A NEW RÔLE FOR RICHARD
In all these months Margaret had not once heard from her husband. Rumors
had come to her that he had not gone alone, but even this she could not
verify, for she had ended the subject peremptorily with the informant
who brought the story,--but the thorn implanted that day rankled. Her
judgment and her knowledge of him told her it was true.
The fiction of her husband's call abroad on urgent business served its
purpose as a nominal explanation, but it deceived nobody. Every one knew
that Victor De Jarnette had no large business interests in Europe, or
anywhere else, and that he was not the man to make any great sacrifice
for them if he had had, being a man of pleasure more than of affairs.
The knowing raised their brows and smiled. The sympathetic said, "Poor
Margaret!"
She asked Richard De Jarnette only once if he had ever heard. No, he
said, he had not. He had written and would let her know when the answer
came. He did not tell her that his letter had been a bitter arraignment
of Victor for his want of manliness in deserting his wife as he had
done, and a stern demand that he should, for the sake of the De Jarnette
name, if for no better reason, return or give some adequate explanation
of his conduct--there could be no excuse. He had not spared him.
Failing to hear from this, he wrote again, this time adding the virile
argument that in case of Victor's failure to explain his conduct, he
should at once revise his will and name his (Victor's) apparently
forgotten child as his heir, instead of himself. He felt that he had an
elder brother's prerogative to counsel, and also the right of an
outraged De Jarnette to protest against the dishonoring of his name. As
child and man, Richard De Jarnette had been slow to wrath, but, once
roused, there was a bull-dog tenacity about him that was hard to shake
off. Perhaps that last clause was the most powerful argument he used.
The younger De Jarnette had a great abundance of money of his own, but
Richard had more, and Victor had always expected to inherit it.
Moreover, he knew that his brother never made an idle threat. So he
wrote.
When this answer to his peremptory letter was read by Richard De
Jarnette, it put a somewhat different face upon the matter. He had been
forced to this, Victor said, by Margaret's action. It was virtually she
that had deserted him. She had laid upon him such restrictions as no man
would for a moment submit to. She had been unreasonable, exacting, and
jealous to a degree that was intolerable. "If you only knew all, you
would retract your harsh words," Victor wrote. "I have always found you
just, and certainly now that the greatest trouble of my life has
overtaken me, I cannot believe that I will find you lacking in either
sympathy or understanding," and thus and thus and thus. Victor was
always a ready letter writer.
Richard De Jarnette read this letter very thoroughly. And as he read, a
wave of pity swept over him for the misguided boy--he was little more
than a boy--always impulsive, passionate, and full-blooded, but to the
brother who was his judge to-day always warm-hearted and affectionate.
The letter had its effect. The world had judged Victor harshly, Richard
thought, he with the rest, he more than all the rest perhaps. It might
be, as he said, that had they known--But then the damning fact remained
that he had deserted her, his young wife, in her time of need. No!
Nothing could palliate that--nothing!
He took up the letter at that, and read further. Margaret had virtually
driven him forth, Victor went on, and Richard remembered that the house
was hers, built by money her father had left in trust for this very
purpose. He had warned Victor that trouble would come from that some
day. Women could not be trusted to refrain from taunting their husbands
with "mine" and "thine," when the test came, he said, contemptuously.
They were all alike. And where was the man that would stand humiliation
like that? Certainly his name was not De Jarnette. This doubtless lay at
the root of the matter, and was perhaps the reason that Margaret was so
reticent about the cause of the trouble.
Perhaps--oh, curse the thing! It wasn't a matter for him to meddle
with--of course not. But it needed somebody--and whom else did they
have? It ended in his reaching the deliberate and most unwelcome
conclusion, after much struggle with himself, that it was his duty to go
to his sister-in-law's house and enter upon the delicate and perilous
office of peacemaker. Which he did.
Margaret met him distantly. They froze each other.
He had heard from Victor, he told her bluntly, feeling his poverty of
phrases suited to womankind.
Her lips straightened. She held out her hand. Could she see the letter?
He reflected a moment. The letter as he thought of it did not seem
particularly pacific, viewed from the stand-point of a deserted wife, so
he answered no. Then he began awkwardly and without preliminaries to
explain. He had come to see if things could not be arranged between
them--patched up for a while with the hope that time would bring them
right. They were both young, and doubtless both had been somewhat in
fault.
She interrupted him here to ask pointedly, "Has your brother told you
anything about the point at issue?"
He was forced to answer that he had not.
"Then you are not competent to arbitrate," she said, quietly, and the
subject was not easy to re-open after that. He went away baffled in his
endeavors, berating himself for a blundering fool, but strengthened in
the belief that the blame was not all on one side. The girl was ice.
As he thought it over that night, one thing came back to him again and
again. She had said, "This is a thing that must be settled without a
go-between, and _some day it will be_." What did she mean by that? How
would it be settled? She had looked uncompromising as she said it. What
did she intend to do--get a divorce? Of course she could get it--on the
palpable ground of desertion. He could see a difference in her attitude
toward Victor as the months went by. At first there had been a reserve,
a suspension of judgment, then apathy, and of late growing resentment.
He had correctly interpreted her states of mind, though he did not
appreciate the cause. As the months went by and Victor did not come, did
not write, did not once even ask about his child, her heart hardened
against him. This ignoring of Philip seemed worse to her almost than his
treatment of herself. How could he stay away from his child? How could
he be false to a helpless little thing like this that he had brought
into the world? How could he-- Then she would snatch little Philip up in
a passion of tenderness and cry in her heart, "I will be father and
mother both to you, my baby, my poor little forsaken baby!"
As the months went by the chances seemed slighter that this thing would
ever be "patched up," as Richard De Jarnette had said. She asked Judge
Kirtley one day if a man had any claim upon a child he had deserted.
Yes, he told her without comment, unless the mother was divorced from
him. She closed her lips suddenly and said no more. She had read in the
paper one day about a man's taking his child away from its mother, who
had left him. The woman was a Catholic and could not have recourse to
divorce to protect herself. Margaret thought a good deal about this
incident. She had always been opposed to divorce.
Richard De Jarnette came to her again one day. He had had another letter
from Victor,--a very touching one it had seemed to him as he read it.
With Margaret's cold eyes upon him it seemed less so.
Victor was anxious for a reconciliation--he told her--and she bowed.
He was tired of his expatriation and longed for home--She smiled.
--and for a sight of his child.
"He is long remembering his child," she said.
Richard De Jarnette bit his lip, cursing himself for having come on this
errand. But he had come at Victor's earnest request, and he would not
abandon the case.
"I recognize the justice of what you imply," he returned. "I can hardly
ask for him any leniency on your part, but, after all, the child is
Victor's as well as yours, and is his heir. It is but natural that he
should wish to see him. For Philip's sake I trust that in some way your
differences may be arranged."
"I may as well tell you that they will never be," she said. "As long as
there was a shadow of a hope that I had misjudged him I held my peace.
Not even to you would I say aught against him. Now that my faith in him
is dead I tell you plainly I shall never be Victor De Jarnette's wife
again. You asked me once what we quarreled about. I will tell you now,
for this is the last conversation we will have on the subject. He was
untrue to me." Her eyes blazed. "The night we quarreled I had found it
out and I told him he must choose between us. He chose the woman who was
not his wife. So far as I am concerned that choice is irrevocable....
This was enough. Surely this _was_ enough. But it was not all, as you
know. By his cruel desertion of me and his unborn child he made me a
target for the arrows of gossip and slander. Do you ask me to forget all
this?"
"Do you mean that you intend to secure a divorce?" he asked her plainly.
"No. I shall make no effort to secure a divorce. People get divorces
because they want to marry again. I have had enough of marriage."
"And if he should want one?"
"I shall not oppose it. All that I want now is to live out my own life,
what is left of it, in my own way, with my child."
He sat a moment in thought. Then he felt constrained to say,
"I trust there may never be any trouble about the child. Victor is
reckless and determined. If he should take it into his head to lay claim
to it, or try to take it from you--"
"If Victor De Jarnette should lay a finger of his hand upon the child he
deserted," she said at white heat, "I should kill him."
He knew, of course, that this was mere passionate talk. She was
justified in having strong feeling. He thought no more about it. But
that night in going over the interview, what she had said that other
time came back to him. "It is a thing that must be settled without a
go-between," she had said. "And some day it will be."
What did she mean by that? A mere separation settled nothing. He feared
that Victor might give her trouble about the child.