I want you to know before you go away.I'm going to confide in you.""Cannot even you see that I am not in the mood to accept confidences?"she exclaimed.

"Yes, I can.But you're going to accept this one," steadily."No," as she made a swift movement, "I'm not going to clear the way till I've done.""I insist!" she cried."If you were--"

He put out his hand, but not to touch her.

"I know what you're going to say.If I were a gentleman--Well, I'm not laying claim to that--but I'm a sort of a man, anyhow, though you mayn't think it.And you're going to listen."She began to stare at him.It was not the ridiculous boyish drop in his voice which arrested her attention.It was a fantastic, incongruous, wholly different thing.He had suddenly dropped his slouch and stood upright.Did he realize that he had slung his words at her as if they were an order given with the ring of authority?

"I've not bucked against anything you've said or done since you've been here," he went on, speaking fast and grimly."I didn't mean to.Ihad my reasons.There were things that I'd have given a good deal to say to you and ask you about, but you wouldn't let me.You wouldn't give me a chance to square things for you--if they could be squared.

You threw me down every time I tried!"

He was too wildly incomprehensible with his changes from humanness to folly.Remembering what he had attempted to say on the day he had followed her in the avenue, she was inflamed again.

"What in the name of New York slang does that mean?" she demanded.

"Never mind New York," he answered, cool as well as grim."A fellow that's learned slang in the streets has learned something else as well.He's learned to keep his eyes open.He's on to a way of seeing things.And what I've seen is that you're so doggone miserable that--that you're almost down and out."

This time she spoke to him in the voice with the quality of deadliness in it which she had used to her mother.

"Do you think that because you are in your own house you can be as intrusively insulting as you choose?" she said.

"No, I don't," he answered."What I think is quite different.I think that if a man has a house of his own, and there's any one in big trouble under the roof of it--a woman most of all--he's a cheap skate if he don't get busy and try to help--just plain, straight help."He saw in her eyes all her concentrated disdain of him, but he went on, still obstinate and cool and grim.

"I guess 'help' is too big a word just yet.That may come later, and it mayn't.What I'm going to try at now is making it easier for you--just easier."

Her contemptuous gesture registered no impression on him as he paused a moment and looked fixedly at her.

"You just hate me, don't you?" It was a mere statement which couldn't have been more impersonal to himself if he had been made of wood.

"That's all right.I seem like a low-down intruder to you.Well, that's all right, too.But what ain't all right is what your mother has set you on to thinking about me.You'd never have thought it yourself.You'd have known better.""What," fiercely, "is that?"

"That I'm mutt enough to have a mash on you."The common slangy crassness of it was a kind of shock.She caught her breath and merely stared at him.But he was not staring at her; he was simply looking straight into her face, and it amazingly flashed upon her that the extraordinary words were so entirely unembarrassed and direct that they were actually not offensive.

He was merely telling her something in his own way, not caring the least about his own effect, but absolutely determined that she should hear and understand it.

Her caught breath ended in something which was like a half-laugh.His queer, sharp, incomprehensible face, his queer, unmoved voice were too extraordinarily unlike anything she had ever seen or heard before.