HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm--he felt the
need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.
He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that
they would have the evening together. When he followed her to the
drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking;
but as she handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily: “I shall have
to carry this off to the study, I’ve got a lot of work to-night.”
Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had
withheld him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at
arm’s length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he
would never take her by surprise. Well--why not face her, then? What he
shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this
way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing
the publisher’s check. He had deposited the money, but the notice
accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for
work. It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough
that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn’s letters. It
would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once
that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them....
He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers
in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell
on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a
temple. Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it
was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on
the brink of sacrilege.
Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. “I’ve brought
you a piece of work--a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
sort for me. Some are not worth keeping--but you’ll be able to judge of
that. There may be a letter or two among them--nothing of much account,
but I don’t like to throw away the whole lot without having them looked
over and I haven’t time to do it myself.”
He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends
for the incident of the previous day.
“Are you sure I shall know which to keep?”
“Oh, quite sure,” he answered, easily--“and besides, none are of much
importance.”
The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a
visitor’s hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in
the act of taking leave.
He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
receipt of a royalty on the “Aubyn Letters.”...
A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife
as the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over
her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
precipitately.
“I’m dining out to-night--you don’t mind my deserting you? Julia Armiger
sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose
concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn’t two--but I
knew YOU wouldn’t be sorry!” She ended with a laugh that had the effect
of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger’s; and before Glennard could
speak she had added, with her hand on the door, “Mr. Flamel stayed so
late that I’ve hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously
early, and Julia dines at half-past seven--”
Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of
an ironical consciousness of what was happening. “She hates me,” he
murmured. “She hates me....”
The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in
his room. When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they
took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm.
While he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that,
after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of
the previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he
had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to
him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman
at his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this
possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely
felt himself left alone with his baseness.
Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
“Aren’t you a little early for church?” he asked.
She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at
her mother’s; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
“Well, good-by,” she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
added: “By the way, I’ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that
I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table.” She went
downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she had
made no sign!
Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On
the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller--she had
evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
desk. The publisher’s notice was among them.
X
His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case
of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks
to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the
same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve
had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of
confession had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift
a portion of his burden to his wife’s shoulders and now that she had
tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up
again.
A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and
came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough
to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over
two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not
unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of
introspection--he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual
revival of moral health.
He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting
to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash
appeal to his wife’s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the
consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches
over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded
that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her
uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a
poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to
characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general
lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the
matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice
where another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had
profited by Mrs. Aubyn’s tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his
wife.
When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats
the gardener’s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In
one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer,
at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more
communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of
intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of
an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now
rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her
attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped
him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination
to perceive that, in respect of the wife’s social arts, a husband
necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.
In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife’s feelings for Flamel.
From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they
yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness
now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....
Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
always skipped the “literary notices” in the papers and he had small
leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had
therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the “Aubyn
Letters” had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book
ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this
apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring
sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did
not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of
obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and
thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.
But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first
page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the
photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of
memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this
unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been
in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into
her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the
tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke,
the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine
in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed
in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor
semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought
that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of
shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare
to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a
renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused
from the creeping lethargy of death....
He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal
of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her
again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of
losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her
presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through
his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every
incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit
of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has
plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail
had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to
Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been
pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that,
but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on
in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him
with her blood....
That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to
the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was
hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into
silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he
was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind
as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full
bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly,
had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--
Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
“Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I’d left it on this
table.” He said nothing, and she went on: “You haven’t seen it?”
“No,” he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
looked up he met her tentative gaze. “I was reading an article in it--a
review of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters,” she added, slowly, with her deep,
deliberate blush.
Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
that she would not speak the other woman’s name; nothing else seemed to
matter. “You seem to do a lot of reading,” he said.
She still earnestly confronted him. “I was keeping this for you--I
thought it might interest you,” she said, with an air of gentle
insistence.
He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
“I haven’t time for such things,” he said, indifferently. As he moved to
the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused
and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.