CONTAINING SOME REVELATIONS
Honora, as she descended, caught a glimpse of the parlour maid picking up
the scattered cards on the drawing-room floor. There were voices on the
porch, where Howard was saying good-by to Mrs. Chandos and Trixton Brent.
She joined them.
"Oh, my dear!" cried Mrs. Chandos, interrupting Honora's apologies, "I'm
sure I shan't sleep a wink--she gave me such a fright. You might have
sent Trixy ahead to prepare us. When I first caught sight of her, I
thought it was my own dear mother who had come all the way from
Cleveland, and the cigarette burned my fingers. But I must say I think it
was awfully clever of you to get hold of her and save Trixy's reputation.
Good night, dear."
And she got into her carriage.
"Give my love to Mrs. Holt," said Brent, as he took Honora's hand, "and
tell her I feel hurt that she neglected to say good night to me. I
thought I had made an impression. Tell her I'll send her a cheque for her
rescue work. She inspires me with confidence."
Howard laughed.
"I'll see you to-morrow, Brent," he called out as they drove away. Though
always assertive, it seemed to Honora that her husband had an increased
air of importance as he turned to her now with his hands in his pockets.
He looked at her for a moment, and laughed again. He, too, had apparently
seen the incident only in a humorous light. "Well, Honora," he remarked,
"you have a sort of a P. T. Barnum way of doing things once in a
while--haven't you? Is the old lady really tucked away for the night, or
is she coming down to read us a sermon? And how the deuce did you happen
to pick her up?"
She had come downstairs with confession on her lips, and in the agitation
of her mind had scarcely heeded Brent's words or Mrs. Chandos'. She had
come down prepared for any attitude but the one in which she found him;
for anger, reproaches, arraignments. Nay, she was surprised to find now
that she had actually hoped for these. She deserved to be scolded: it was
her right. If he had been all of a man, he would have called her to
account. There must be--there was something lacking in his character. And
it came to her suddenly, with all the shock of a great contrast, with
what different eyes she had looked upon him five years before at
Silverdale.
He went into the house and started to enter the drawing-room, still in
disorder and reeking with smoke.
"No, not in there!" she cried sharply.
He turned to her puzzled. Her breath was coming and going quickly. She
crossed the hall and turned on the light in the little parlour there, and
he followed her.
"Don't you feel well?" he asked.
"Howard," she said, "weren't you worried?"
"Worried? No, why should I have been? Lula Chandos and May Barclay had
seen you in the automobile in town, and I knew you were high and dry
somewhere."
"High and dry," she repeated. What?"
"Nothing. They said I had run off with Mr. Brent, didn't they?"
He laughed.
"Yes, there was some joking to that effect."
"You didn't take it seriously?
"No--why should I?"
She was appalled by his lack of knowledge of her. All these years she had
lived with him, and he had not grasped even the elements of her nature.
And this was marriage! Trixton Brent--short as their acquaintance had
been--had some conception of her character and possibilities her husband
none. Where was she to begin? How was she to tell him the episode in the
automobile in order that he might perceive something of its sinister
significance?
Where was she to go to be saved from herself, if not to him?
"I might have run away with him, if I had loved him," she said after a
pause. "Would you have cared?"
"You bet your life," said Howard, and put his arm around her.
She looked up into his face. So intent had she been on what she had meant
to tell him that she did not until now perceive he was preoccupied, and
only half listening to what she was saying.
"You bet your life," he said, patting her shoulder. "What would I have
done, all alone, in the new house?"
"In the new house?" she cried. "Oh, Howard--you haven't taken it!"
"I haven't signed the lease," he replied importantly, smiling down at
her, and thrusting his hands in his pockets.
"I don't want it," said Honora; "I don't want it. I told you that I'd
decided I didn't want it when we were there. Oh, Howard, why did you take
it?"
He whistled. He had the maddening air of one who derives amusement from
the tantrums of a spoiled child.
"Well," he remarked, "women are too many for me. If there's any way of
pleasing 'em I haven't yet discovered it. The night before last you had
to have the house. Nothing else would do. It was the greatest find in New
York. For the first time in months you get up for breakfast--a pretty
sure sign you hadn't changed your mind. You drag me to see it, and when
you land me there, because I don't lose my head immediately, you say you
don't want it. Of course I didn't take you seriously--I thought you'd set
your heart on it, so I wired an offer to Shorter to-day, and he accepted
it. And when I hand you this pleasant little surprise, you go right up in
the air."
He had no air of vexation, however, as he delivered this somewhat
reproachful harangue in the picturesque language to which he commonly
resorted. Quite the contrary. He was still smiling, as Santa Claus must
smile when he knows he has another pack up the chimney.
"Why this sudden change of mind?" he demanded. "It can't be because you
want to spend the winter in Quicksands."
She was indeed at a loss what to say. She could not bring herself to ask
him whether he had been influenced by Trixton Brent. If he had, she told
herself, she did not wish to know. He was her husband, after all, and it
would be too humiliating. And then he had taken the house.
"Have you hit on a palace you like better?" he inquired, with a clumsy
attempt at banter. "They tell me the elder Maitlands are going abroad
--perhaps we could get their house on the Park."
"You said you couldn't afford Mrs. Rindge's house," she answered
uneasily, "and I--I believed you."
"I couldn't," he said mysteriously, and paused.
It seemed to her, as she recalled the scene afterwards, that in this
pause he gave the impression of physically swelling. She remembered
staring at him with wide, frightened eyes and parted lips.
"I couldn't," he repeated, with the same strange emphasis and a palpable
attempt at complacency. "But--er--circumstances have changed since then."
"What do you mean, Howard?" she whispered.
The corners of his mouth twitched in the attempt to repress a smile.
"I mean," he said, "that the president of a trust company can afford to
live in a better house than the junior partner of Dallam and Spence."
"The president of a trust company!" Honora scarcely recognized her own
voice--so distant it sounded. The room rocked, and she clutched the arm
of a chair and sat down. He came and stood over her.
"I thought that would surprise you some," he said, obviously pleased by
these symptoms. "The fact is, I hadn't meant to break it to you until
morning. But I think I'll go in on the seven thirty-five." (He glanced
significantly up at the ceiling, as though Mrs. Holt had something to do
with this decision.) "President of the Orange Trust Company at forty
isn't so bad, eh?"
"The Orange Trust Company? Did you say the Orange Trust Company?"
"Yes." He produced a cigarette. "Old James Wing and Brent practically
control it. You see, if I do say it myself, I handled some things pretty
well for Brent this summer, and he's seemed to appreciate it. He and Wing
were buying in traction stocks out West. But you could have knocked me
down with a paper-knife when he came to me--"
"When did he come to you?" she asked breathlessly.
"Yesterday. We went down town together, you remember, and he asked me to
step into his office. Well, we talked it over, and I left on the one
o'clock for Newport to see Mr. Wing. Wonderful old man! I sat up with him
till midnight--it wasn't any picnic" . . .
More than once during the night Honora awoke with a sense of oppression,
and each time went painfully through the whole episode from the evening
--some weeks past when Trixton Brent had first mentioned the subject of
the trust company, to the occurrence in the automobile and Howard's
triumphant announcement. She had but a vague notion of how that scene had
finished; or of how, limply, she had got to bed. Round and round the
circle she went in each waking period. To have implored him to relinquish
the place had been waste of breath; and then--her reasons? These were the
moments when the current was strongest, when she grew incandescent with
humiliation and pain; when stray phrases in red letters of Brent's were
illuminated. Merit! He had a contempt for her husband which he had not
taken the trouble to hide. But not a business contempt. "As good as the
next man," Brent had said--or words to that effect. "As good as the next
man!" Then she had tacitly agreed to the bargain, and refused to honour
the bill! No, she had not, she had not. Before God, she was innocent of
that! When she reached this point it was always to James Wing that she
clung--the financier, at least, had been impartial. And it was he who
saved her.
At length she opened her eyes to discover with bewilderment that the room
was flooded with light, and then she sprang out of bed and went to the
open window. To seaward hung an opal mist, struck here and there with
crimson. She listened; some one was whistling an air she had heard
before--Mrs. Barclay had been singing it last night! Wheels crunched the
gravel--Howard was going off. She stood motionless until the horse's
hoofs rang on the highroad, and then hurried into her dressing-gown and
slippers and went downstairs to the telephone and called a number.
"Is this Mr. Brent's? Will you say to Mr. Brent that Mrs. Spence would be
greatly, obliged if he stopped a moment at her house before going to
town? Thank you."
She returned to her room and dressed with feverish haste, trying to
gather her wits for an ordeal which she felt it would have killed her to
delay. At ten minutes to eight she emerged again and glanced anxiously at
Mrs. Holt's door; and scarcely had she reached the lower hall before he
drove into the circle. She was struck more forcibly than ever by the
physical freshness of the man, and he bestowed on her, as he took her
hand, the peculiar smile she knew so well, that always seemed to have an
enigma behind it. At sight and touch of him the memory of what she had
prepared to say vanished.
"Behold me, as ever, your obedient servant," he said, as he followed her
into the screened-off portion of the porch.
"You must think it strange that I sent for you, I know," she cried, as
she turned to him. "But I couldn't wait. I--I did not know until last
night. Howard only told me then. Oh, you didn't do it for me! Please say
you didn't do it for me!"
"My dear Honora," replied Trixton Brent, gravely, "we wanted your husband
for his abilities and the valuable services he can render us."
She stood looking into his eyes, striving to penetrate to the soul
behind, ignorant or heedless that others before her had tried and failed.
He met her gaze unflinchingly, and smiled.
"I want the truth," she craved.
"I never lie--to a woman," he said.
"My life--my future depends upon it," she went on. "I'd rather scrub
floors, I'd rather beg--than to have it so. You must believe me!"
"I do believe you," he affirmed. And he said it with a gentleness and a
sincerity that startled her.
"Thank you," she answered simply. And speech became very difficult.
"If--if I haven't been quite fair with you--Mr. Brent, I am sorry. I--I
liked you, and I like you to-day better than ever before. And I can quite
see now how I must have misled you into thinking--queer things about me.
I didn't mean to. I have learned a lesson."
She took a deep, involuntary breath. The touch of lightness in his reply
served to emphasize the hitherto unsuspected fact that sportsmanship in
Trixton Brent was not merely a code, but assumed something of the
grandeur of a principle.
"I, too, have learned a lesson," he replied. "I have learned the
difference between nature and art. I am something of a connoisseur in
art. I bow to nature, and pay my bets."
"Your bets?" she asked, with a look.
"My renunciations, forfeits, whatever you choose to call them. I have
been fairly and squarely beaten--but by nature, not by art. That is my
consolation."
Laughter struck into her eyes like a shaft of sunlight into a well; her
emotions were no longer to be distinguished. And in that moment she
wondered what would have happened if she had loved this man, and why she
had not. And when next he spoke, she started.
"How is my elderly dove-coloured friend this morning?" he asked. "That
dinner with her was one of the great events of my life. I didn't suppose
such people existed any more."
"Perhaps you'll stay to breakfast with her," suggested Honora, smiling.
"I know she'd like to see you again."
"No, thanks," he said, taking her hand, "I'm on my way to the train--I'd
quite forgotten it. Au revoir!" He reached the end of the porch, turned,
and called back, "As a 'dea ex machina', she has never been equalled."
Honora stood for a while looking after him, until she heard a footstep
behind her,--Mrs. Holt's.
"Who was that, my dear?" she asked, "Howard?"
"Howard has gone, Mrs. Holt," Honora replied, rousing herself. "I must
make his apologies. It was Mr. Brent."
"Mr. Brent!" the good lady repeated, with a slight upward lift of the
faint eyebrows. "Does he often call this early?"
Honora coloured a little, and laughed.
"I asked him to breakfast with you, but he had to catch a train. He
--wished to be remembered. He took such a fancy to you."
"I am afraid," said Mrs. Holt, "that his fancy is a thing to be avoided.
Are you coming to Silverdale with me, Honora?"
"Yes, Mrs. Holt," she replied, slipping her arm through that of her
friend, "for as long as you will let me stay."
And she left a note for Howard to that effect.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 4, by Winston Churchill