“Tell me, Harroway,” said Gerard, “you who are the friend of us all,
and would like to defend both my wife and Colman, does her story hold
water?”
“I should let things alone for the present,” replied the lawyer,
cautiously; “make investigations, give her for the while the benefit of
the doubt.”
“But there can’t be any doubt. The whole thing hangs together. Colman
was over head and ears in love with her before our marriage. He has been
openly in love with her ever since. They have been associated in all her
confounded schemes and philanthropies. He was always on her tongue and
in her thoughts--always in the house when I wasn’t there. I remember
he wanted to jump down my throat once because I suggested Irene had her
faults like others. Look at those poems of his addressed to her. All the
same story. This charge of murder is brought against him. His mouth
is closed. For a time I didn’t believe the woman plea. However, we all
agreed there was one. Who could it be? All of us floored. My wife half
dead with anxiety--yet going through it day by day. We know what women
can bear when it’s a question of concealment--a woman the other day
was delivered of a child during a ball, and returned smiling to the
ball-room--you saw the case. I don’t call Irene’s attitude any criterion
of innocence. She keeps it up to the end. But when the rope is round his
neck, her nerve gives way, and the whole thing comes out. Put upon oath,
she gives it cut and dried--as cynically as you please--a woman all
over. There’s no getting out of it. And I--I am the common mock of
England.”
He spoke quietly, with an air of outraged dignity that won Harroway’s
sympathy.
“It’s a miserable business altogether,” said the latter, biting the end
of his quill-pen, as he sat in his leathern office-chair, pushed back
slightly from the table.
“Then you agree with me that her explanation is preposterous?”
“The other thing bears the greater stamp of probability,” replied
Harroway. And thus was Irene judged. Gerard felt relieved. Harroway’s
opinion was of a certain value. It was sure to be the keynote of that
of the Merriams’ social circle in which the old solicitor was an
influential member, and Gerard was anxious to learn how society would
take his divorce. For that purpose he had sought out Harroway in his
office and plunged into the midst of things, with a frankness that was
not altogether characteristic. He had gained his first point--a definite
verdict against Irene. He himself believed her guilty. But a lurking,
uncomfortable suspicion that proof of her innocence might not sing with
his heart’s secret wishes made him distrustful of his own judgment. The
contemplation of divorce was accompanied by sundry pricks of conscience.
A vague fear assailed him that society might take Irene’s side. He
sought the support of public opinion to bolster up a not too stout
courage. He had a dim feeling that, in spite of his willingly jealous
belief in her guilt, he was about to do Irene a great wrong by divorcing
her.
“I am not a revengeful man, Harroway,” he said after a few moments’
silence. “I am only anxious to put an end to a tie the continuance of
which would be a farce. It is not even as though I were putting her to
public shame. She has done that herself already.”
“Then I would not be precipitate,” said Harroway. “You might feel
disposed to forgive her. Such things have happened to men without loss
of dignity.”
“I’m not going to forgive her. I don’t think she would desire it. The
fact is our marriage has been a sham from the beginning. If I divorce
her, she can marry Colman. I’m not likely--God forbid--to tie myself to
a woman again. So it’s not for my sake. If I were seeking vengeance I
should keep her legally tied. And I shan’t sue for damages.”
“The action would have to be undefended.”
“Precisely,” said Gerard, with a slight flush. Harroway rose and took
two or three turns about the room, his hands behind his back.
“I see no other way out of it, Merriam,” he said. “I was hoping you
could forgive her--take her back, sometime. I am fond of her. In fact,
fond of the three of you, confound it! The whole business has upset me.
First the murder affair--and now this. Yes. It’s best. Let somebody be
happy, at any rate. You are acting generously--but I’d like you to give
her a little grace--unless time is important.”
“It is important,” said Gerard. “I want to get away. I don’t see why
I should go on slaving at the bar any longer. If it hadn’t been for my
wife I should have chucked it long ago. I have about six hundred a year
of my own. Why the deuce should I worry myself?”
“What are you thinking of doing?”
“South Africa. Big game shooting. One of the dreams of my life. I’m sick
of this atmosphere. I want to breathe freely. I know Freewintle--the
big man at that sort of thing, you know. He’s going out in two or three
months. I don’t see why I should lose the chance of going with him. So I
should like to set everything straight by then.”
Harroway nodded his head with mournful assent.
“I can quite understand.”
He walked across the room, then back again and halted before Gerard.
“But you know, Merriam, I would willingly give a thousand pounds to have
your wife proved innocent.”
“I would give all I have to be able to believe her,” returned Gerard.
But his tone sounded disingenuous in his own ears.
“I am not going to ask you to act for me, professionally,” he added.
“I suppose not,” replied Harroway, drily.
They shook hands and parted. Gerard took a long breath as soon as he
reached the open air, and the look of dignified sorrow vanished from his
face. He walked through Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a step that was almost
jaunty--greatly pleased by his visit.
If there had been anything mean or cruel in his proposed action,
Harroway would have protested bluntly, for flabbiness of expression was
not one of his characteristics. Obviously it was the only thing to be
done. The sooner the better. As he turned into Chancery Lane a child
held up to him a basket of violets. He bought a bunch, stuck it in
his buttonhole, a thing which he had not done for years, being a man
neglectful of spruceness in attire. He felt exhilarated, in holiday
mood, experiencing a sensation of freedom from chafing constraints.
Two weeks had passed since his furious interview with Irene. He had
spent them at his friend Weston’s place, alone, for the owner was
absent, where he fished, and, between the rises, meditated on his
wrongs. He had spoken to Irene in violent indignation and hatred,
brutally, as the coarse-grained man does when he feels himself to be
injured. Instinct, that explosion of a long-laid train of a thousand
tiny sensations, had directed his blow against her most vital spot--her
idealisation of himself. He had left her in passionate anger. It was
well that he did not encounter Hugh that day. In the calm of the country
life his anger cooled down, but it had engendered a crop of sentiments
which, when he examined them, turned out to be not altogether
disagreeable. As he was not the man to have his senses long led captive
by the same woman, the honeymoon fervour of his attachment to Irene had
grown cold for some years. The glowing passion of love, therefore,
had not been outraged. As a matter of fact, he was tired of her, like
thousands of men at the present moment, whom habit and sloth and kind
integrity keep dully affectionate to their wives. He was tired of her
effusiveness, of her strenuousness, of the high plane of feeling on
which she seemed to live, and of her unremitting efforts to drag him
thither. He had never felt at ease with her, had been forced to practise
a thousand deceptions; to live, in short, a life alien to his nature.
In the daily unconscious struggle between two individualities, the
stronger and more finely tempered wins. Gerard had yielded simply
because he had been afraid to resist. The subconsciousness of this moral
flabbiness had always been present. It acted now as a forcing-bed for
the above-mentioned crop of sentiments.
The violets in his buttonhole typified their bursting into riotous
bloom. He walked across the Strand and down westward along the
embankment, his veins tingling. The fresh breeze blowing against the
tide raised a myriad ripples that sparkled in the sunshine. A gull that
had strayed up river was hovering snow-white against the blue sky. The
steamers, with their illusory air of crowded merriment, shot swiftly
by, and gave a queer sense of the rushing life of liberty. Every man has
certain moments of sensitiveness to external surroundings. With Gerard
they were rare; but this was one. Life was holding out her promise, the
world was before him. He felt magnanimous towards Hugh; almost grateful
to him for having given him this opportunity of re-starting his
existence. He was young still, only five-and-thirty. A recent legacy had
put him beyond the necessity of working at an irksome and unremunerative
profession. He leaned over the parapet by Somerset House, and in
the factories across the water saw the wide stretching veldt and the
lumbering bullock-carts and all the joys of the longed-for hunter’s
life. A lingering respectability no longer sought to disguise the fact;
he was heartily glad to be freed from Irene.
*****
And so it happened that, some days afterwards, while Cahusac was sitting
with Hugh before their hotel at Avignon, and opening the letters which
the swarthy waiter had just brought, he was astonished to see Hugh
start to his feet, and, white and trembling with passion, stare at a
communication which he dashed presently upon the table.
“The villain--the damned villain!”
Cahusac queried mutely through his gold spectacles. “He is bringing an
action for divorce--for divorce against her--do you understand?”
“Don’t shout so, man, and sit down,” said Cahusac, quietly. Hugh obeyed
mechanically, tore at his great moustache, and went on in a voice
rendered hoarse by his effort to keep it within conversational tones:
“He believes that story. Is proceeding on the strength of it. A
woman who idolised him, made him her god---the veriest cur would have
understood. My God! Cahusac, I’ll go back at once and shoot him on
sight. He doesn’t deserve to live. To cast off a woman like that. By
heaven, I’ll kill him.”
“Don’t talk like a madman,” said Cahusac.
“I can’t sit here. Come for a turn with me. I shall be better walking.”
Cahusac stuffed his correspondence into his pocket and accompanied him
out of doors. They passed beneath the frowning mass of the old Palace of
the Popes, with its innumerable towers and machicolated battlements, and
reached the outer boulevards. The mid-day sun beat fiercely down. Below
them lay the blue Rhone, winding through this garden of Southern France.
The sun, the scene, and Cahusac’s quiet yet sympathetic common sense
gradually calmed Hugh’s blazing anger.
“Had you no suspicion that it might come to this?” asked Cahusac, as
they walked along under the trees.
“None whatever. Do you think if I had, I should have loitered about
here? I knew he had quarrelled with her. She told me. I could see
nothing unnatural in it. There are some sacrifices beyond the power of
the average man. She thought he was equal to herself. I didn’t. At least
for a day or two I did--just after the trial. Then came disillusion. You
were right in what you said about knowledge of men. One can only test
them by tempest. This one has been tested. He’s no better, no worse,
than that fellow over there with the white umbrella and the rolls of
fat at the back of his neck. In fact, I was obliged, after a time, to
sympathise with him. What right had I to expect that a man would make
such a sacrifice for me? I was powerless to reconcile them. It was her
urgent wish that I should disappear for a few weeks--until things got
settled. But I never, for one second, thought he doubted. We have been
friends from childhood, he and I--intimates. He knows every syllable
that has ever passed between his wife and myself. A thunderbolt out of
this blue sky could not appall me more than this ghastly news.”
“To tell you a secret,” said Cahusac, “I saw the clay feet of the idol
long ago. A good fellow in his way--the average sensual man.”
“The discovery must be killing her,” said Hugh. “I wonder why she did
not tell you before you started.”
“I don’t pretend to know. She had her reasons. I am quite satisfied. I
could never put her into the dull category of common women. And to
think that that man--Cahusac, he can’t believe it of her. Some infernal
villainy is at work.”
He broke forth again. Cahusac quietly listened out the torrent of
indignation. It held elements of the rhapsodic that interested him.
They returned through the town. Hugh rushed into the telegraph office
and despatched a message:--
“_Are you mad? I am coming_.”
“I hope you have done nothing rash,” said Cahusac, who had waited for
him outside.
“I’ve told him that I am coming. I must go back straight, Cahusac. It is
treating you miserably. But you see I can’t go on. I must see him--put a
stop to this infamous business--drag him to his knees before his wife.”
“Take a sober man’s advice, Colman,” said the other, “and have it out
with Mrs. Merriam first.”
Hugh’s eyes flashed and his lips curled in a smile beneath his
moustache. Superfluous counsel! His heart hungered for her. There was a
spice of irony in his thanks.
A few hours later Cahusac accompanied him to the railway station. The
final adieux came.
“I owe you a great debt of gratitude, Cahusac,” said Hugh.
“I have enjoyed every minute of the holiday,” replied the other
heartily.
“So have I. It has made a fresh man of me. I can face this now, thanks
to you. If it had come on top of all the rest, I believe it would have
floored me. A man is only capable of a certain amount of convulsion at a
time.”
They parted, and the great P. L. M. train carried Hugh swiftly
northwards. He had spoken truly. He was under a deep obligation to the
quiet, kind-hearted man whose calm judgment and equable nature formed
a complete sedative to the fever of his mind, whose companionship was a
cool hand on a hot brow. A great need of expansion had been the reaction
from the intense restraint of the month preceding his trial. His
thoughts paid Cahusac grateful tribute.
A study of time-tables suddenly brought him to realisation of the date.
It was the anniversary of his wedding day. The first. It was scarcely
credible. The disastrous twelvemonth, viewed in retrospect, seemed a
space of many years. The memory of the first wedded kiss of Minna’s
young ripe lips came faintly as if from a far past, yet not without a
spasm of revulsion; the memory of a _succubus_. Elemental sex feelings,
determining hatred, bend a man’s judgment of a woman to elemental
fierceness. For this reason often are women beaten. He tried to shake
off the haunting sense of her caresses--to bury her existence in
oblivion. But she was too essential a factor in this ruin of lives
amongst which he was walking. What had become of her? He clenched his
hands together, and wished that she was dead.
Yet what was she doing? The petty and incongruous question teased him.
A train whirred past. Was it a strange fatality, or an equally strange
telepathic sub-consciousness? In that train was Minna, convalescent
after a long illness, being carried on to Marseilles, where she was to
catch the steamer to Smyrna. So husband and wife passed each other in
the darkness, on the first anniversary of their wedding-day, and the
soul of each was filled with passionate repudiation of the other. And in
either case the starry woman, whom one worshipped and the other dreaded
and envied, was the determining cause.