"Perhaps not. But I did. And that lady is ill. You may be interested to
know it. She was ill when she arrived in Paris from London ten days
ago."
"Then she's here."
"She's here. That's why I'm taking your time in asking you to remain."
Chip forced the next question with some difficulty: "Does she--does she
want to--to see me?"
"She hasn't said so."
"Has she--said anything about me at all?"
"That, I think, I must leave you to learn later. But I should like you
to know at once that I'm not keeping you here without a motive."
The stately figure moved on, leaving Chip to guess blindly at the
possibilities in store.
More days passed--nearly a week. Chip spent much of his time in the
Kleine Schanze, noticing that the distinguished stranger frequented it
less. Idleness would have got on his nerves, and Berne begun to bore
him, had it not been for the knowledge that he was under the same roof
with Edith. That gave him patience. It was the kind of comfort a man or
a woman finds in being near the prison where some loved one is shut up
in a cell.
It was again an afternoon when the shining spiritual presences were
making themselves visible--not with the gleaming suddenness with which
they had appeared ten days before, but slowly, with vague wonders, as if
finding it hard to bring themselves within mortal ken. Rounding the
corner of the promenade at the end remote from the hotel, at a point
from which he had the whole line of the bluff and the green depths of
the valley and the slopes of the Gurten and the curtain of Alpine mist
in one superb _coup d'oeil_, Chip saw a great white shoulder baring
itself luminously in the eastern sky. For long minutes that was all. It
might have been one of the gates of pearl of which he had heard tell.
It was the sort of thing from which no earth-dweller could take his
eyes. He stood leaning on his stick, his cigar smoldering in his left
hand. He couldn't see that the clouds lifted or that the mists rolled
away; he only grew aware that what seemed like a gate became a bastion,
and what seemed like a bastion rose into a tower, and that out of the
tower and in the midst of the tower and round about the tower white
pinnacles glistened in white air. Nothing had happened that he could
define, beyond a heightening of his own capacity to see. Nothing on that
horizon seemed to emerge or to recede: looking wrought the wonder; he
either saw or he didn't see; and just now he saw. He thought of
something he had heard or read--he had forgotten where: "Immediately
there fell from his eyes as it had been scales." That, apparently, was
the process, while the spiritual presences ranged themselves slowly
within his vision--row upon row, peak upon peak, dome upon dome,
serried, ghostly--white against a white sky, white in white air.
He withdrew his gaze only because the people, ever eager for this
spectacle which they had seen all their lives, crowded to the parapet.
As the children were still in school, it was a quiet throng, elderly and
sedate. Leaning on the balustrade, all faces turned one way, they
fringed the promenade, leaving the broad, paved spaces empty.
For this reason Chip's eye caught the more quickly at the other end of
the terrace the figures of a man and a woman who stood back from the
line of gazers. They were almost in profile toward himself, the man's
erect, stately form allowing the fact that a woman was clinging to his
arm to be just perceptible. It required no such movement as that of a
few minutes later--a movement by which the woman came more fully into
view--for Chip to recognize Edith.
_His_ Edith, _his wife_, clinging to another man's arm, clinging to her
husband's arm, clinging to the arm of a husband who was not himself,
dependent on him, supported by him, possessed by him, coming and going
with him, living and eating with him, bearing him children, sharing with
him whatever was most intimate, directed by him and dominated by
him!--yet, all the while, in everything that could make two beings one
except that stroke of the pen called law, _his wife_!
How had it come about? What had he done, what had she done, to make this
hideous topsyturvydom a fact? He put his hand to his forehead like a man
dazed; but he withdrew it quickly. His forehead was wet and clammy. He
was shaken, transpierced. He saw now that, in all the three years since
he had heard she was married, he hadn't really known it. Perhaps it was
his imagination that was at fault--perhaps his incapacity for believing
what wasn't under his very eyes--perhaps his own success in keeping the
dreadful fact at a distance--_but he hadn't really known it_. Nothing
could have brought it home to him like this--this glimpse of her
intimate association with the other man, and her dependence upon him.
His first impulse was to get out of their sight, to hide, to find some
place where he could grasp the appalling fact in silence and seclusion.
Second thoughts reminded him that there was a situation to be faced and
that he might as well face it now as at any other time. What sort of
situation it would be he couldn't guess; but he was sure that behind the
immobile mask of the other man's grave face there was something that
would be worth the penetration. He would give him a chance. He would go
forward to meet them. No, he wouldn't go forward to meet them; he would
wait for them where he stood. No, he wouldn't wait for them where he
stood; he would slip into the little rotunda close beside him--a little
rotunda generally occupied by motherly Bernese women, but which for the
moment the commanding spectacle outside had emptied.
It was a little open rotunda, with seats all round and a rude table in
the middle. In sitting down he placed himself as nearly as possible in
full view, but with his face toward the mountains. It gave him a
preoccupied air to be seen relighting his cigar. It was thus optional
with the couple who began to advance along the promenade to pass him by
or to pause and address him.
Nothing but a shadow warned him of their approach.
"Chip--"
He turned. Edith was standing in the doorway, the man behind her. The
haggard pallor of her face and the feverishness of her eyes reminded
Chip of the morning little Tom was born. He was on his feet--silent. He
couldn't even breathe her name. It was the less necessary since she
herself hastened to speak:
"Chip, Mr. Lacon knows we met in England. I told him as soon as I
reached Paris; I didn't want him not to know. And now he wants us all to
meet--I don't know why."
Since he had to say something, he uttered the first words that came to
him: "Was there any harm in it--our meeting? Mr. Lacon knows we have
children--and things to talk over."
"Oh, it isn't only that," she said, excitedly. "It's more. I don't know
what--but I know it's more."