THE SHADOWING PAST
Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge
himself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of those
outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.
He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, and
his cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, or
that of the wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could face life
again, he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric of
some new and factitious faith.
But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist and chaos of utter
bewilderment, as reason crept haltingly back to her seat, his first
blind and indeterminate rage fell away from him. His first black and
blinding clouds of suspicion slowly subsided before practical and
orderly question and cross-question. Thought adjusted itself to its
new environment. Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed his ceaseless
artillery of interrogation toward the outer and darker walls of
uncertainty still so blankly confronting him.
It was not that he had been consumed by any direct sense of loss, of
deprivation. It was not that he had feared open and immediate
treachery. If a rage had burned through him, at the sudden and
startling sight of his own wife thus secretly masquerading in an
unknown rôle, it was far from being a rage or mere jealousy and
distrust.
They had, in other days, each passed through questionable and perilous
experiences. Both together and alone they had adventured unwillingly
along many of the more dubious channels of life. They had surrendered
to temptation; they had sown and reaped and suffered, and become weary
of it. They had struggled slowly yet stoically up towards
respectability; they had fought for fair-dealing; they had entered a
compact to stand by each other through that long and bitter effort to
be tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard.
What now so disturbed and disheartened him was the sudden sense of
something impending, the vague apprehension of some momentous and
far-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow. And it was
framing itself into being at a time when he had most prayed for their
untrammelled freedom, when he had most looked for their ultimate
emancipation from the claws of that too usurious past.
But, above all, what had brought about the sudden change? Why had no
inkling of it crept to his ears? Why was she, the passionate pleader
for the decencies of life whom he had last watched so patiently and
heroically imparting the mastery of the pianoforte to seven little
English children in a squalid Paris _pension_, now lapsing back into
the old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility? Why had she
weakened and surrendered, when he himself, the oldtime weakling of the
two, had clung so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude? And
what was the meaning and the direction of it all? And what would it
lead to? But why, above all, had she kept silent, and given him no
warning?
Durkin looked up and listened to the soft rustling of the palm
branches. The bray of a distant band saddened him with an unfathomable
sense of homesickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with languid
tropicality, and the waiting richness of life, he caught the belated
glimmer of lights and the throb and murmur of string music. It carried
in to him what seemed the essential and alluring note of all the
existence he had once known and lived. Yet day by day he had fought
back that sirenic call. It had not always been an open victory--the
weight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for that--but for _her_
sake he had at least vacillated and hesitated and temporized, waiting
and looking for that final strength which would come with her first
wistful note of warning, or with her belated return to his side.
Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick about him; here Chance
had laid the board for its most tempting game. In that way, as the
young Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the world. But
he had turned away from those clustering temptations, he had left
unbroken his veneer of honorable life, for her sake--while she herself
had surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably, whatever strange form the
surrender might even at that moment be taking.
All he could do, now, was to wait until morning. There would surely be
some message, some hint, some key to the mystery. While everything
remained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through the tangled past in
search of some casual seed of explanation for that still undeciphered
present.
He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopic
past career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraph
operator, when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-on
into an Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from the
railroad, and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate struggle
to work his way up once more, his hunger for money and even a few weeks
of leisure, that his long dreamed of photo-telegraphy apparatus might
be perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in the
Postal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or two
until he and his outside confederate had been able to make their
illicit wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wandering
street-cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch of
poverty had turned him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers and
vicissitudes of a poolroom key-operator. He recalled his chance
meeting with MacNutt, the wire-tapper, and their partnership of
privateer forces in that strange campaign against Penfield, the alert
and opulent poolroom king, who had seemed always able to defy the
efforts and offices of a combative and equally alert district-attorney.
Most vividly and minutely of all, he reviewed his first meeting with
Frances Candler, and the bewilderment that had filled him when he
discovered her to be an intimate and yet a reluctant associate with
MacNutt in his work--a bewilderment which lasted until he himself grew
to realize how easy was the downward trend when once the first false
step had been made.
He brought back to mind their strange adventures and perils and escapes
together, day by day and week by week, their early interest that had
ripened into affection, their innate hatred of that underground life,
which eventually flowered into open revolt and flight, their impetuous
marriage, their precipitate journey from the shores of America.
Then came to him what seemed the bitterest memories of all. It was the
thought of that first too fragile happiness which slowly but implacably
merged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but none the less
evident. That interregnum of peace had been a Tantalus-like taste of a
draught which he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet, point by
point, he recalled their first quiet and hopeful weeks in England, when
their old ways of life seemed as far away as the America they had left
behind, when they still had unbounded faith in themselves and in the
future. Just how or where fell the first corroding touch he could
never tell. But in each of them there had grown up a secret unrest--it
was, he knew, the hounds of habit whimpering from their kennels. "No
one was ever reformed," he had once confided to Frances, "by simply
being turned out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drug
their first rising doubts with the tumult of incessant travel and
change. His wife had lured him to secluded places, she had struggled
to interest him in a language or two, she had planned quixotic courses
of reading--as though a man such as he might be remolded by a few
months of modern authors!--and carried him off to centres of gaiety--as
though the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drive
that inmost fever out of his blood!
He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics, with their bridge-whist
and late dinners and incongruous dissipations, for a fortnight. Then
they fled to the huddled little hotels and _pensions_ of the narrow and
dark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under skies which Frank declared to be
bluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from India
and royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from Paris and
students from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers from
all the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to Durkin they were at
last alone. He confided this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morning
after they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled cups, at the
spring where the comely, rubber-garmented native girls caught and doled
out the biting hot spray of the geyser. They were seated at the
remoter end of the glass-covered Promenade, and a band was playing.
Something in the music, for once, had saddened and dispirited Frank.
"Alone?" she had retorted. "Who is ever alone?"
"Well, our wires are down, for a little while, anyway!" laughed Durkin,
as he sipped the hot salt water from the china cup. It reminded him,
he had said, of all his past sins in epitome. Frank sighed wearily,
and did not speak for a minute or two.
"But, after all," she said at last, in a meditative calmness of voice,
"there are always some sort of ghostly wires connecting us with one
another, holding us in touch with what we have been and done, with our
past, and with our ancestors, with all our forsaken sins and misdoings.
No, Jim, I don't believe we are _ever_ alone. There are always sounds
and hints, little broken messages and whispers, creeping in to us along
those hidden circuits. We call them Intuitions, and sometimes we speak
of them as Character, and sometimes as Heredity, and weakness of
will--but they are there, just the same!"
The confession of that mood was a costly one, for before the week was
out they had, in some way, wearied of the sight of that daily
procession of nephritics and neurotics, and were off again, like a pair
of homeless swallows, to the Rhine salmon and the Black Forest venison
of Baden. From there they fled to the mountain air of St. Moritz,
where they were frozen out and driven back to Paris--but always
spending freely and thinking little of the vague tomorrow. Durkin,
indeed, recognized that taint of improvidence in his veins. He was a
spendthrift; he had none of the temperamental foresight and frugality
of his wife, who reminded him, from time to time, and with
ever-increasing anxiety, of their ever-melting letter of credit. But,
on the other hand, she stood ready to sacrifice everything, in order to
build some new wall of interest about him, that she might immure him
from his past. She still planned and schemed to shield him, not so
much from the world, as from himself. Yet he had seen, almost from the
first, that their pursuit of contentment was born of their common and
ever-increasing terror of the future. Each left unuttered the actual
emptiness and desolation of life, yet each nursed the bitter sting of
it. Day by day he had put on a bold face, because he had long since
learned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her. And,
above all things, he hated to see her unhappy.