When he was gone she tried to release herself from the kind of abeyance in which she seemed to have gone back and been as subject to him as in the first days when he had awed her and charmed her with his superiority at Middlemount, and he again older and freer as she had grown since.
He came back late in the afternoon, looking jaded and distraught.
Hinkle, who looked neither, was with him. "Well," he began, "this is the greatest thing in my experience. Belsky's not only alive and well, but Mr. Gregory and I are both at large. I did think, one time, that the police would take us into custody on account of our morbid interest in the thing, and I don't believe we should have got off, if the Consul hadn't gone bail for us, so to speak. I thought we had better take the Consul in, on our way, and it was lucky we did."
Clementina did not understand all the implications, but she was willing to take Mr. Hinkle's fun on trust. "I don't believe you'll convince Mrs.
Landa that Mr. Belsky's alive and well, till you bring him back to say so."
"Is that so!" said Hinkle. "Well, we must have him brought back by the authorities, then. Perhaps they'll bring him, anyway. They can't try him for suicide, but as I understand the police, here, a man can't lose his hat over a bridge in Florence with impunity, especially in a time of high water. Anyway, they're identifying Belsky by due process of law in Rome, now, and I guess Mr. Gregory"--he nodded toward Gregory, who sat silent and absent "will be kept under surveillance till the whole mystery is cleared up."
Clementina responded gayly still, but with less and less sincerity, and she let Hinkle go at last with the feeling that he knew she wished him to go. He made a brave show of not seeing this, and when he was gone, she remembered that she had not thanked him for the trouble he had taken on her account, and her heart ached after him with a sense of his sweetness and goodness, which she had felt from the first through his quaint drolling. It was as if the door which closed upon him shut her out of the life she had been living of late, and into the life of the past where she was subject again to the spell of Gregory's mood; it was hardly his will.
He began at once: "I wished to make you say something this morning that I have no right to hear you say, yet; and I have been trying ever since to think how I could ask you whether you could share my life with me, and yet not ask you to do it. But I can't do anything without knowing--You may not care for what my life is to be, at all!"
Clementina's head drooped a little, but she answered distinctly, "I do ca'e, Mr. Gregory."
"Thank you for that much; I don't count upon more than you have said.
Clementina, I am going to be a missionary. I think I shall ask to be sent to China; I've not decided yet. My life will be hard; it will be full of danger and privation; it will be exile. You will have to think of sharing such a life if you think"--He stopped; the time had come for her to speak, and she said, "I knew you wanted to be a missionary"--"And--and--you would go with me? You would" --He started toward her, and she did not shrink from him, now; but he checked himself. "But you mustn't, you know, for my sake."
"I don't believe I quite undastand," she faltered.
"You must not do it for me, but for what makes me do it. Without that our life, our work, could have no consecration."
She gazed at him in patient, faintly smiling bewilderment, as if it were something he would unriddle for her when he chose.
"We mustn't err in this; it would be worse than error; it would be sin."
He took a turn about the room, and then stopped before her. "Will you--will you join me in a prayer for guidance, Clementina?"
"I--I don't know," she hesitated. "I will, but--do you think I had betta?"
He began, "Why, surely"--After a moment he asked gravely, "You believe that our actions will be guided aright, if we seek help?"
"Oh, yes--yes"--"And that if we do not, we shall stumble in our ignorance?"
"I don't know. I never thought of that."
"Never thought of it"--"We never did it in our family. Father always said that if we really wanted to do right we could find the way." Gregory looked daunted, and then he frowned darkly. "Are you provoked with me? Do you think what I have said is wrong?"
"No, no! You must say what you believe. It would be double hypocrisy in me if I prevented you."
"But I would do it, if you wanted me to," she said.
"Oh, for me, for ME!" he protested. "I will try to tell you what I mean, and why you must not, for that very reason." But he had to speak of himself, of the miracle of finding her again by the means which should have lost her to him forever; and of the significance of this. Then it appeared to him that he could not reject such a leading without error, without sin. "Such a thing could not have merely happened."
It seemed so to Clementina, too; she eagerly consented that this was something they must think of, as well. But the light waned, the dark thickened in the room before he left her to do so. Then he said fervently, "We must not doubt that everything will come right," and his words seemed an effect of inspiration to them both.
