William Monk 09 - A Breach of Promise

Melville spoke so unhesitatingly that Rathbone was sure he was lying. He had been expecting the question and was prepared for it.
    “You have not found your affections engaged elsewhere?” He looked at Melville closely and thought he saw a faint flush in his cheeks, although his eyes did not waver.
    “I have no desire or intention of marrying anyone else,” Melville said with conviction. “You may search all you care to, you will find nothing to suggest I have paid the slightest court to any other lady. I work extremely hard, Sir Oliver. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to establish oneself as an architect.” There was a ring of bitterness in his voice, and somethingwhich was almost certainly pride. His clear eyes were filled with light. “It requires time and skill in negotiation, patience, the art of diplomacy, as well as a vision of precisely what makes a building both beautiful and functional, strong enough to endure through generations of time and yet not so exorbitantly expensive that no one can afford to construct it. It requires a magnitude of ideas and yet note of the minutest detail. Perhaps the law is the same.” He raised his brows and stared questioningly, almost challengingly. For the first time Rathbone was conscious of the man’s remarkable mind, the breadth and the power of his intellect. He must indeed have an extraordinary strength of will. His present problem was not indicative of his character. He was certainly not a man of indecision.
    “Yes,” Rathbone agreed ruefully, many of his own past romances, or near romances, fleeting through his mind. He had been too busy, too ambitious, to allow the time necessary to enlarge them into courtship. This he could understand with no effort at all. But he had not been unmindful enough of others, or of the way of the world, to allow himself to be so misunderstood that anyone, even a socially avaricious would-be mother-in-law, had missed his intentions.
    “Yes, the law is a hard taskmistress, Mr. Melville,” he agreed. “And one requiring both imagination and exactitude if one is to succeed. And it also requires an ability to judge character. I confess that I do not think you are telling me the whole truth of this matter.”
    He saw Melville’s face tighten and the skin around his lips turn pale.
    “Many men are not particularly in love with the women they marry,” he continued, “but find the alliance quite tolerable. Even more young women accept marriages which are based upon financial or dynastic necessity. If the person is honorable, kind, and not physically repellent, they very frequently learn to love one another. At times such a union is happier than one entered into in the heat of a passion which is based upon dreams and fades when the first hunger is assuaged, and there is no friendship left to feed it or to tide them over the latertimes.” As he said it he knew it was true, and yet he would not have entered such an arrangement himself.
    Melville looked away. “I am aware of all that, Sir Oliver, and I do not deny it. I am not prepared to marry Zillah Lambert in order to satisfy her mother’s ambitions for her, or to try to be what she desires in a husband.” He rose to his feet rather awkwardly, as if he were too rigid to coordinate his limbs as he normally might. “And profoundly grateful as I am to Barton Lambert for his patronage of my art, my obligation does not extend to the ruin of my personal happiness or peace … of life.”
    Rathbone drew in breath to ask him yet again what it was he was concealing, then saw in Melville’s face that he would not answer. Perhaps if the Lamberts did indeed sue him he would change his mind. Until then the matter was speculative anyway, and he felt increasingly that it was something in which he did not wish to become involved. Melville could not win. And frankly, Rathbone thought he was being melodramatic about something which was no more than the lot of a vast proportion of mankind, and not so very bad.
    “Then perhaps you had better see what transpires, Mr. Melville,” he said aloud, “before presuming the worst. Perhaps if you were to explain the situation to Miss Lambert herself and give her the opportunity to break the engagement, for whatever reason you can agree upon that does her no dishonor, then such an ugly and expensive matter as a legal suit could be avoided. And your relationship with Mr. Lambert would suffer far less. I assume you have taken that