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Title: The Touchstone

Author: Edith Wharton

Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
Release Date: May, 1995
[Last updated: September 4, 2017]

Language: English

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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***




Produced by Judith Boss





THE TOUCHSTONE

By Edith Wharton




I


“Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish
him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few
regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor
Joslin’s address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to
say that he will promptly return any documents entrusted to him.”

Glennard dropped the SPECTATOR and sat looking into the fire. The club
was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with
its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue.
It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was
not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of
having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason
of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them
seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he
eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no
nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up
things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them
up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.

Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was
a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
woman he loved Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into
a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned
from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out
of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.

The SPECTATOR had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye
fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He
had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed
it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by
some familiar monument.

“Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England....” The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had
looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful,
perhaps, than when later, to Glennard’s fancy at least, the consciousness
of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate
speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if
ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment
had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to
be loved by her had been a state to touch any man’s imagination, the
physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of
conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand
lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery....

“She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
value.” So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He
had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained
with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise
to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant
woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to
him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and
his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of
irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of
his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed
the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his
shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one’s
self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being
disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her
cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that
belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the
strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her
hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart
contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,
one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from
some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
seldom came beneath his hand....

“Her letters will be of special value--” Her letters! Why, he must have
hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
letter-box when he came home to his rooms--but her writing seemed to
spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.

He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group
of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define
an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in
a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by
February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take
one’s yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where
a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth’s colorless organ
dominated another circle of languid listeners.

“Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free,” one of
the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.

Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. “Give
it another six months and it’ll be talking about itself,” he declared.
“It’s pretty nearly articulate now.”

“Can it say papa?” someone else inquired.

Dinslow’s smile broadened. “You’ll be deuced glad to say papa to IT
a year from now,” he retorted. “It’ll be able to support even you in
affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--”

Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but those who
were “in it”--were proverbially “tired” of Dinslow’s patent, and none
more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom large
in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations between
the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow’s urgent offers to
“take him in on the ground floor” had of late intensified Glennard’s
sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men
who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on
their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of
humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in
the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss
Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her
rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation
he might join her there without extra outlay.

He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no
one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But
no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an
admiring youth called out--“Holly, stop and dine!”

Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
wrong side of a more finished face. “Sorry I can’t. I’m in for a beastly
banquet.”

Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn’t marry her,
it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and
his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.




II


He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
there, but because one must pay for the experiment.

In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
Aubyn’s picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent’s features
cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes
of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have
the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life
behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher’s bill or
their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some
grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most
salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most
consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive
feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning
grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching
reasonableness, made Glennard’s situation more difficult than if he had
aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked
so little--they knew so well how to make that little do--but they
understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget,
that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.

The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard’s exasperation. He was
sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for
two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
not want to.

Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He
had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
table and squared himself to the task....

It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying
in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
taken from the drawer.

The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to
the last....

He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
begun life in his uncle’s law office in the old university town. It was
there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first
met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two
years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of
the paternal roof.

Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman,
of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as
it were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was
least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her
more latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them
feel the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged
combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that
was like a deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been
prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact
even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the
acutest generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal
susceptibilities were concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it
serves most women and one felt that her brains would never be a guide
to her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first
year of their acquaintance. He was at an age when all the gifts and
graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of
youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn’s company he was prompted by an intuitive
taste for the best as a pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy
of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for
distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was
cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was
vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no
palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard’s
aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol
of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a
foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry
him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and
discouragement.

It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed
being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of
beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn’s lips. When they met
she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had
an ambitious man’s impatience of distinguished women, was young enough
to be dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book
that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other “my
dear” when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of
course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still
more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
other the augur’s wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together
in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
one’s elders.

Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely,
and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return
to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the
moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that
she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel his
inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard’s
opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal
air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn’s plagiarisms, to
borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
with the text.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard’s
imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
of Margaret Aubyn’s romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
though he had lost a friend.

It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her
presence. She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work,
she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable
pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the current of his
confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York,
the sight of Mrs. Aubyn’s writing was like a voice of reassurance in
surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity found a
retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and
this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence,
after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with
himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the
space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable
and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of
sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to
withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned
that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably
staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had
no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow
a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered
inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn’s
business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed
to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they
might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
affections.

It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small
change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the
luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had
the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.

Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had
no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York
to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels
were yet unharvested.

For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but
of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to
New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours
together. Glennard had planned no course of action--he simply meant to
let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push
his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose
to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his
heart. He was tired of her already--he was always tired of her--yet he
was not sure that he wanted her to go.

“I may never see you again,” he said, as though confidently appealing to
her compassion.

Her look enveloped him. “And I shall see you always--always!”

“Why go then--?” escaped him.

“To be nearer you,” she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
closing door.

The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little
of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought
by Mrs. Aubyn’s gradual translation into terms of universality. In
becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that
Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on
a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated,
by popular veneration.

Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of
a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.

In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with
literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of
her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity.
He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors
who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their
friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden
sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed,
humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope
of her interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but
he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a
distinguished woman; had never measured the literary significance of her
oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in
his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like
this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her
something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified
his claim.

He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in
the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the
sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self
observing from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent
flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and
with the gesture of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his
purpose--to establish, as it were, a moral alibi--swept the letters into
a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too
long to burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one
fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
put them back into the locked drawer.




III


It was one of the laws of Glennard’s intercourse with Miss Trent that
he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up.
There was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the
jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on
this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her
welcome.

His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness
had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so
that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational
perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect
of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of
consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the
man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival.
It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn’s memory to serve as a foil to Miss
Trent’s presence, and never had the poor lady thrown her successor into
more vivid relief.

Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed
by rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the
demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt
the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her
chief grace in Glennard’s eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely
the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances;
but Miss Trent’s reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him
content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.

“You didn’t come to the opera last night,” she began, in the tone that
seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it.

He answered with a discouraged gesture. “What was the use? We couldn’t
have talked.”

“Not as well as here,” she assented; adding, after a meditative pause,
“As you didn’t come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead.”

“Ah!” he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him
from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their
wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to
be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of
serene inaction.

“We had a long talk,” Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before
adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver
communications, “Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her.”

Glennard looked up with a start. “Abroad? When?”

“Now--next month. To be gone two years.”

He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. “Does she really?
Well, I want you to go abroad with ME--for any number of years. Which
offer do you accept?”

“Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration,” she
returned, with a smile.

Glennard looked at her again. “You’re not thinking of it?”

Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare
that they might have been said to italicize her words. “Aunt Virginia
talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the
others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must
think of that, you know.” She glanced down at her gown which, under a
renovated surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard’s wooing. “I
try not to cost much--but I do.”

“Good Lord!” Glennard groaned.

They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. “As the
eldest, you know, I’m bound to consider these things. Women are such a
burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to
provide for it isn’t very much. You see, we’re all poor together.”

“Your aunt isn’t. She might help your mother.”

“She does--in her own way.”

“Exactly--that’s the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in
any way you like, but if you’re to be happy you’ve got to be so in her
way--and in her old gowns.”

“I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia’s old gowns,” Miss Trent
interposed.

“Abroad, you mean?”

“I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will
help.”

“Of course--I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its
advantages negatively.”

“Negatively?”

“In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what
it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get
away from a life like this.” He summed up in a disparaging glance the
background of indigent furniture. “The question is how you’ll like
coming back to it.”

She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. “I only know
I don’t like leaving it.”

He flung back sombrely, “You don’t even put it conditionally then?”

Her gaze deepened. “On what?”

He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused
before her. “On the alternative of marrying me.”

The slow color--even her blushes seemed deliberate--rose to her lower
lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a smile
and she waited.

He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous
exasperation escapes through his muscles.

“And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!”

Her eyes triumphed for him. “In less!”

“The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then?
It’s slaving one’s life away for a stranger!” He took her hands
abruptly. “You’ll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard
Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the
Mediterranean--”

She released herself. “If you think that--”

“I don’t. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean.” He broke off
incoherently. “I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow
connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean.” He caught her hands
again. “Alexa--if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?”

“Could we?” she sighed, half yielding.

“In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes,” he
pressed her. “Could you get on with one servant?”

“Could you get on without varnished boots?”

“Promise me you won’t go, then!”

“What are you thinking of, Stephen?”

“I don’t know,” he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his
intention. “It’s all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip
the other day--”

“You’re not speculating?” she cried, with a kind of superstitious
terror.

“Lord, no. This is a sure thing--I almost wish it wasn’t; I mean if I
can work it--” He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the
temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave
the situation the base element of safety.

“I don’t understand you,” she faltered.

“Trust me, instead!” he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on
her abruptly, “If you go, you know, you go free,” he concluded.

She drew back, paling a little. “Why do you make it harder for me?”

“To make it easier for myself,” he retorted.




IV


Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.

He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian
was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for
letters--collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.

“I meant women--women’s letters.”

The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.

Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to--to some
one person--a man; their husband--or--”

“Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”

“Well--something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with
lightness. “Didn’t Merimee--”

“The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”

“Of course not,” said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.

“There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”

“Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she--were they--?” He chafed at his own
ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.

“If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
Sabran--”

But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern--English or American. I
want to look something up,” he lamely concluded.

The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.

“Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I’ll have Merimee’s
letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”

He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab
which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small
restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.

Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
interfere with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious
exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself
sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance
to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to
think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was
blent with such base elements.

His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore
her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded the first
page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.

“My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
to-morrow. Please don’t come till then--I want to think the question
over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be
reasonable?”

It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand
in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some
other, luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into
his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through
the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull
resignation closed in on him like a fog.

“Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.

He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.

Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel
since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust
that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by
their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say
that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include
himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions
were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite
charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those
mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally
yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the
obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in
Flamel’s presence than a surplice in the street.

“Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
man assented, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore
instead of twenty.”

The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its
space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism.
Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its
owner’s intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves
with a prominence, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.

Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
Apollinaris.

“You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.

“They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the
collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of
nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to
stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--“Some men,” Flamel
irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other
days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library
represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the
collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.”

Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came
on a thin volume of faded manuscript.

“What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.

“Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of
thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a
bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--and here are some letters
of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”

Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame
Commanville?”

“His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for
this kind of thing.”

“I don’t--at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many collections
of letters?”

“Lord, no--very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting
ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though--the
rarest thing I’ve got--half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet
Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them--a lot of collectors
were after them.”

Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was
the one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”

Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
to their value,” he said, meditatively.

Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel.
He was in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a
recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.

“I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an
engagement.”

He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself
as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay
and unbosom himself to Flamel.

The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
pressure on his arm.

“Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I
don’t often have the luck of seeing you here.”

“I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.

Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through
a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air.
It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.

“I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself
asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.

“Oh, so-so--depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him thoughtfully.
“Are you thinking of collecting?”

Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”

“Selling?”

“Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--”

Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.

“A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left
me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond
of me and left ‘em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
they might benefit me somehow--I don’t know--I’m not much up on such
things--” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.

“A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”

“Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him--by one person,
you understand; a woman, in fact--”

“Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently.

Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think
they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”

Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”

“Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They
were tremendous friends, he and she.”

“And she wrote a clever letter?”

“Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”

A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words
had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.

“Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret
Aubyn’s letters? Did you say YOU had them?”

“They were left me--by my friend.”

“I see. Was he--well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any
rate. What are you going to do with them?”

Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I
don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that
some fellow was writing her life--”

“Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”

Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He
felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.

Flamel sat with meditative eye. “What do you WANT to do with them?” he
asked.

“I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden
energy--“If I can--”

“If you can? They’re yours, you say?”

“They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent--I mean there are
no restrictions--” he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated
proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his
action.

“And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his
cigar-tip.

Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
framed in tarnished gilding.

“It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are
as personal as--as these of my friend’s.... Well, I don’t mind telling
you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
it rather obscures my judgment--the fact is if I could lay my hand on a
few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified--under the
circumstances....” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the
moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own
estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than
of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal
to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously
reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel
another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--“You don’t
think people could say... could criticise the man....”

“But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”

“He’s dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--”

Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way
to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
reluctance--!

The older man’s answer reassured him. “Why need you assume any
responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your
friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity
himself, I suppose?”

“No, no.”

“Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it
all right?”

Glennard’s hesitation revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see
that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them
at all?”

“Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I
doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great
for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the
best advantage--to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”

“Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven’t counted. There may be more....”

“Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”

“I don’t know--that is--they corresponded for years. What’s the odds?”
 He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.

“It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “A long
correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written
within a year. At any rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a
book, wouldn’t they?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”

“Not love-letters, you say?”

“Why?” flashed from Glennard.

“Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they WERE--why,
you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”

Glennard was silent.

“Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
association with her name?”

“I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel--you
won’t mention this to anyone?”

“Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was
smiling at him from the hearth.

Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
questioned with loitering indifference--“Financially, eh?”

“Rather; I should say so.”

Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much--should you say? You
know about such things.”

“Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if you’ve
got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book is
brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down from the publisher,
and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers
bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I’m
talking in the dark.”

“Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
Persian rug beneath his feet.

“I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.

“Of course--you’d have to see them....” Glennard stammered; and, without
turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by....”




V


The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the
crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the
veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden
was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random--amid laughing
counter-charges of incompetence--had shot up in fragrant defiance of
their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual
wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a
crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried.
A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil.
So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage
setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step
forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the
veranda-rail.

The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year,
and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling
too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as
yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.

His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might
have grown opaque.

“Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.

“Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had
thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a
visitor?” he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.

“Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.

“Flamel? Again?”

She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is
down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
here.”

Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him
next Sunday.”

Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the
most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come
from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do
you want to?”

“Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of
indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he
had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror
reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.

“Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with
her tea, she returned the feminine answer--“I thought you did.”

“I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would
be rather jolly; let’s go.”

She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which
he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them
out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his
eye down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded
behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his
garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
awaited his sickle.

He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests
good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are
looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for
two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap.”

She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air
of balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall
be almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house... she’ll
let us have it for almost nothing....”

“Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on
in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.

“‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’ Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready
next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR....”

He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back,
her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little
over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers
of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and
a privet hedge hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided
possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had
been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities,
impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf,
every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their
privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained
from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and
her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her
beyond the reach of rescue....

He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious
weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting
them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction
had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which
we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion
of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not
to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably
committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her--she had
become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s
adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful
venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s
professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of
living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for
simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review
or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in
a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of
prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought
it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood
that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his
fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for
himself was likely to know how to turn over other people’s money.

But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife’s happiness that
Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her
new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are
as sore to a husband’s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out
the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising
tide of opportunity. And somehow--in the windowless inner cell of his
consciousness where self-criticism cowered--Glennard’s course seemed
justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?



Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger
gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not
knowing what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious
instrument of his wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his
own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it;
and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable
presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always
be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other.
It was what she had always wanted--to be with him--and she had gained
her point at last....

He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
lifted his wife’s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the
woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity--“Any
news?”

“No--none--” he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers
lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them? He stretched
his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility
of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for
weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?
He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if
she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that
she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of
fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen
and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He
laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance,
decidedly.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked.

He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection
of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who
couldn’t find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of
the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her
smile. He glanced at his watch, “Isn’t it time to dress?”

She rose with serene reluctance. “It’s a pity to go in. The garden looks
so lovely.”

They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space
in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, “If we mean to
go on the yacht next Sunday,” she suggested, “oughtn’t you to let Mr.
Flamel know?”

Glennard’s exasperation deflected suddenly. “Of course I shall let him
know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to
Flamel.”

The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
leaving one space in which to contemplate one’s folly at arm’s length.
Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a
chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour
he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs
of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having
always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.




VI


THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the
yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of
cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The party
was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but composed of more
heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually
runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had
bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency.
Cleverness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as
futile as the sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used
to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of view that goes with
the civilized uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife’s attitude
implied the same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more
and more into Flamel’s intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she
enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form
of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the
kind of people who have their thinking done for them by the community.

Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on
shore, and his wife’s profile, serenely projected against the changing
blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never
been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty
above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious
face seem an accidental collocation of features.

The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs.
Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who
couldn’t “see” Alexa Glennard’s looks; and Mrs. Touchett’s claims to
consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the
wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady
of the trio which Glennard’s fancy had put to such unflattering uses,
was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This
was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the RADIATOR. Mrs. Dresham
was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the
role of her husband’s exponent and interpreter; and Dresham’s leisure
being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his
wife’s attitude committed her to the public celebration of their
remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham
was repaid by the fact that there were people who took HER for a
remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction
with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other
ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men--the
kind of women who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their
questions left unanswered.

Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham’s instinct for the
remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled
dulness among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability
to appreciate her. Under Dresham’s tutelage she had developed into a
“thoughtful woman,” who read his leaders in the RADIATOR and bought the
books he recommended. When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know
what Mrs. Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a
trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her the wide-margined result
of his explorations.

Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of
fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn’t
spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his
annoyance to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there
remained a latent irritation against the general futility of words.

His wife’s gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on
the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had
turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when
Mrs. Armiger’s voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated
potentialities of language.

“You’ve read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?” he heard her ask; and, in
reply to Alexa’s vague interrogation--“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’--it’s
the only book people are talking of this week.”

Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “You HAVEN’T read them? How
very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book’s in the air; one
breathes it in like the influenza.”

Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.

“Perhaps it hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said, with her
unruffled smile.

“Oh, DO let me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a
change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down.
Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”

Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any
of us give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a
virtue.”

“I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,’”
 said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the
roots--her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care;
who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too
much like listening at a keyhole.”

“But if she wanted it published?”

“Wanted it? How do we know she did?”

“Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man--whoever he is--with
directions that they should be published after his death--”

“I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.

“He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.

“Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
head again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett
protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been
written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no
woman could have told him to--”

“Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not
love-letters.”

“No--that’s the worst of it; they’re unloved letters,” Mrs. Touchett
retorted.

“Then, obviously, she needn’t have written them; whereas the man, poor
devil, could hardly help receiving them.”

“Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
them,” said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.

Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. “From the way
you defend him, I believe you know who he is.”

Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
the woman who is in her husband’s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
his shoulders.

“What have I said to defend him?”

“You called him a poor devil--you pitied him.”

“A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course
I pity him.”

“Then you MUST know who he is,” cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant
air of penetration.

Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. “No one knows; not
even the publishers; so they tell me at least.”

“So they tell you to tell us,” Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther,
“But even if HE’S dead and SHE’S dead, somebody must have given the
letters to the publishers.”

“A little bird, probably,” said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her
deduction.

“A little bird of prey then--a vulture, I should say--” another man
interpolated.

“Oh, I’m not with you there,” said Dresham, easily. “Those letters
belonged to the public.”

“How can any letters belong to the public that weren’t written to the
public?” Mrs. Touchett interposed.

“Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn’s
belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of
thought. It’s the penalty of greatness--one becomes a monument
historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition
that one is always open to the public.”

“I don’t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the
sanctuary, as it were.”

“Who WAS he?” another voice inquired.

“Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy--the letter-box, the slit in the wall
through which the letters passed to posterity....”

“But she never meant them for posterity!”

“A woman shouldn’t write such letters if she doesn’t mean them to be
published....”

“She shouldn’t write them to such a man!” Mrs. Touchett scornfully
corrected.

“I never keep letters,” said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression
that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.

There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily,
“You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men
would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their
significance as documents. The personal side doesn’t count where there’s
so much else.”

“Oh, we all know you haven’t any principles,” Mrs. Armiger declared; and
Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: “I shall never write
you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel.”

Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing
of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a
senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel’s crowd--and what business had
Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication
of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...

Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa’s
elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had
scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that
he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without
the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....


Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her
husband by an unexpected request.

“Will you bring me those letters from town?” she asked.

“What letters?” he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.

“Mrs. Aubyn’s. The book they were all talking about yesterday.”

Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
deliberation, “I didn’t know you cared about that sort of thing.”

She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her
till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a
gentle tenacity, “I think it would interest me because I read her life
last year.”

“Her life? Where did you get that?”

“Someone lent it to me when it came out--Mr. Flamel, I think.”

His first impulse was to exclaim, “Why the devil do you borrow books of
Flamel? I can buy you all you want--” but he felt himself irresistibly
forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. “Flamel always has the
newest books going, hasn’t he? You must be careful, by the way, about
returning what he lends you. He’s rather crotchety about his library.”

“Oh, I’m always very careful,” she said, with a touch of competence that
struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: “Don’t forget the
letters.”

Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result
of some hint of Flamel’s? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he
preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his
last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation
of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much
Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate,
from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put.
The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the
most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien
forces that his own act had set in motion....

Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles,
had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of
her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not
forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary
idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that
all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be
bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at
the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked
with conspicuously lettered volumes. “Margaret Aubyn” flashed back
at him in endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a
counter where the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings.
It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He
caught up a copy, tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued
him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.

In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were
to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.

He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not
draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of
the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The
motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine
that a man in front of him was reading....

At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay
on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at
him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken
phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was
a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
shelter. He had not known it would be like this....

He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered
the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows,
also makes innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the
immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the
presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface
of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.




VII


A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”

The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told
me you were out and I came upstairs.”

The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see
them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving
his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be
counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.

“Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
obstructed her vision of the books.

“I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”

“I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug;
adding, uncontrollably--“I suppose Flamel was there?”

“No; he left on the yacht this morning.”

An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left
Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to
the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.

“Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.

He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the
most astounding exceptions!”

Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had
been hot in town or that something had bothered him.

“Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was
not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible
for that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still
smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret
Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t
you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”

Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife.
“All about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to
him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand,
and moved by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some
way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through
his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of
figuring impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from
one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge
life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received
his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
greatness.

The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an
old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct
of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous that man can
exercise--made him awkwardly declare--“Oh, I used to see her at people’s
houses, that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a
multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I
simply can’t see what you can find to interest you in such a book.”

She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”

“I glanced at it--I never read such things.”

“Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”

Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
ahead.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed
his hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know;
won’t you give me some now?” he suggested.

That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself
into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his
papers he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a
night as this? I’ll join you presently outside.”

But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. “I want to look at my book,”
 she said, taking up the first volume of the “Letters.”

Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. “I’m going to shut
the door; I want to be quiet,” he explained from the threshold; and she
nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.

He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
in her hand? The door did not shut her out--he saw her distinctly, felt
her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel
like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown
country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in
an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our
habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the
boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife’s character
not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his
ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by
the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before.
As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession
of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her
individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable
as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once
incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its
effects.

To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he
went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to
talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was
to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of
protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club
in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to
dine. The only man in the club was Flamel.

Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to
come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as
a shield against his wife’s scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating
than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.

He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter’s ready
acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they
passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and
the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn’s name, conspicuously displayed
above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.

“We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his
watch.

“Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something--”

Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel
rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard
dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he
feared.

The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till
it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the
shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements
in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric
railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from
the imminent risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his
discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of
someone else’s suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table
without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.

The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s
presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light
thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to
this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor
was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
landmarks to travel by.

Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind
the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic
enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went
to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he
saw the second volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table.
He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been
reading. It was one of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He
dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that
one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem
like that...?

Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right--it
IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”

Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
generation the book will be a classic.”

“Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephen DID know her--”

“Did he?” came from Flamel.

“He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
feel dreadfully... he wouldn’t read it... he didn’t want me to read it.
I didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than
a stranger’s.”

“Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as
he does....”

Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with
which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points
most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of
Margaret Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the
publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness
it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the
possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it
by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the
window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in
Flamel’s presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such
a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above
all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against
the perpetual criticism of his wife’s belief in him....

The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there
a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need
defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing,
declared the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but
obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel’s verdict might be
questioned, Dresham’s at least represented the impartial view of the
man of letters. As to Alexa’s words, they were simply the conventional
utterance of the “nice” woman on a question already decided for her by
other “nice” women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she
would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of
dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments
of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by
the publication of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters would have betrayed her secrets
without a scruple.

The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate
relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would
fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other
topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel,
saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn they were the last words
he meant to utter!--“Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport
you must come out and spend a few days with us--mustn’t he, Alexa?”




VIII


Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert
his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not
even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto
been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely
aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any
affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious
house--but in this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It
pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters”
 confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed
them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social
obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a
personal guise.

Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to
be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to
perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself
negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought
himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of
baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be
made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust
into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.

The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve
to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond
the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved
the American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares.
Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude
with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about
the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the
suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he
thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against
his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well
enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that
he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and
directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of
her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself
could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had
she been more complex, more feminine--if he could have counted on
her imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of
neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action
would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to
own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he
preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances
would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments
of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had
sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to
whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he
hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to
him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the
house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there,
his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.

Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house
that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the
immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in
her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who
could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty
woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty.
Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial
imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good
sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the
necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and
before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a
parlour-maid to their small establishment.

Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
on Glennard’s breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters. It happened to be
the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the
table at his wife, who had come down before him and had probably
laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward
questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating
whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it
off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a
check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of
the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The
money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help
welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book
was still selling far beyond the publisher’s previsions. He put the
check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife.

On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the
sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been
overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the
letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the
situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it,
pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act.
It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his
friend anew.

When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa’s
drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered
in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger’s conversation like the
ejaculations of a startled aviary.

She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
men.

“Oh, go on, go on,” young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger
met Glennard’s inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn’t
see what there was to laugh at. “I’m sure I feel more like crying. I
don’t know what I should have done if Alexa hadn’t been home to give me
a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds--yes, another, dear, please--” and
as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on
the selection of a second lump of sugar, “Why, I’ve just come from the
reading, you know--the reading at the Waldorf.”

“I haven’t been in town long enough to know anything,” said Glennard,
taking the cup his wife handed him. “Who has been reading what?”

“That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what’s her name--Mrs.
Dresham’s protegee--unless she’s YOURS, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big
ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying like idiots--it was
the most harrowing thing I ever heard--”

“What DID you hear?” Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: “Won’t you
have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot
toast, please.” Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under
discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him
with her lovely amazement.

“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’--didn’t you know about it? The girl read them
so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have fainted if
there’d been a man near enough to carry me out.”

Hartly’s glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, “How like you women
to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
blatant publicity of the readings!”

Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal.
“It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to
be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for a charity.”

“Oh,” her hostess murmured, indifferently, “with me charity begins at
home. I can’t afford emotional luxuries.”

“A charity? A charity?” Hartly exulted. “I hadn’t seized the full beauty
of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters at the Waldorf before
five hundred people for a charity! WHAT charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?”

“Why, the Home for Friendless Women--”

“It was well chosen,” Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
the sofa-cushions.

When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. “Who asked you
to take a ticket for that reading?”

“I don’t know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up.”

“It’s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she’s capable of! It’s
loathsome--it’s monstrous--”

His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, “I thought so too. It
was for that reason I didn’t go. But you must remember that very few
people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--”

Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. “As I do?”
 he repeated.

“I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To
most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too
remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different--”

Glennard gave her a startled look. “Different? Why different?”

“Since you were her friend--”

“Her friend!” He stood up impatiently. “You speak as if she had had only
one--the most famous woman of her day!” He moved vaguely about the room,
bending down to look at some books on the table. “I hope,” he added,
“you didn’t give that as a reason, by the way?”

“A reason?”

“For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.

The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
the hand on the trigger.

“I seem,” she said from the threshold, “to have done both in giving my
reason to you.”


The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies’ draperies,
followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
discussion of the “Aubyn Letters” and Glennard, hearing his wife
questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she
had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked.
He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the “Letters” were
concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting
a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to
the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had
organized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself--for he
was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.

The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife’s
glance struck him cold.

She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel’s side, and it appeared to
Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers
of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the
reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard
almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A
throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with
a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether
Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about
the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him
better that Alexa should know too.

He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his
front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through
his veins? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife’s
scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had
closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth
he wondered no longer--she would despise him. But this lent a new
insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge
from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for
the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his
wife’s indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay
his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he
needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him....

When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.




IX


HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm--he felt the
need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.

He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that
they would have the evening together. When he followed her to the
drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking;
but as she handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily: “I shall have
to carry this off to the study, I’ve got a lot of work to-night.”

Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had
withheld him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at
arm’s length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he
would never take her by surprise. Well--why not face her, then? What he
shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this
way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.

The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing
the publisher’s check. He had deposited the money, but the notice
accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for
work. It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough
that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn’s letters. It
would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once
that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them....

He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers
in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell
on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a
temple. Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it
was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on
the brink of sacrilege.

Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. “I’ve brought
you a piece of work--a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
sort for me. Some are not worth keeping--but you’ll be able to judge of
that. There may be a letter or two among them--nothing of much account,
but I don’t like to throw away the whole lot without having them looked
over and I haven’t time to do it myself.”

He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends
for the incident of the previous day.

“Are you sure I shall know which to keep?”

“Oh, quite sure,” he answered, easily--“and besides, none are of much
importance.”

The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a
visitor’s hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in
the act of taking leave.

He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
receipt of a royalty on the “Aubyn Letters.”...

A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife
as the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over
her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
precipitately.

“I’m dining out to-night--you don’t mind my deserting you? Julia Armiger
sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose
concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn’t two--but I
knew YOU wouldn’t be sorry!” She ended with a laugh that had the effect
of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger’s; and before Glennard could
speak she had added, with her hand on the door, “Mr. Flamel stayed so
late that I’ve hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously
early, and Julia dines at half-past seven--”

Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of
an ironical consciousness of what was happening. “She hates me,” he
murmured. “She hates me....”


The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in
his room. When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they
took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm.
While he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that,
after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of
the previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he
had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to
him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman
at his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this
possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely
felt himself left alone with his baseness.

Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.

“Aren’t you a little early for church?” he asked.

She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at
her mother’s; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.

“Well, good-by,” she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
added: “By the way, I’ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that
I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table.” She went
downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.

She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she had
made no sign!

Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On
the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller--she had
evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
desk. The publisher’s notice was among them.




X


His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case
of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks
to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the
same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve
had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of
confession had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift
a portion of his burden to his wife’s shoulders and now that she had
tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up
again.

A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and
came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough
to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over
two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not
unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of
introspection--he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual
revival of moral health.

He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting
to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash
appeal to his wife’s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the
consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches
over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded
that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her
uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a
poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to
characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general
lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the
matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice
where another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had
profited by Mrs. Aubyn’s tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his
wife.

When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats
the gardener’s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In
one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer,
at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more
communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of
intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of
an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now
rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her
attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped
him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination
to perceive that, in respect of the wife’s social arts, a husband
necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.

In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife’s feelings for Flamel.
From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they
yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness
now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....


Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
always skipped the “literary notices” in the papers and he had small
leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had
therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the “Aubyn
Letters” had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book
ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this
apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring
sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did
not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of
obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and
thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.

But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first
page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the
photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of
memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this
unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been
in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into
her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the
tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke,
the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine
in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed
in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor
semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought
that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of
shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare
to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a
renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused
from the creeping lethargy of death....

He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal
of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her
again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of
losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her
presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through
his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every
incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit
of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has
plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail
had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to
Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been
pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that,
but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on
in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him
with her blood....

That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to
the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was
hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into
silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he
was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind
as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full
bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly,
had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--

Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.

“Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I’d left it on this
table.” He said nothing, and she went on: “You haven’t seen it?”

“No,” he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.

His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
looked up he met her tentative gaze. “I was reading an article in it--a
review of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters,” she added, slowly, with her deep,
deliberate blush.

Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
that she would not speak the other woman’s name; nothing else seemed to
matter. “You seem to do a lot of reading,” he said.

She still earnestly confronted him. “I was keeping this for you--I
thought it might interest you,” she said, with an air of gentle
insistence.

He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.

“I haven’t time for such things,” he said, indifferently. As he moved to
the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused
and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.




XI


As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases;
the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek
a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by
Margaret Aubyn’s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental
reparation, but rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the
reality of the tie between them.

The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
share the narrow hospitality of her husband’s last lodging; but though
Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited
her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a
chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse;
she had died alone, as she had lived; and the “distinguished mourners”
 who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman
they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at
what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it
must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues
stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of
affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to
marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a
frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the
most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for
the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those
easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the
living. Glennard’s eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had
instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had
forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he
discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft
rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues.

“How she would have hated it!” he murmured.

A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures
moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks.
Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly
dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as
though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative
rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he
asked for some flowers.

“Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the
dripping counter.

Glennard shook his head.

“Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door
and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the
scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were
white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the
long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an
odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned
in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of
Margaret Aubyn’s nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner
vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....

The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.




XII


The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a
final effort of escape from his wife’s inexpressive acceptance of his
shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to
that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His
chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife’s
indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his
dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to
her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to
her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
seemed, understood without knowing.

In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings,
in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been.
There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the
wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.

To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons,
of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening,
there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually
led him to the Park and its outlying regions.

One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates
and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon
streaked with east wind. Glennard’s cab advanced slowly, and as he
leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that
wound under bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his
attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple,
who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though
adapting their gait to a conversation marked by meditative intervals.
Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning
toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife’s profile.
The man was Flamel.

The blood rushed to Glennard’s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and
pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent
down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming
conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called
out--“Turn--drive back--anywhere--I’m in a hurry--”

As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They
had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.

“My God, my God--” he groaned.

It was hideous--it was abominable--he could not understand it. The woman
was nothing to him--less than nothing--yet the blood hummed in his ears
and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the
primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self
than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish
to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt--almost a physical nausea. The
poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably
sick....

He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner
that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at
his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty
of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.

He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the
front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out.
His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought
reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and
began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he
had written.


“MY DEAR FLAMEL,”

“Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which
represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters.”

“Trusting you will excuse the oversight,

“Yours truly,

“STEPHEN GLENNARD.”


He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the
post-box at the corner.


The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was
preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He
seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.

The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a
moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his
note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.

“My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?” Glennard recognized his
check.

“That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before.”

Flamel’s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his
accent changed and he asked, quickly: “On what ground?”

Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the
calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. “On the ground that you sold Mrs.
Aubyn’s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases
is entitled to a percentage on the sale.”

Flamel paused before answering. “You find, you say. It’s a recent
discovery?”

“Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I’m new to the
business.”

“And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
business, as far as I was concerned?”

Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. “Are you reproaching me
for not having remembered it sooner?”

Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the
verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice,
rejoined, good-humoredly, “Upon my soul, I don’t understand you!”

The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. “It’s simple enough--”
 he muttered.

“Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly service?
I don’t know what your other friends expect!”

“Some of my friends wouldn’t have undertaken the job. Those who would
have done so would probably have expected to be paid.”

He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other.
Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate
note. “If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay
yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part
I’ve never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the
letters.”

“That’s just it!”

“What--?”

“The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When
a man’s got stolen goods to pawn he doesn’t take them to the
police-station.”

“Stolen?” Flamel echoed. “The letters were stolen?”

Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. “How much longer do you expect me to
keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were
written to me.”

Flamel looked at him in silence. “Were they?” he said at length. “I
didn’t know it.”

“And didn’t suspect it, I suppose,” Glennard sneered.

The other was again silent; then he said, “I may remind you that,
supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of
finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me
the originals.”

“What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It’s the
kind of thing one can easily do.”

Flamel glanced at him with contempt. “Our ideas probably differ as to
what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me.”

Glennard’s anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought.
“It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES know about the
letters--has known for some months....”

“Ah,” said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at
a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel’s muscles were
under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced
by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words
contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious
intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure
now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only
made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to
speak.

“If she knows, it’s not through me.” It was what Glennard had waited
for.

“Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I
leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife
informed of my actions? I didn’t suppose even such egregious conceit as
yours could delude a man to that degree!” Struggling for a foothold in
the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, “My
wife learned the facts from me.”

Flamel received this in silence. The other’s outbreak seemed to
have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a
deliberation implying that his course was chosen. “In that case I
understand still less--”

“Still less--?”

“The meaning of this.” He pointed to the check. “When you began to speak
I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was
intended as a random insult. In either case, here’s my answer.”

He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the
desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.

Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his
self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel’s, the result
had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted
the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted
did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He
saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a
passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of
the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel’s unwillingness to
quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.

In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife’s
indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental
resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world
wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with
instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.

It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly
homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis.
He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached
his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his
vision, she had once more become the central point of consciousness.




XIII


It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have
missed the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in
her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related
to the private business of some client? What, for instance, was to
prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown
person who had sold the “Aubyn Letters.” The subject was one not likely
to fix her attention--she was not a curious woman.

Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the
candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not
slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as
when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel’s company; the
attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough,
after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone
else.

As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant
anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had
already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt
only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now,
strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and
she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as
incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place.
Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love
passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.

She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the
chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the
mantel.

Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was
looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.

He moved across the room and stood before her.

“There’s something that I want to say to you,” he began in a low tone.

She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a
jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was
as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her
ironically.

“I’ve never prevented your seeing your friends here,” he broke out. “Why
do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so
cheap--”

She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive,” he went on, the
utterance of the charge reviving his anger.

“Ah,” she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with
a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.

Her silence exasperated him.

“Well?” he burst out. “Is that all you have to say?”

“Do you wish me to explain?” she asked, proudly.

“Do you imply I haven’t the right to?”

“I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for
a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to.”

“I didn’t suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a
sensible woman doesn’t do. She doesn’t slink about in out-of-the-way
streets with men. Why couldn’t you have seen him here?”

She hesitated. “Because he wanted to see me alone.”

“Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal
alacrity?”

“I don’t know that he has any others where I am concerned.” She
paused again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an
under-note of warning. “He wished to bid me good-by. He’s going away.”

Glennard turned on her a startled glance. “Going away?”

“He’s going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you
knew.”

The last phrase revived his irritation. “You forget that I depend on you
for my information about Flamel. He’s your friend and not mine. In fact,
I’ve sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to
him when you must see plainly enough that I don’t like him.”

Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her
words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his
exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare
him.

“He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was
married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish
me to like him.”

Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had
expected: she was certainly not a clever woman.

“Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it’s not the first
time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his
friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that
my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige
me.”

She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its
efficacy.

“Is that what you imply?” he pressed her.

“No,” she answered with sudden directness. “I noticed some time ago that
you seemed to dislike him, but since then--”

“Well--since then?”

“I’ve imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to
him, as you call it.”

“Ah,” said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped,
for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last
in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind
speech.

“And why did you imagine this?” The blood mounted to his forehead.
“Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?”

She turned pale. “Under obligations?”

“Oh, don’t let’s beat about the bush. Didn’t he tell you it was I who
published Mrs. Aubyn’s letters? Answer me that.”

“No,” she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of
alternatives, she added: “No one told me.”

“You didn’t know then?”

She seemed to speak with an effort. “Not until--not until--”

“Till I gave you those papers to sort?”

Her head sank.

“You understood then?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her immovable face. “Had you suspected--before?” was slowly
wrung from him.

“At times--yes--” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“Why? From anything that was said--?”

There was a shade of pity in her glance. “No one said anything--no one
told me anything.” She looked away from him. “It was your manner--”

“My manner?”

“Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said--once or twice--your
irritation--I can’t explain--”

Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who
has been running. “You knew, then, you knew”--he stammered. The avowal
of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered
her less remote. “You knew--you knew--” he repeated; and suddenly his
anguish gathered voice. “My God!” he cried, “you suspected it first, you
say--and then you knew it--this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew
it months ago--it’s months since I put that paper in your way--and yet
you’ve done nothing, you’ve said nothing, you’ve made no sign, you’ve
lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference--no difference in
either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don’t you see the
hideous ignominy of it? Don’t you see how you’ve shared in my disgrace?
Or haven’t you any sense of shame?”

He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see
how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had
both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any
chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn.

He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.

“Haven’t you had enough--without that?” she said, in a strange voice of
pity.

He stared at her. “Enough--?”

“Of misery....”

An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. “You saw then...?” he
whispered.

“Oh, God----oh, God----” she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid
her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in silence, a long time,
driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.

When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have
hurt him less than the tears on his hands.

She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping.
“It was for the money--?”

His lips shaped an assent.

“That was the inheritance--that we married on?”

“Yes.”

She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered
away from him.

“You hate me,” broke from him.

She made no answer.

“Say you hate me!” he persisted.

“That would have been so simple,” she answered with a strange smile. She
dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead
on her hand.

“Was it much--?” she began at length.

“Much--?” he returned, vaguely.

“The money.”

“The money?” That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment
he did not follow her thought.

“It must be paid back,” she insisted. “Can you do it?”

“Oh, yes,” he returned, listlessly. “I can do it.”

“I would make any sacrifice for that!” she urged.

He nodded. “Of course.” He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt.
“Do you count on its making much difference?”

“Much difference?”

“In the way I feel--or you feel about me?”

She shook her head.

“It’s the least part of it,” he groaned.

“It’s the only part we can repair.”

“Good heavens! If there were any reparation--” He rose quickly and
crossed the space that divided them. “Why did you never speak?” he
asked.

“Haven’t you answered that yourself?”

“Answered it?”

“Just now--when you told me you did it for me.” She paused a moment and
then went on with a deepening note--“I would have spoken if I could have
helped you.”

“But you must have despised me.”

“I’ve told you that would have been simpler.”

“But how could you go on like this--hating the money?”

“I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I
did.”

He gazed at her with a kind of awe. “You’re wonderful,” he murmured.
“But you don’t yet know the depths I’ve reached.”

She raised an entreating hand. “I don’t want to!”

“You’re afraid, then, that you’ll hate me?”

“No--but that you’ll hate ME. Let me understand without your telling
me.”

“You can’t. It’s too base. I thought you didn’t care because you loved
Flamel.”

She blushed deeply. “Don’t--don’t--” she warned him.

“I haven’t the right to, you mean?”

“I mean that you’ll be sorry.”

He stood imploringly before her. “I want to say something
worse--something more outrageous. If you don’t understand THIS you’ll be
perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house.”

She answered him with a glance of divination. “I shall understand--but
you’ll be sorry.”

“I must take my chance of that.” He moved away and tossed the books
about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. “Does Flamel care
for you?” he asked.

Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. “What
would be the use?” she said with a note of sadness.

“Ah, I didn’t ask THAT,” he penitently murmured.

“Well, then--”

To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her
with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense
redistribution of meanings.

“I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having
told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”

He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had
to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an
effort--“Don’t blame him--he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them
published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to
another man... a man who was dead....”

She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.

“You DO despise me!” he insisted.

“Ah, that poor woman--that poor woman--” he heard her murmur.

“I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face
hidden.

“You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.

“Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any
check on his gathering purpose.

“He cared for you--he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told
you of the letters--”

She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you?
THAT--!”

Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon... like another....”

“A scoundrel’s!”

He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”

“Stephen! Stephen!” she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his
lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. “Don’t say such things.
I forbid you! It degrades us both.”

He put her back with trembling hands. “Nothing that I say of myself can
degrade you. We’re on different levels.”

“I’m on yours, whatever it is!”

He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.




XIV


The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife,
was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was
but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of
communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his
humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed
grotesque and mean.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of
self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If
Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there
was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling
seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to
the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which
he leaned.

They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious
track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a
haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it,
to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned
shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring
spring!

Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in
the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made
her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she
meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt
was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching,
in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to
acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters,
and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched,
meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which
she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations
drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness,
to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did
not speak.

It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.

“I’ve heard from Mr. Flamel,” she said.

Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.

“It’s from Smyrna,” she said. “Won’t you read it?”

He handed it back. “You can tell me about it--his hand’s so illegible.”
 He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and stood
before her. “I’ve been thinking of writing to Flamel,” he said.

She looked up.

“There’s one point,” he continued, slowly, “that I ought to clear up.
I told him you’d known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do,
of course; but I can’t leave him to that false impression; I must write
him.”

She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, “Why do you
call it a false impression? I did know.”

“Yes, but I implied you didn’t care.”

“Ah!”

He still stood looking down on her. “Don’t you want me to set that
right?” he tentatively pursued.

She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. “It isn’t necessary,” she
said.

Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture
of comprehension, “No,” he said, “with you it couldn’t be; but I might
still set myself right.”

She looked at him gently. “Don’t I,” she murmured, “do that?”

“In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation’s too complete!
You make me seem--to myself even--what I’m not; what I can never be.
I can’t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
enlighten others.”

The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. “Don’t
you see that it’s become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
myself down to the last lie--only there’d always be another one left
under it!--and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least
have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don’t you see that the
worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?”

Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. “Ah, poor woman, poor
woman,” he heard her sigh.

“Don’t pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
You’re both inaccessible! It was myself I sold.”

He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. “How
much longer,” he burst out, “do you suppose you can stand it? You’ve
been magnificent, you’ve been inspired, but what’s the use? You can’t
wipe out the ignominy of it. It’s miserable for you and it does HER no
good!”

She lifted a vivid face. “That’s the thought I can’t bear!” she cried.

“What thought?”

“That it does her no good--all you’re feeling, all you’re suffering. Can
it be that it makes no difference?”

He avoided her challenging glance. “What’s done is done,” he muttered.

“Is it ever, quite, I wonder?” she mused. He made no answer and they
lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
communication.

It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.

“Don’t they say,” she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
apprehensiveness, “that the early Christians, instead of pulling down
the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--purified them by
turning them to their own uses? I’ve always thought one might do that
with one’s actions--the actions one loathes but can’t undo. One can
make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
against them....” Her voice wavered on the word. “We can’t always tear
down the temples we’ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put
good spirits in the house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and
understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn’t been in
such great need....”

She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was
bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds--they
quickened the seeds of understanding.

At length he looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, “what spirits have come
to live in the house of evil that I built--but you’re there and that’s
enough for me. It’s strange,” he went on after another pause, “she
wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it’s through her that
it’s come to me. But for her I shouldn’t have known you--it’s through
her that I’ve found you. Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it
hardest--makes me most intolerable to myself. Can’t you see that it’s
the worst thing I’ve got to face? I sometimes think I could have
borne it better if you hadn’t understood! I took everything from
her--everything--even to the poor shelter of loyalty she’d trusted
in--the only thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her,
I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she’s given me YOU
in return!”

His wife’s cry caught him up. “It isn’t that she’s given ME to you--it
is that she’s given you to yourself.” She leaned to him as though swept
forward on a wave of pity. “Don’t you see,” she went on, as his eyes
hung on her, “that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt
you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been
what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into
the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a
woman--that’s the gift she would have wished to give!”

“Ah,” he cried, “but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
her?”

“The happiness of giving,” she said.





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