MRS. KEENE’S apartment on the Place de la Madeleine was a scene of
joyful commotion and confusion. The small breakfast which followed the
wedding was an informal affair; and though it was supposed that only the
nearest personal friends were present, the rooms were cheerfully
crowded, and the uniforms made a show and glitter. The charming girls
who were permitted to be their sister’s bridesmaids were the object of
much notice and attention; and when the company had risen from the
table, the eldest sister, who was so much the least pretty and
vivacious, was scarcely missed from the room. A few people inquired for
the bride’s brother, who had also disappeared; but as he was a stranger
to every one, the fact of his absence was little noticed.
Martha, when she went to look for Harold, found him in his own room,
smoking.
“I knew it was you,” he said, as she came in, closing the door behind
her. “I thought you would come to look me up; but why did you? I’m poor
company for anybody to-day. Well,” he added, with a short, deep breath,
“thank the Lord, that’s over! When you get married, Martha, I want you
to elope. I’ve no business at a wedding. I feel that I have cast an evil
eye on Alice and Victor.”
“Oh, Harold, I was thinking of you more than of them all the time,” said
Martha, earnestly. “It did seem absolute cruelty to have required it of
you. How _could_ mama!”
Concentrated as her tone and manner were, she was doubtful whether they
even penetrated the consciousness of her companion, who, with his chair
tipped backward, his frock-coat thrown open, with a ruthless disregard
of the smart gardenia which ornamented its lapel, and his hands thrust
deep into his trousers pockets, was smoking vigorously, and looking away
from her out of the window.
Martha had come here in the ardent hope of giving comfort, and she felt
a little hurt. She smothered the feeling back into her heart, however,
as she said:
“I knew it was anguish to you, standing there and going through that
ceremony.”
He turned, and looked at her.
“Well, rather!” he said, with a short laugh, still keeping the cigar in
his mouth, and talking with his teeth clenched upon it. Then he turned
his face toward the window again; but his glance was so vague that
Martha felt that he saw some picture in his mind, rather than the scene
below. “The service was the same,” he said, clasping his hands behind
his head, and narrowing his eyes as if to get the perspective. “The
music was the same--and those roses! And that was not all. Vivid as she
always is to me in every other respect, I have not always been able to
hold on to her voice; but to-day I heard it perfectly, saying, ‘I,
Sophia, take thee, Harold,’ and all the rest.”
He got up suddenly, threw his cigar into the grate, and walked across
the room.
“Oh, poor Harold!” Martha said, her voice thick with tears.
The effect of her words was instantaneous. He turned suddenly, and
showed in both face and figure a swiftly summoned and effectual calm.
“My dear girl,” he said quickly, “you don’t suppose I’m posing for an
injured husband, I hope? I have suffered, of course; but with a man
certain kinds of suffering get to be a business. To speak of it seems
like talking shop. It’s detestable to be talking it to you now; but the
truth is, this wedding affair has nearly knocked me out. I could have
gone on keeping up the bluff, of course, and talked the usual bosh with
the wedding-guests in yonder; but I found I had a contract with myself
that had to be seen to. It has cost me something to smooth out and
harden down my thoughts and feelings about my own life; but I had got
the thing done. This wedding business, however, upheaved it all. When I
found that I was actually sinking into the mushy swamp of self-pity, I
thought it was about time to come away, and steady up my nerve a bit.
I’m all right now, however, and I see clear again. The thing’s over, and
no harm is done.”
Martha’s eyes followed him wistfully as he turned to the dressing-table,
picked up a brush, and smoothed the swart surface of his thick, dark
hair, brushed some specks of dust from his coat, and carefully
straightened the injured flower.
“Shall we go back?” he said. “We may be missed.”
“Don’t go quite yet. No one will think about us,” she said; and then she
added doubtfully: “May I talk to you a little, Harold?”
“Certainly, my dear. Talk all you want,” he answered, sitting down;
“only there’s nothing to say.”
“Where is she? I’ve so often longed to know.”
“I haven’t the least idea. She asked me not to follow her movements, and
I never have.”
“Then you do not even know whether she is living or dead?”
“Yes; I know that much. She is not dead. I feel her in the world. If she
went out of it, I believe I should know it. Besides, I would have been
informed of that. She spoke of it, and said so.”
There was a moment’s pause, which Martha broke.
“Will you tell me this,” she said, “whether you are as hopeless about it
all as you were when I last spoke to you of it?”
“Exactly as hopeless. When a thing is absolute, my dear, it doesn’t
have degrees. I have never been anything else than hopeless since the
hour of my last interview with her. She told me then,” he said, with a
sort of cold conciseness, “that her first wish was to set me absolutely
free. She said she wanted me to marry again. She said that just as soon
as we had lived apart the time required by law for a divorce, she wanted
me to get it. She said she was sorry there was no way to get it sooner.
She said, also, that she would take back her maiden name.”
He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and, walking over to the
window, stood there for a moment. Then he turned suddenly, and came and
stood in front of Martha, looking her directly in the eyes. She saw by
that look that he was calm and steady, and so she ventured to question
him a little further.
“Do you know whom she lives with?” she asked.
“With an aunt, whose life, as she told me, is utterly out of the world
that we knew together. She said that, on this account, there was good
reason to hope that we would never meet again.”
Martha, who felt that this subject might not be spoken of between them
again, continued to question him as he stood and looked down at her with
a perfect consciousness of self-possession.
“Was she so beautiful?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“And are you still unchanged in giving her the supreme place that you
did give her from the moment you first saw her?”
“Yes,” he said again.
“Oh, Harold,” exclaimed the girl, “I sometimes think it might have
turned out differently if the marriage had not been so rash and sudden.”
He took a seat near her, and continued to look at her as he said:
“It could have made no difference to me. You don’t fully understand it,
Martha. It is impossible that you should. I knew, the day I met her,
that I had been set apart and saved for her. I know it now. It was the
kind of gravitation that comes once in a life.”
“Then you do not regret it?”
“For myself, not in the least. She was my wife for a month. What I have
gone through since is a small price to pay for that. But when I think
of what it has cost her--that most delicate of women--to face the odium
of it--that superb woman’s life shadowed by the vulgarity of a suddenly
ruptured marriage; and--deeper than that!--to have her best life maimed
forever--God! I curse the day that I was born!”
“And what has she brought on you, I’d like to know?” cried Martha. “It
was she who cast you off--not you her. Ah, Harold, if she had been the
woman she should have been, she never could have done it!”
He looked at her with some impatience in his glance.
“Whether she was the woman she should have been or not is a thing that
neither concerns nor interests me. She was the woman I loved. The whole
thing is in that.”
“And the woman you still love? Is that true, Harold?”
“True as death,” he said; “but what does it all matter? Your
relentlessness is the friend’s natural feeling. It shows how bootless it
is to give account. I care more for your opinion than any other, but
even your scorn does not signify to me here. It misses the point. The
only pride that is involved is pride in my own immutability. Love ought
always to be a regeneration,” he went on, as if putting into shape the
thoughts that were rising out of the recent chaos in his mind. “It’s
easy enough to keep true when the love, the joy, the equal give and
take, go on unbroken. It’s when a man actually turns and walks out of
heaven, and the gates shut behind him forever, that he finds out the
stuff that’s in him. Sometimes, when I think about it, I try to fancy
what would be my humiliation if I found I had grown to love her less.”
Martha was silent a moment. Then she said, as if urged by the necessity
of speaking out, for this once, all that she had so long kept back:
“Suppose, after you get the divorce, you should hear that she was
married?”
“I’m braced to bear that, if it comes,” he said. “I know it is possible,
but I don’t fear it. I may, of course, be wrong; but I don’t believe,
with what has been between us, that she could ever be the wife of
another man while I lived. She might think so. She might even try--go
part of the way; but I never felt more secure of anything than that she
would find herself unable to do it.”
“Then do you think that she possibly still cares for you?”
“No; I’m not a fool. She made that point sufficiently plain. Didn’t she
tell me, in the downright, simple words, that she did not love me--had
never loved me--had found out it was all a mistake? I believe she meant
it absolutely. I believe it was true. You don’t suppose, if I doubted
it, I’d have given her up as I have done?”
“Oh, Harold, what was it all about, that quarrel that you had? Could you
bear to tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell. We thought we were perfectly suited, perfectly
sympathetic. Our feelings had stood every test but marriage. When it
came to that, they failed. It was a case of non-adjustment of
feelings--different points of view--different natures, perhaps. I saw
facing me the demand that I should change myself, root and branch, and
become a different creature from what God had made me. This I could not
do. I might have pretended and acted, but she was not the woman to
tolerate the wretched puppet of a man which that would have made of me.
_Her_ changing was a thing I never thought of. I was never mean enough
to think that a woman was bound to sacrifice her individuality in
marriage. Why should a wife surrender that sacred citadel any more than
a husband? How odious should I feel myself, if I had ever taken that
position in the slightest degree! And shams were out of the question
with us. Neither of us could have tolerated anything uncandid--anything
that smacked of a tacit convention.”
There was a moment’s pause, and then Martha broke out impulsively:
“I can’t help thinking that it might have been prevented. It may be that
you were too proud. Have you ever thought that?”
“No,” he said, with a certain grimness. “I have never taken that view of
the case. She made it so entirely plain that she wanted to be rid of me
at once and forever--that there was no room for reflection on that
point. If there is a man alive who could have held her bound after her
words to me, I hope I may never make his acquaintance.”
The appearance of agitation which had marked the beginning of the
interview was now utterly gone from Harold. He spoke deliberately, and
as if with a certain satisfaction in the sense of getting his thoughts
into form.
Again there was a pause. Then Martha said, speaking very low:
“But, Harold, you are doing without love.”
“I have had it,” he answered, “and what has been is mine, to keep
forever. I have lost my wife, but the greatness, the exaltation, of my
love increases. I have learned that love is subjective and independent.
A renunciation is only an episode in it. I deserve no pity. No, Martha;
never fall into the mistake of pitying me. I should pity you from my
heart if I thought you would miss what I have had; and the gods may be
lenient to as sweet a soul as yours. You may have the joy, some day,
without the renunciation.”
“I don’t want it! I wouldn’t have it!” cried the girl, vehemently. “No
one will ever love me, and I wouldn’t have them to. It would break my
heart. It makes me seem ridiculous even to speak of it. I want _you_ to
have love and joy. That is all I ask.”
“Well, I’ve had it. Be satisfied. Of the two of us,--except that you
have hope, which I have not,--you are the one to be pitied.”
“Oh, Harold, _don’t_! Unless you want to break my heart outright, don’t
talk to me about being happy. I want happiness for _you: I’ve_ got no
use for it.”
She got up as she spoke, and moved toward him. Harold stood up, too, and
bent to kiss her. Demonstrations between them were unusual, and it was a
very Martha-like instinct that made her now so incline her head as to
receive his caress upon her hair.
“We will go back to the others now,” said Harold. “Thank you, Martha.”
So together they went back to the wedding-party.
[Illustration: “‘I KNEW IT WAS ANGUISH TO YOU.’”]
[Illustration: “AS SHE HAD SEEN HER ONCE BEFORE.”]