"You are looking very serious, dearest," he declared in a tone of
assumed lightness, marred by a cumbersome quality which made it
grotesque. As his voice broke on her reverie, his wife started, then sat
gazing at him with a sphinx-like expression in her eyes, which he found
it hard to endure. But he went boldly on: "Very serious indeed for a
bride of a month's standing."
Still she did not answer and under the steadiness of her silent gaze,
his momentary reassurance wilted. He had foreseen the possibility of
encountering a woman turned Valkyrie, but was unaccoutred to face this
enigmatical calm.
Standing here now with those cool eyes upon him, a new and cumulative
apprehension tortured him. What if, with a swift determination, his wife
had decided upon yet another course: that of simulating until her own
chosen moment ignorance of what she knew: of drawing him more deeply
into the snare before she confronted him with her discovery?
But as he was weighing these possibilities, Conscience broke the
silence. She even smiled in a mirthless fashion--and the man began to
hope again.
"I _was_ serious," she said. "I was reproaching myself."
"Reproaching yourself--" the husband arched his brows--"for what?"
She responded slowly as if weighing her words.
"For many things. You have devoted years of your life to my father and
myself--and asked nothing. After a long while I consented to marry
you--though I couldn't give myself freely or without reserve."
He bent over a little and spoke with a grave dignity.
"You have given me everything," he said quietly, "except the admission
that you love me. I told you before we were married that I had no fear
and no misgiving on that point. I shall win your love, and meanwhile I
can be patient."
She let the implied boast of word and manner pass without debate and
went on self-accusingly:
"You've treated yourself very much like an old house being torn to
pieces and done over to satisfy the whims and eccentricities of a new
tenant."
Tollman affected a manner meant to be debonair, but his thought was
divided and uncontrollable impulse drew his glance shiftily to the
table.
"Well, suppose that I have tried to change myself, why shouldn't I? I
love you. I'm eager to demonstrate that I'm not too old a dog to learn
new tricks."
She only shook her head, and, finding words more tolerable than silence,
he proceeded:
"I've discovered the fountain which Ponce de Leon missed. Henceforth I
mean to go on growing younger."
"And yet, Eben--" She was still looking at him with that directness
which hinted at some thought foreign to her words--something as yet
unmentioned which had left her unstrung. "It's not really a congenial
rôle to you--this one of reshaping your life. At heart you hate it....
This house proves that. So does this room--and its contents."
The pause which separated the final words brought a sinking sensation at
the pit of his stomach, and the discomfort of a fencer, dueling in the
dark--a swordsman who recognizes that his cleverness is outmatched. His
question came with a staccato abruptness.
"How is that?"
Conscience rose from her chair and for a moment stood letting her eyes
travel about the walls, the furniture, the pictures. As they wandered,
the husband's gaze followed them, and when they rested for an instant on
the open strong box and the untidy papers, his alarm gained a brief
mastery so that he stepped hurriedly forward, placing himself between
her and the danger.
"What were you saying?" he questioned nervously.
"I was calling your attention to this room. Look at it. If you didn't,
at heart, hate all change--all innovation, you couldn't have lived here
this long without having altered it."
"Altered it--why?"
Conscience laughed. "Well, because it's all unspeakably depressing, for
one thing. Outside of prisons, I doubt if there is anything drearier in
the world than Landseer engravings in black frames and fantastically
grained pine trying to be oak--unless it's hair-cloth sofas and
portraits that have turned black."
The lord of the manor spoke in a crestfallen manner, touched with
perplexity. To what was all this a preamble?
"That portrait is of an ancestor of mine," he said and his wife once
more laughed, though this time his anxiety fancied there was irony in
it. "All right," she said, "but wouldn't it have been quite as
respectful and much more cheerful to send him on a visit to some painter
who takes in dingy ancestors and does them over?"
"I hadn't thought of it," he acknowledged, but the idea did not seem to
delight him.
"No." They were still standing, she facing the table and he facing her,
making of his shoulders as wide a screen as possible.
Now she moved and stood with the fingers of one hand resting lightly on
the spot where lay a profusion of scattered sheets and envelopes. These
were papers which, should she see and recognize them--granting that she
had not already done so--would spell divorce or separation. Tollman drew
a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. At the price of
any concession he must get her out of that room for five minutes!
"No," she went on. "It hadn't occurred to you, because you really
dislike all change. You are a reactionary ... and I'm afraid I'm what
you'd call a radical."
"But, dear--" he spoke eagerly, ready to sacrifice without combat even
his cherished reverence for the unchanging order of his fathers: even
his aversion to the wasting of money--"I haven't told you before because
I wanted to surprise you. I've let all that wait until you should be
here to direct it. I wanted the renovated house, like the renovated man,
to bear the stamp of your designing."
The wife's eyes flashed with surprise and apparent pleasure. "Do you
really mean it?" she exclaimed. "Do you really mean that I may do what I
like with the place?"
"Yes, yes--" he hastened to assure her. "You are in supreme command
here. You have _carte blanche_."
For a while she did not speak, but when she did her voice was very soft.
"Eben," she said almost falteringly, "you give me everything--and I give
you so little."
A few minutes later, with vast relief, he watched her go through the
door, then collapsed, a limp creature, into the chair by the table, his
arms going out and sweeping the papers into a pile close to his body.
His face, relaxed from the strain of dissembling, looked old and his jaw
sagged.
But before he had sufficiently recovered to investigate the documents he
heard a rustle and looked around. Conscience was standing in the
door--and he feared that even the slouch of his shoulders, seen from
behind, might have been dangerously revealing. His wife's level tone as
she spoke, no less than her words, intensified his conviction of defeat.
"The note that I asked you to mail to Stuart Farquaharson--that night
when he left--never reached him."
So she had, after all, been playing with him as a cat plays with a
mouse! She had left the room, only to return and confront him when he
was unmanned. Something of cornered desperation came into his eyes, but
with a final instinct of precaution he managed to assume a remnant of
poise.
"Never reached him? That seems hardly possible."
She nodded. "Yes; doesn't it? I asked you at the time if you were
certain you had mailed it. Do you remember?"
"Perfectly. I said I had never forgotten to mail a letter."
"Still, he never received it--and he wrote one to me--at the same time
which I didn't get, either."
Eben Tollman licked his lips. It seemed useless to carry the fight
further. He stood with one foot over the brink and momentum at his back.
Then when another moment would have ended his campaign of dissimulation
his wife spoke again, and the man's brain reeled--but this time with an
incredulous reversal of emotion. Some miracle had saved him!
"I've just had a note from him. He's in India."
Eben Tollman straightened up, and shook from his shoulders the weight of
a decade or two.
He had been dying the multiple deaths of the coward because he had let
his imagination bolt and run away. The menace had passed, and
straightway came a transformation. Once more he was full-panoplied in
his assurance of self-righteousness. His voice was unctuously
calculated, persuasively considerate.
"That is a very extraordinary story, but you aren't letting things that
happened so long ago trouble you, are you, my dear?"
"A thing--which has caused bitterness between friends--even long ago,
must trouble one."
"Yes, I quite concur in that sentiment." He nodded understandingly. It
was the same gentleness of manner to which he had owed so much in the
past. "And yet--I don't like to speak critically of a man who was once a
rival--yet unhappily there are other things to be remembered. His
experiences in New York seemed to prove him wanting of much that your
friendship must demand."
Conscience did not answer, but she felt the justice of the criticism.
When his wife had again left him alone he lost no time in bending over
memoranda and running through papers with fingers that trembled.
Then he straightened up again. All was as he had left it. The two
intercepted letters were tied safely together and the dust which had
gathered upon their wrapper was undisturbed.
For some minutes he abandoned himself to the satisfaction of a man whose
escape has been narrow--but complete. Eventually, however, his brows
drew together with an annoyance which had strayed into his thoughts and
poisoned them. He had handled the situation ineptly and expensively.
He had given his young wife _carte blanche_ to do what she chose with
his old house. She would waste money more lavishly even than he had
wasted it when he had employed the services of the Searchlight
Investigation Bureau. What, after all, were these cushion-footed sleuths
but blackmailers of a legalized sort? He dismissed lightly the
circumstance that such enterprises fatten upon the support of gentlemen
who have work to do which more open methods fail to favor. This process
of thought permitted his armor of self-righteousness to be worn in
accord with thrift and the accomplishment of his wishes and to remain
the while undented by self-accusation.
* * * * *
The first days of her wedding trip had been marked, for Conscience, by a
numbed vagueness, which brought a kindly blunting of all her emotions.
In that coma-like condition she could be outwardly normal while inwardly
she was living a life of unrealities. She had fought that dangerous
comfort as a surrender to phantasy until in a measure she had conquered
it.
She had fought steadfastly against all the insurgent influences in her
heart aroused by the belated telegram, as one fights the influence of a
drug. It was not Eben Tollman's fault--ran her logic--that this message
from Egypt had drawn Stuart Farquaharson dangerously close to his wife's
inmost thoughts at a time when, she had told herself, he must henceforth
be kept in the far background.
But there was no escaping the reality that the cablegram and the letter
had brought definite results. They had lifted Stuart out of his place in
the past and drawn him into the present. He had not been guilty of
desertion, but was, like herself, the victim of a hideous and
inexplicable mistake.
It had hurt when Tollman referred to Farquaharson's unfavorable record,
even with the consideration of tone he had employed. But Conscience told
herself that her duty lay less in defense of the man whom she had once
loved and who had fallen from his pedestal than in the square facing of
present facts.
Her husband had alluded to Stuart with neither rancor nor resentment but
in kindliness and fair judgment. Now, at all events, she argued wildly,
seeking to coerce her heart, it was to Eben and not to Stuart that she
owed loyalty. So, while her husband sat in his study regretting that he
had conceded too much to his fears of unmasking, she wrestled in her
room with rebellious heart fires, kindled by the letter from the exile.
She shivered, though the room was warm. Assuredly, she told herself, she
must keep burning before her mental vision the memory that, however much
Stuart had been the victim of a mistake at the time of their parting, he
had since forfeited all claims upon her love.
* * * * *
Stuart Farquaharson, the writer of best sellers, reflected that Life
does not divide its chapters by the measure of the calendar, nor does it
observe that rule of literary craftsmanship which seeks to distribute
the drama of a narrative into a structural unity of form with the
ascending stages of climax.
At this bruised cynicism an older man would have smiled, but to Stuart
it was poignantly real.
He had lost the prize which to him seemed the only guerdon worth
striving for, while every other recognition had come easily--almost
without effort.
The success of his novel had been so extraordinary that Farquaharson
fell to reviewing his literary experience with a somewhat impersonal
amusement. He had not poured his soul into his work with a bitter sweat
of midnight endeavor as the genius is said to do. He had wooed the muse
about as reverently as a battered tramp might fondle an equally battered
dog, seeking, without illusion, a substitute for better companionship.
One afternoon he sat alone in a Yokohama tea-house, reading the latest
collection of newspaper reviews which had come to his hand.
"We have here a book," observed one commentator, "which irritates with a
sense of undeveloped power while it delights with a too-facile charm. It
would seem to come from a pen more gifted than sincere."
As Stuart slipped the collection of clippings into his pocket a hand
fell on his shoulder and he rose to encounter a ruddy-faced young man in
the undress uniform of the United States Navy.
"Why so solitary?" demanded the newcomer. "Surely a famous novelist
needn't sit alone in the shadow of Fuji Yama. The place teems with
charming Americans."
Farquaharson's face lighted with genuine pleasure as he grasped the
outstretched hand in a grip of cramping heartiness.
"Jimmy Hancock!" he exclaimed. "Why, man, I haven't seen you since--" He
paused, and Jimmy, seating himself, grinned back as he took up the
unfinished sentence: "'Since the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary--' I'll have Scotch and soda, thank you."
Farquaharson laughed. This was the same breezy Jimmy and the two had met
rarely since the first academy days. That was a time which carried them
both back almost to Conscience's visit in the Valley of Virginia.
A torrent of questions, many of them intrinsically inconsequential yet
important to the exile, had to be put by the officer and answered by the
author. Finally came one which Stuart had apprehended.
"When did you see Conscience Williams last? An unspeakably ancient
letter from home mentioned your spending a summer up there on Cape Cod?
There were even rosy prophecies." Farquaharson winced a little.
"She is married," he said evenly, though with an effort. "She quite
recently married a gentleman by the name of Eben Tollman."
"Oh, then I was misinformed. Give me her address if you know it and I'll
send my overdue congratulations."
Farquaharson complied with that obedience to social necessity which made
him conceal the fact that, for him, this reunion with an old friend had
been robbed of its savor and turned into a series of unhappy memories.
"This evening you are coming aboard to dine with me," announced Hancock
when he had finished his drink and risen, "and after dinner a handful of
people will arrive for an informal dance on deck."
But Farquaharson gave an excuse. He felt weary and shrank from those
inevitable confidences which must ensue. This evening he was leaving for
Tokyo and would reach Yokohama on his return only in time to make his
steamer for Honolulu. Jimmy Hancock was full of regret. His own cruiser,
he said, would sail to-morrow for Nagasaki.
Stuart's return from Tokyo and Nikko put him in Yokohama just before his
steamer's sailing time. So it happened that he went over the gang plank
of the _Nippon Maru_ as the whistle was warning visitors ashore.
Having no acquaintances among the figures that lined the deck rail
behind a flutter of handkerchiefs, he went to the smoking-lounge where
for two hours he busied himself with his author's routine of note books.
It was mid-afternoon when he emerged among those fellow passengers who
had long ago claimed their steamer chairs and dedicated themselves to
the idleness of the voyage.
Stuart began pacing the boat deck with the adequate companionship of his
pipe. He was not lonely for the society of men and women. In his own
mind he put a stress of emphasis on women. Two of them had touched his
life closely enough to alter its currents. One, he had lost through his
own folly and her inability to free herself from the sectionalism of an
inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn
him into the whirlpool of her heedlessness.
In ways as far apart as east and west, each had been fascinating and
each had been beautiful.
The orbit of his rounds carried him several times past a woman, who was
standing unaccompanied at the rail astern. Her face and glance were
turned outward where the propellers were churning up a lather of white
spume and where little eddies of jade and lapis-lazuli raced among the
bubbles.
He felt, at first, no curiosity for the averted face, but finally the
length of time she had been standing there without change of posture,
the unusual slenderness and grace of the figure, and the fact that he
had _not_ seen her features awakened a tepid interest.
But when, for the seventh time, he rounded the white walls of the after
cabin and she turned with a smile of seeming welcome on her lips,
Farquaharson stopped dead. For just a surprised instant he forgot the
requirements of courtesy and glanced about as if instinctively seeking
escape. His jaw stiffened, then with a sense of chagrin for this
gracelessness he stepped forward with a belated cordiality.
But in the brief interval he saw the exquisitely fair coloring of the
woman's cheeks flush pinker, and the lower lip catch between her teeth.
Her eyes, which in the afternoon sun were golden amber, clouded with a
swift shadow of pain which as swiftly vanished.
"I was wondering, Stuart," said Marian Holbury slowly, "whether you
meant to speak to me at all."
"I didn't know you were on this side of the world," he responded with
recovered equanimity.
She leaned against the rail and, while the breeze whipped the sash of
her sweater and her white skirt about her, studied him gravely until he
said: "Meeting you here was such a coincidence that it astonished me ...
don't you find it surprising, too?"
She shook her head.
"No," she said, "I don't. You see I _did_ know that you were on this
side of the globe. I even knew that you would be on board. Lieutenant
Hancock told me."