Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian
was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for
letters--collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
“I meant women--women’s letters.”
The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to--to some
one person--a man; their husband--or--”
“Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”
“Well--something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with
lightness. “Didn’t Merimee--”
“The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”
“Of course not,” said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
“There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”
“Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she--were they--?” He chafed at his own
ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
“If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
Sabran--”
But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern--English or American. I
want to look something up,” he lamely concluded.
The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
“Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I’ll have Merimee’s
letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”
He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab
which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small
restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
interfere with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious
exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself
sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance
to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to
think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was
blent with such base elements.
His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore
her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded the first
page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.
“My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
to-morrow. Please don’t come till then--I want to think the question
over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be
reasonable?”
It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand
in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some
other, luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into
his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through
the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull
resignation closed in on him like a fog.
“Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel
since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust
that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by
their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say
that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include
himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions
were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite
charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those
mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally
yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the
obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in
Flamel’s presence than a surplice in the street.
“Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
man assented, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore
instead of twenty.”
The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its
space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism.
Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its
owner’s intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves
with a prominence, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.
Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
Apollinaris.
“You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.
“They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the
collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of
nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to
stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--“Some men,” Flamel
irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other
days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library
represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the
collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.”
Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came
on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
“What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
“Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of
thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a
bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--and here are some letters
of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame
Commanville?”
“His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for
this kind of thing.”
“I don’t--at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many collections
of letters?”
“Lord, no--very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting
ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though--the
rarest thing I’ve got--half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet
Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them--a lot of collectors
were after them.”
Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was
the one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
to their value,” he said, meditatively.
Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel.
He was in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a
recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
“I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an
engagement.”
He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself
as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay
and unbosom himself to Flamel.
The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
pressure on his arm.
“Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I
don’t often have the luck of seeing you here.”
“I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through
a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air.
It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
“I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself
asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
“Oh, so-so--depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him thoughtfully.
“Are you thinking of collecting?”
Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”
“Selling?”
“Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--”
Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
“A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left
me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond
of me and left ‘em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
they might benefit me somehow--I don’t know--I’m not much up on such
things--” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.
“A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”
“Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him--by one person,
you understand; a woman, in fact--”
“Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently.
Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think
they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”
Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”
“Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They
were tremendous friends, he and she.”
“And she wrote a clever letter?”
“Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”
A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words
had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
“Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret
Aubyn’s letters? Did you say YOU had them?”
“They were left me--by my friend.”
“I see. Was he--well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any
rate. What are you going to do with them?”
Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I
don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that
some fellow was writing her life--”
“Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”
Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He
felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
Flamel sat with meditative eye. “What do you WANT to do with them?” he
asked.
“I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden
energy--“If I can--”
“If you can? They’re yours, you say?”
“They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent--I mean there are
no restrictions--” he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated
proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his
action.
“And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his
cigar-tip.
Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
framed in tarnished gilding.
“It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are
as personal as--as these of my friend’s.... Well, I don’t mind telling
you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
it rather obscures my judgment--the fact is if I could lay my hand on a
few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified--under the
circumstances....” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the
moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own
estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than
of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal
to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously
reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel
another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--“You don’t
think people could say... could criticise the man....”
“But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”
“He’s dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--”
Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way
to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
reluctance--!
The older man’s answer reassured him. “Why need you assume any
responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your
friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity
himself, I suppose?”
“No, no.”
“Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it
all right?”
Glennard’s hesitation revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see
that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them
at all?”
“Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I
doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great
for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the
best advantage--to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”
“Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven’t counted. There may be more....”
“Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”
“I don’t know--that is--they corresponded for years. What’s the odds?”
He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
“It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “A long
correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written
within a year. At any rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a
book, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”
“Not love-letters, you say?”
“Why?” flashed from Glennard.
“Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they WERE--why,
you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”
Glennard was silent.
“Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
association with her name?”
“I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel--you
won’t mention this to anyone?”
“Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was
smiling at him from the hearth.
Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
questioned with loitering indifference--“Financially, eh?”
“Rather; I should say so.”
Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much--should you say? You
know about such things.”
“Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if you’ve
got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book is
brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down from the publisher,
and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers
bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I’m
talking in the dark.”
“Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
Persian rug beneath his feet.
“I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.
“Of course--you’d have to see them....” Glennard stammered; and, without
turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by....”
V
The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the
crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the
veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden
was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random--amid laughing
counter-charges of incompetence--had shot up in fragrant defiance of
their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual
wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a
crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried.
A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil.
So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage
setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step
forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the
veranda-rail.
The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year,
and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling
too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as
yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might
have grown opaque.
“Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
“Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had
thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a
visitor?” he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
“Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
“Flamel? Again?”
She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is
down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
here.”
Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him
next Sunday.”
Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the
most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come
from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do
you want to?”
“Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of
indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he
had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror
reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
“Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with
her tea, she returned the feminine answer--“I thought you did.”
“I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would
be rather jolly; let’s go.”
She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which
he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them
out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his
eye down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded
behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his
garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
awaited his sickle.
He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests
good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are
looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for
two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap.”
She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air
of balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall
be almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house... she’ll
let us have it for almost nothing....”
“Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on
in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
“‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’ Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready
next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR....”
He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back,
her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little
over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers
of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and
a privet hedge hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided
possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had
been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities,
impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf,
every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their
privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained
from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and
her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her
beyond the reach of rescue....
He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious
weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting
them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction
had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which
we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion
of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not
to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably
committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her--she had
become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s
adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful
venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s
professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of
living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for
simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review
or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in
a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of
prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought
it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood
that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his
fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for
himself was likely to know how to turn over other people’s money.
But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife’s happiness that
Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her
new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are
as sore to a husband’s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out
the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising
tide of opportunity. And somehow--in the windowless inner cell of his
consciousness where self-criticism cowered--Glennard’s course seemed
justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger
gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not
knowing what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious
instrument of his wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his
own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it;
and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable
presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always
be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other.
It was what she had always wanted--to be with him--and she had gained
her point at last....
He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
lifted his wife’s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the
woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity--“Any
news?”
“No--none--” he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers
lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them? He stretched
his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility
of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for
weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?
He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if
she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that
she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of
fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen
and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He
laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance,
decidedly.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked.
He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection
of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who
couldn’t find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of
the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her
smile. He glanced at his watch, “Isn’t it time to dress?”
She rose with serene reluctance. “It’s a pity to go in. The garden looks
so lovely.”
They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space
in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, “If we mean to
go on the yacht next Sunday,” she suggested, “oughtn’t you to let Mr.
Flamel know?”
Glennard’s exasperation deflected suddenly. “Of course I shall let him
know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to
Flamel.”
The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
leaving one space in which to contemplate one’s folly at arm’s length.
Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a
chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour
he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs
of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having
always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.