TEN DAYS later, Mr. Sellers, still house-bound, asked Waythorn to call
on his way down town.
The senior partner, with his swaddled foot propped up by the fire,
greeted his associate with an air of embarrassment.
"I'm sorry, my dear fellow; I've got to ask you to do an awkward thing
for me."
Waythorn waited, and the other went on, after a pause apparently given
to the arrangement of his phrases: "The fact is, when I was knocked out
I had just gone into a rather complicated piece of business for--Gus
Varick."
"Well?" said Waythorn, with an attempt to put him at his ease.
"Well--it's this way: Varick came to me the day before my attack. He
had evidently had an inside tip from somebody, and had made about a
hundred thousand. He came to me for advice, and I suggested his going
in with Vanderlyn."
"Oh, the deuce!" Waythorn exclaimed. He saw in a flash what had
happened. The investment was an alluring one, but required negotiation.
He listened intently while Sellers put the case before him, and, the
statement ended, he said: "You think I ought to see Varick?"
"I'm afraid I can't as yet. The doctor is obdurate. And this thing
can't wait. I hate to ask you, but no one else in the office knows the
ins and outs of it."
Waythorn stood silent. He did not care a farthing for the success of
Varick's venture, but the honor of the office was to be considered, and
he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner.
"Very well," he said, "I'll do it."
That afternoon, apprised by telephone, Varick called at the office.
Waythorn, waiting in his private room, wondered what the others thought
of it. The newspapers, at the time of Mrs. Waythorn's marriage, had
acquainted their readers with every detail of her previous matrimonial
ventures, and Waythorn could fancy the clerks smiling behind Varick's
back as he was ushered in.
Varick bore himself admirably. He was easy without being undignified,
and Waythorn was conscious of cutting a much less impressive figure.
Varick had no head for business, and the talk prolonged itself for
nearly an hour while Waythorn set forth with scrupulous precision the
details of the proposed transaction.
"I'm awfully obliged to you," Varick said as he rose. "The fact is I'm
not used to having much money to look after, and I don't want to make
an ass of myself--" He smiled, and Waythorn could not help noticing
that there was something pleasant about his smile. "It feels uncommonly
queer to have enough cash to pay one's bills. I'd have sold my soul for
it a few years ago!"
Waythorn winced at the allusion. He had heard it rumored that a lack of
funds had been one of the determining causes of the Varick separation,
but it did not occur to him that Varick's words were intentional. It
seemed more likely that the desire to keep clear of embarrassing topics
had fatally drawn him into one. Waythorn did not wish to be outdone in
civility.
"We'll do the best we can for you," he said. "I think this is a good
thing you're in."
"Oh, I'm sure it's immense. It's awfully good of you--" Varick broke
off, embarrassed. "I suppose the thing's settled now--but if--"
"If anything happens before Sellers is about, I'll see you again," said
Waythorn quietly. He was glad, in the end, to appear the more
self-possessed of the two.
The course of Lily's illness ran smooth, and as the days passed
Waythorn grew used to the idea of Haskett's weekly visit. The first
time the day came round, he stayed out late, and questioned his wife as
to the visit on his return. She replied at once that Haskett had merely
seen the nurse downstairs, as the doctor did not wish any one in the
child's sick-room till after the crisis.
The following week Waythorn was again conscious of the recurrence of
the day, but had forgotten it by the time he came home to dinner. The
crisis of the disease came a few days later, with a rapid decline of
fever, and the little girl was pronounced out of danger. In the
rejoicing which ensued the thought of Haskett passed out of Waythorn's
mind and one afternoon, letting himself into the house with a latchkey,
he went straight to his library without noticing a shabby hat and
umbrella in the hall.
In the library he found a small effaced-looking man with a thinnish
gray beard sitting on the edge of a chair. The stranger might have been
a piano-tuner, or one of those mysteriously efficient persons who are
summoned in emergencies to adjust some detail of the domestic
machinery. He blinked at Waythorn through a pair of gold-rimmed
spectacles and said mildly: "Mr. Waythorn, I presume? I am Lily's
father."
Waythorn flushed. "Oh--" he stammered uncomfortably. He broke off,
disliking to appear rude. Inwardly he was trying to adjust the actual
Haskett to the image of him projected by his wife's reminiscences.
Waythorn had been allowed to infer that Alice's first husband was a
brute.
"I am sorry to intrude," said Haskett, with his over-the-counter
politeness.
"Don't mention it," returned Waythorn, collecting himself. "I suppose
the nurse has been told?"
"I presume so. I can wait," said Haskett. He had a resigned way of
speaking, as though life had worn down his natural powers of resistance.
Waythorn stood on the threshold, nervously pulling off his gloves.
"I'm sorry you've been detained. I will send for the nurse," he said;
and as he opened the door he added with an effort: "I'm glad we can
give you a good report of Lily." He winced as the _we_ slipped out, but
Haskett seemed not to notice it.
"Thank you, Mr. Waythorn. It's been an anxious time for me."
"Ah, well, that's past. Soon she'll be able to go to you." Waythorn
nodded and passed out.
In his own room, he flung himself down with a groan. He hated the
womanish sensibility which made him suffer so acutely from the
grotesque chances of life. He had known when he married that his wife's
former husbands were both living, and that amid the multiplied contacts
of modern existence there were a thousand chances to one that he would
run against one or the other, yet he found himself as much disturbed by
his brief encounter with Haskett as though the law had not obligingly
removed all difficulties in the way of their meeting.
Waythorn sprang up and began to pace the room nervously. He had not
suffered half so much from his two meetings with Varick. It was
Haskett's presence in his own house that made the situation so
intolerable. He stood still, hearing steps in the passage.
"This way, please," he heard the nurse say. Haskett was being taken
upstairs, then: not a corner of the house but was open to him. Waythorn
dropped into another chair, staring vaguely ahead of him. On his
dressing-table stood a photograph of Alice, taken when he had first
known her. She was Alice Varick then--how fine and exquisite he had
thought her! Those were Varick's pearls about her neck. At Waythorn's
instance they had been returned before her marriage. Had Haskett ever
given her any trinkets--and what had become of them, Waythorn wondered?
He realized suddenly that he knew very little of Haskett's past or
present situation; but from the man's appearance and manner of speech
he could reconstruct with curious precision the surroundings of Alice's
first marriage. And it startled him to think that she had, in the
background of her life, a phase of existence so different from anything
with which he had connected her. Varick, whatever his faults, was a
gentleman, in the conventional, traditional sense of the term: the
sense which at that moment seemed, oddly enough, to have most meaning
to Waythorn. He and Varick had the same social habits, spoke the same
language, understood the same allusions. But this other man...it was
grotesquely uppermost in Waythorn's mind that Haskett had worn a
made-up tie attached with an elastic. Why should that ridiculous detail
symbolize the whole man? Waythorn was exasperated by his own
paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him,
became as it were the key to Alice's past. He could see her, as Mrs.
Haskett, sitting in a "front parlor" furnished in plush, with a
pianola, and a copy of "Ben Hur" on the centre-table. He could see her
going to the theatre with Haskett--or perhaps even to a "Church
Sociable"--she in a "picture hat" and Haskett in a black frock-coat, a
little creased, with the made-up tie on an elastic. On the way home
they would stop and look at the illuminated shop-windows, lingering
over the photographs of New York actresses. On Sunday afternoons
Haskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of them in a
white enameled perambulator, and Waythorn had a vision of the people
they would stop and talk to. He could fancy how pretty Alice must have
looked, in a dress adroitly constructed from the hints of a New York
fashion-paper; how she must have looked down on the other women,
chafing at her life, and secretly feeling that she belonged in a bigger
place.
For the moment his foremost thought was one of wonder at the way in
which she had shed the phase of existence which her marriage with
Haskett implied. It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, every
inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of
her life. If she had denied being married to Haskett she could hardly
have stood more convicted of duplicity than in this obliteration of the
self which had been his wife.
Waythorn started up, checking himself in the analysis of her motives.
What right had he to create a fantastic effigy of her and then pass
judgment on it? She had spoken vaguely of her first marriage as
unhappy, had hinted, with becoming reticence, that Haskett had wrought
havoc among her young illusions....It was a pity for Waythorn's peace
of mind that Haskett's very inoffensiveness shed a new light on the
nature of those illusions. A man would rather think that his wife has
been brutalized by her first husband than that the process has been
reversed.
"Why, how do you do?" she said with a distinct note of pleasure