A man must have descended to the very deepest levels of depression
before he loses his power to laugh, or to be cheered by an unexpected
bettering of his financial position. John Fulton was in a bad way, but
certain things still struck him as funny, and the money which he had
been enabled to borrow from the bank had eased his mind. Still, so
Lucy told me, he could not sleep at night, and it must have been
obvious to the most casual observer that he was a sick man. He had a
drawn and hungry look. Jock and Hurry could by no means satisfy his
appetite for affection. Indeed, I think the sight and touch and the
sounds of them at play were no great comfort to him at this time. He
must have felt in their presence something of that anguish of pity
which a man feels for children who have lost their mother.
He had hoped at first that Lucy's failure of affection was but a
temporary aberration. But at last he must have come to despair of any
change in her feelings for him, at least under existing conditions.
Indeed their relations were going from bad to worse. A man loved and
beloved falls into habits of passion for which there is no cure but
death or old age. Yet a man would readily believe that separation
might affect him like an opiate, and it must have been in this belief
that Fulton determined to accompany Harry Colemain on a trip to Palm
Beach. To me he vouchsafed the explanation that he was not well and
that he couldn't sleep, and that when he wasn't well, and that when he
couldn't sleep, his one thought and desire was to get to salt water.
"It always cures me," he said, just as if he had often been sick
before. From Lucy I had the truth of the matter.
"He thinks," she said, "that if he goes away and stays away for a long
time that perhaps I will miss him enough to want him back, and on the
old footing. He isn't even going to write to me. It's going to be
exactly as if he didn't exist."
"Do you think it wise for him to go, Lucy?"
"Perhaps it will do him good. It won't change me. I know that. If
only he'd change. Haven't I done him enough harm to make him hate me?
Archie, I'm so sorry for him that I wish I was dead. And yet I want to
live. I'm too young to die. I want to live, and be happy--happy the
way I used to be happy."
"And you can't with John?"
She shook her head quietly. "It's the most wonderful thing to be in
love!" she said. "I wonder what I did to have that wonderful thing? I
wonder what I've done to deserve to lose it? And even if--even if it
happened again it could never be the same. There can be only one first
time--even if you've got a silly memory that doesn't remember very
well. And you make ties and habits and all these have to be thrown
overboard when the second time happens, and there's scandal, and cold
shoulders, and--what do you think I _ought_ to do? If I can't give him
what he's paying for oughtn't I to cut loose on my own, to support
myself, and not be a burden to him and a ubiquitous reminder that we've
failed to make a go of living together? What _ought_ I to do?"
It had become very hard for me to tell her what I thought she ought to
do. Ever since that moment when I had first known that I wanted to
take her in my arms and comfort her, I had begun to have doubts of my
own honesty. And now she had put that honesty to a definite test, and
I was determined that it should come through the ordeal alive.
"Must I really tell you what I think you ought to do?"
"Yes."
"Some of the things I think you ought to do, are things that I know you
don't want to do--things that you think perhaps you _can't_ do. Women
often say _can't_ when they mean _won't_, don't they?"
"Maybe."
"I'm afraid you aren't going to like what I'm going to say, nor me for
saying it."
"Try me," she said, and she gave me a look of great trust and
understanding.
"I'm going to tell you what I think you ought to do, Lucy, and what I
think you ought to have done."
Any teacher whose scholars looked at him with the trustfulness and
expectation with which Lucy now looked at me, must be inspired, I
think, to the very top notch of his sense of honor and duty. I am sure
at least that I laid the law down of what I thought she should do, and
should have done with complete honesty and without regard to
consequences. If I got nothing better for my pains than dislike, at
least I could criticize her conduct and character without being biased
by my growing affection for her.
"In the first place," I said, "when you found out that you no longer
loved your husband, you made your first mistake. By your own admission
he had given you everything in the way of devotion and faithfulness
that a man can give a woman. When you found that you no longer loved
him, you shouldn't have told him. He ought never to have known. You
should have summoned all your fortitude and delicacy to deceive him
into thinking that you had not changed toward him, and never would."
"I _couldn't_!" exclaimed Lucy.
"You wouldn't," I said.
"It wouldn't have been honest."
"Perhaps not. But it would have been noble."
Lucy naturally enough preferred praise to blame, and this showed in her
face and in her voice. I felt infinitely removed from our previous
terms of intimate confidence, when she said: "Couldn't or wouldn't,
it's history that I didn't."
"That being so," I said, "I think you should go now to your husband and
tell him that love or no love you propose to be his faithful wife till
death part you; to put him first in your head, if not in your heart.
It may be that through a long course of simulation you will come once
more to care for him. Self-sacrifice is a noble weapon. I think,
Lucy, that you would be very wise if you told him that two is not a
lucky number."
"I don't understand."
"Jock and Hurry," I said, "are two."
She changed color to the roots of her hair. "Oh," she cried, "you
don't understand how a woman feels about that! I'd rather die. I--I
_couldn't_!"
"You _won't_."
"I thought _you_ understood me better. I thought _you_ wanted me to be
happy!"
"Upon my soul, Lucy, I think that you might find happiness that way."
She shrugged her shoulders and her face looked hard as marble. "And
that's your advice!" she said. And then with a sudden change of
expression, "It's what you think I _ought_ to do. Would it please you
if I took your advice? Is it what you _want_ me to do?"
I had spoken as I thought duty commanded. It hadn't been easy. With
each word I felt that I had lost ground in her estimation. She asked
that last question with the expression of a weary woebegone child, and
I answered it without thought, and upon the urge of a wrong impulse.
"No--no," I cried. "It's not what I want you to do. I had almost
rather see you dead."
There was a long silence.
"Do you mean that?"
"Yes, Lucy. Yes."
"Then you _do_ care. Oh, thank God!"
I don't know how she got there. It was as if I had waked up and found
her in my arms.
Kissed and kissing, we heard the opening of the distant front door.
And Oh, how I wish I had found the courage when Fulton came into the
livingroom, to tell him that I loved his wife, and that she loved me,
and what was he going to do about it! I did have the impulse, but not
the courage. When Fulton came in Lucy was knitting at an interminable
green necktie, and I was talking to her from a far chair across an open
number of the illustrated _London News_. We looked, I believe, as
casual and innocent as cherubim, but my conscience was very guilty, and
it seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, that for the first time Fulton
showed me a certain curtness of manner, as if he was not pleased at
finding me so often in his house.