throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for
either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife
the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of
their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is
contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his
senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to
pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to
her.
"Won't you sit down?" he asked.
Muriel sat down.
"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"
"About my trip to Lyons?"
"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."
"I have some right, I think, to come home."
"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an
'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"
"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has
been in my mind for some time."
"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your
suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at
the first?"
"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"
"Love affair? There has been no love affair."
Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he
stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.
"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't
for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"
Muriel was silent.
"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I
tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that
night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the
Spanish dancer----"
Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames
of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved,
with an upward motion, slowly around her.
"You saw that!"
"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and,
naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe
what it was."
The wife fought for her self-control and won it.
"Deceit! Deceit even then!"
"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did
not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris--and I
understood later why you wanted to go back."
He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.
"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your
illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did
not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy,
too, there came the night of the fete. I could tell when von Klausen and
you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the
air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the
boulevards: I separated myself from you."
He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once
beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.
"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to give me a fair chance?
You threw me into his arms--or tried to--and you call that a fair
chance?"
Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which
clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he
smiled quietly.
"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger;
your love for me--or failing your love, your moral strength--need not
assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself
to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."
"You coward!"
"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be
a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full
opportunity. Otherwise the fear--a very small one then--would have
continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives,
his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."
"You dare to say that!"
He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the
room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing
its point.
"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is
that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all
upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went
on, "a woman compromises herself with X, at least after she has become
a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself
with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only
exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner
or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y
and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their
personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though
this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she
should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has
managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a
few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."
Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks
were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the
low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a
lightning-flash on a darkened sea.
"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she
declared.
He raised a steady hand.
"Only a moment more, please," he said.
Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:
"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I
took you away from Paris again--the next day, wasn't it?--because you
wanted to go, but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen
was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am
by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian
turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I
decided to make an end of it. Now"--he spoke as if he were concluding an
affair of business--"I have made that end."
"How have you made that end?"
Stainton smiled wanly.
"My dear----" he said.
"Don't call me that."
"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you
are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."
"How have you made an end?"
"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."
"You mean that you think--that you dare to think that I--that the
Captain and--that we----"
"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know.
Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the
preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this
house----"
"At your invitation!"
"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained
alone with you in this room until after midnight--I say, given all
these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I
wanted--the evidence of seeing you in his arms--no man in his senses
would for one moment doubt----"
"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her
disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.
"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say----"
"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will
never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You
unclean-minded old man!"
He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.
At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own
high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been
so long festering in her mind--at first unguessed, then vehemently
denied, but always there and always becoming more and more
poisonous--the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned
to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in
a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had
achieved maturity.
"Now you listen to me," she commanded.
Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.
Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its
back and leaned across the back toward her.
So they stood, facing each other.
"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible
alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and
hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and
trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to
hope--actually to hope!--for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young,
and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one
minute your wife."
Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.
"You were a good imitation," he said.
"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife,
anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and
couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real,
so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what
was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what
you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an
admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was
it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And
me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house,
and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"
"For a time you were a good imitation."
"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I
tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I
soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things
would change, that they were so bad they must change--and they
wouldn't."
"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper
lip.
"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't
you remember, at the very start, how I _said_ I wanted to be honest? But
somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened,
seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why
does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie,
and so all we did was lies and lies."
"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."
"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to
give--not what I gave you--not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What
was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you
always _knew_ that _you_ had all _you_ wanted. Well, you had. But did
you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as
a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I
sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let
myself be married to a man three times my age--and this is Nature's
punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and
then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger,
and because I _was_ hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that
was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"--she
flashed it out at him--"what happened to me while you were selling the
mine was not an accident!"
This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger
and horror struggled for him.
"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean----"
"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that
girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and
I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that
I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to
have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't
want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think
I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the
time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go
crazy--_crazy_! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother
against my will!"
He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her
deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely
done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:
"You loved him--then?"
"I didn't love you."
"Did you love him?"
"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied
to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But
then, when I did _that_ thing, I only knew what I've told you."
Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself,
but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the
door.
Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.
"But I love him now," she said.
"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.
"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing--nothing. I was no
more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so
little, were fit to be my husband."
Stainton half turned.
"And he?" Jim asked.
"He loves me: you only liked having me."
He turned slowly away again.
She thought that she heard him whisper:
"No child!"
"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost
everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a
baby, a little dead baby. It will never leave me: it's the little
ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."
He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of
going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an
hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a
candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face.
One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with
him. She was right; he was growing old.
XX
HUSBAND AND LOVER
At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and
flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling
clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.
"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or
less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me,
I----"
"But, monsieur----"
"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."
"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."
"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried
to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion
flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."
"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"
"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to
monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."
Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed to him and, as the maid
left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth
time when the domestic reappeared.
"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.
"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his
question.
The maid presented a card.
"Show Captain von Klausen up here," said Jim.
A moment later, husband and lover stood alone together.
"Good-morning," said Stainton.
He held out his hand, and von Klausen, after a swift hesitation, took
it.
The Austrian's expression was disturbed. He was unshaven. It was obvious
that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. The sight seemed, somehow,
to restore his host's self-confidence.
"You will please to pardon for this early intrusion----" von Klausen
began.
Stainton smiled.
"You are always so pleasant, Captain," he said, "that you never intrude.
Besides, the earlier the better. As it happens, I was just this moment
thinking of you."
Von Klausen bowed. There was a brief pause, the Austrian's blue eyes
wandering about the room in an endeavour to escape Stainton's glance,
and Stainton's eyes fastened thoughtfully upon the Austrian.
"Well?" asked the husband.
Von Klausen coughed.
"Madame is--is----" he started, but stopped short.
"You asked for me. Did you expect to find her up at this time of day?"
"Oh, no--no: certainly not. Pardon me. I forgot the hour."
"Ah, you often forget the hour, don't you, Captain?"
The Austrian braced himself. He raised his chin defiantly. He met the
issue directly.
"You refer," he asked, "to my late call of last evening--yes?"
"More or less. I am rather curious about that call."
"Sir, there is nothing about it to excite your curiosity. You asked me
to call. There is nothing of my call that you may not learn from your
wife."
"No doubt. Of course not; but it may be that I prefer to ask you."
Von Klausen was in a corner. Anger he could have met with anger, but
here was something that he did not comprehend.
"I can answer no question," he said, stiffly, "that you have not asked
of Mrs. Stainton."
"How do you know that I haven't asked her?"
"I do not know that you have."
"You are sure of that?"
"What do you wish to say, Mr. Stainton?"
"I mean: are you sure that you haven't seen her since you left here last
night?"
The Austrian's face expressed a bewilderment that Stainton could not
mistrust.
"How is that possible?" inquired von Klausen.
"Oh, of course!" Stainton, convinced, shrugged his shoulders. "However,
I do want to make a few inquiries of you."
"Then I prefer to wait until your wife descends, so that you may make
them in her presence."
Stainton still held in his left hand the letter that Muriel had
addressed to him. He tapped it upon the knuckles of his right hand.
"I am afraid," he said, "that I can't conveniently wait so long. Captain
von Klausen, are you in love with my wife?"
The Austrian rose precipitately. His blond moustache bristled.
"Sir!" said he.
"I merely wanted to know."
"At your question I am amazed, sir."
"Oh, I really had a good reason for asking."
"In my country no reason suffices for such a question."
"Hum. Well, you see, neither my wife nor I belong to your country, and
you are not in your country now. However, there is no need for you to
get excited, Captain. I am sorry if I seem to have intruded on your
confidence with a lady; but, to tell you the truth, as my wife has
admitted that she is in love with you, I was not unnaturally somewhat
curious to discover whether you reciprocated her affection."
Von Klausen's eyes protruded. This husband was, obviously, mad. He might
have been driven mad by his discovery. The discovery seemed a thing
accomplished. With a great in-taking of breath, the Austrian made
answer:
"You have loved your wife. Why should _I_ be ashamed to say that I love
her?"
If von Klausen expected an explosion, he was disappointed.
"Well," said Stainton, calmly, "that is one way of looking at it."
"Please?"
"Never mind. You say you love her?"
"Yes."
Stainton looked at him narrowly, from under heavy brows. He regularly
tapped his knuckles with the envelope.
"For a day?" he asked.
"Sir?"
"I mean: is this a world-without-end business so far as you are
concerned, or is it one of your little amusements by the way?"
The Austrian clenched his teeth.
"Do you mean to insult me, sir?"
"I assure you that I mean nothing of the sort."
"Then you insult your wife!"
"Not at all. I am sorry that you should suppose I could think ill of
her."
"If you do not think ill of her, you have no right to ask such a
question as this which you have asked."
"It's not impossible that I should be a trifle interested, you know."
"I cannot understand, sir, how you can have the calmness----"
"Why not? She is my wife, you see. What I want to know is whether you
are genuinely, sincerely in love with her. You know what I mean. As
between man and man now: is this a for-ever-and-ever affair with you?"
The Austrian's bewilderment found vent in a long sigh.
"It is," said he.
"Good," said Stainton. He thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets
and bent forward. "If I let her get a divorce from me, will you marry
her?" he asked.
"Do you make a joke?"
"I don't consider this a joking matter, Captain. I ask you a frank
question and I want a frank answer."
Von Klausen doubted his ears, but he replied:
"I would desire nothing better, but my faith forbids."
"You're sincere in that?"
"Absolutely."
"I mean about your faith, you know."
"Whatever else may be charged against me, sir, heresy or infidelity may
not be charged."
"Have a cigar," said Stainton.
He produced his cigar-case, gave the Austrian a cigar, held a steady
match while his guest secured a light, and then, with a cigar between
his teeth, began to walk rapidly up and down the room, puffing quietly,
his hands clasped behind his back.
"Look here," he said. "I am the kind of man that lives to look ahead and
prepare for all contingencies. I do not always succeed, but I see no
harm in trying. Well. When I first began to think about this thing, I
said I would be prepared for the worst, if the worst came. I remembered
your prejudices, and I had a fellow do some research work for me at the
Bibliotheque Nationale, and yesterday I spent some time in the seminary
library at Avignon. My dear fellow, you haven't got a leg to stand on."
"No leg?"
"Not in your objections to divorce and remarriage."
"The Church----"
"Was founded by, or at any rate pretends allegiance to, Jesus of
Nazareth. Now, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said--it's not
certain--something that may seem to bear out your theories; but that
something which may be twisted to your way was said just about two
thousand years ago to a small, outlying, semi-barbarous province. Are
you going to try to apply it to civilisation to-day?"
The Austrian had philosophically seated himself in the chair against
which Jim had leaned the night before.
"I apply the Sermon on the Mount," said von Klausen.
"Do you? I didn't think you did. But we'll pass that. Your faith bases
its argument on the interpretation of that text made by the Early
Church, and the Christian Fathers interpreted it in just about two dozen
different ways."
"So?" said von Klausen: he would humour this lunatic.
"In the first place, at the beginning of the Christian Era marriage in
Rome was a private partnership that the parties could dissolve by mutual
consent, or by one notifying the other, as in any other partnership;
that was part of Roman law, and for centuries neither the Church nor its
Fathers disputed that law. In all the history of the first phase of
Christianity in Rome you can't find one time when the whole Church
accepted the idea that marriage was indissoluble. Once or twice the
Church tried to get the law to require the Church's sanction before
decree of divorce would be legally valid, but that was not a denial of
divorce; it was a recognition and an endeavour to capture the control
and exploitation of divorces."
"That matters nothing," said von Klausen. "These things were determined
otherwise. With all my heart I wish not, but they were."
"How? The Church began by having nothing to do with marriages. Weddings
were not held in the churches and so of course marriage was not
considered a sacrament. I can give you chapter and verse for everything
I say. About the only early council that tried to interfere with the law
was the Council of 416, or some time near that. It tried to make Rome
abolish divorce, but no emperor listened to it till early in the ninth
century--Charlemagne, and he practised divorce himself. Only a little
earlier--I think it was in 870--the Church officially allowed
dissolution of marriage. In the Middle Ages the episcopal courts allowed
divorce and were supported by the popes."
"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage
indissoluble?"
"I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the
Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble, _anathema sit_. The
Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the
Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He
shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do,"
he said.
"You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said.
"I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed
divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom
tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so
afraid of women that he--he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce
for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was
careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming."
"St. Augustine is the authority in this matter."