Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert
his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not
even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto
been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely
aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any
affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious
house--but in this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It
pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters”
confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed
them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social
obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a
personal guise.
Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to
be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to
perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself
negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought
himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of
baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be
made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust
into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve
to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond
the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved
the American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares.
Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude
with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about
the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the
suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he
thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against
his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well
enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that
he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and
directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of
her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself
could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had
she been more complex, more feminine--if he could have counted on
her imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of
neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action
would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to
own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he
preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances
would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments
of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had
sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to
whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he
hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to
him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the
house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there,
his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.
Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house
that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the
immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in
her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who
could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty
woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty.
Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial
imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good
sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the
necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and
before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a
parlour-maid to their small establishment.
Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
on Glennard’s breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters. It happened to be
the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the
table at his wife, who had come down before him and had probably
laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward
questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating
whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it
off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a
check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of
the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The
money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help
welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book
was still selling far beyond the publisher’s previsions. He put the
check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife.
On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the
sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been
overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the
letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the
situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it,
pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act.
It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his
friend anew.
When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa’s
drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered
in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger’s conversation like the
ejaculations of a startled aviary.
She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
men.
“Oh, go on, go on,” young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger
met Glennard’s inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn’t
see what there was to laugh at. “I’m sure I feel more like crying. I
don’t know what I should have done if Alexa hadn’t been home to give me
a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds--yes, another, dear, please--” and
as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on
the selection of a second lump of sugar, “Why, I’ve just come from the
reading, you know--the reading at the Waldorf.”
“I haven’t been in town long enough to know anything,” said Glennard,
taking the cup his wife handed him. “Who has been reading what?”
“That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what’s her name--Mrs.
Dresham’s protegee--unless she’s YOURS, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big
ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying like idiots--it was
the most harrowing thing I ever heard--”
“What DID you hear?” Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: “Won’t you
have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot
toast, please.” Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under
discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him
with her lovely amazement.
“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’--didn’t you know about it? The girl read them
so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have fainted if
there’d been a man near enough to carry me out.”
Hartly’s glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, “How like you women
to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
blatant publicity of the readings!”
Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal.
“It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to
be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for a charity.”
“Oh,” her hostess murmured, indifferently, “with me charity begins at
home. I can’t afford emotional luxuries.”
“A charity? A charity?” Hartly exulted. “I hadn’t seized the full beauty
of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters at the Waldorf before
five hundred people for a charity! WHAT charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?”
“Why, the Home for Friendless Women--”
“It was well chosen,” Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
the sofa-cushions.
When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. “Who asked you
to take a ticket for that reading?”
“I don’t know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up.”
“It’s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she’s capable of! It’s
loathsome--it’s monstrous--”
His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, “I thought so too. It
was for that reason I didn’t go. But you must remember that very few
people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--”
Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. “As I do?”
he repeated.
“I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To
most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too
remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different--”
Glennard gave her a startled look. “Different? Why different?”
“Since you were her friend--”
“Her friend!” He stood up impatiently. “You speak as if she had had only
one--the most famous woman of her day!” He moved vaguely about the room,
bending down to look at some books on the table. “I hope,” he added,
“you didn’t give that as a reason, by the way?”
“A reason?”
“For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
the hand on the trigger.
“I seem,” she said from the threshold, “to have done both in giving my
reason to you.”
The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies’ draperies,
followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
discussion of the “Aubyn Letters” and Glennard, hearing his wife
questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she
had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked.
He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the “Letters” were
concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting
a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to
the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had
organized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself--for he
was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife’s
glance struck him cold.
She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel’s side, and it appeared to
Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers
of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the
reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard
almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A
throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with
a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether
Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about
the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him
better that Alexa should know too.
He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his
front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through
his veins? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife’s
scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had
closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth
he wondered no longer--she would despise him. But this lent a new
insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge
from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for
the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his
wife’s indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay
his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he
needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him....
When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.