The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife,
was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was
but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of
communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his
humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed
grotesque and mean.
Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of
self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If
Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there
was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling
seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to
the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which
he leaned.
They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious
track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a
haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it,
to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned
shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring
spring!
Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in
the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made
her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she
meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt
was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching,
in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to
acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters,
and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched,
meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which
she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations
drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness,
to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did
not speak.
It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.
“I’ve heard from Mr. Flamel,” she said.
Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.
“It’s from Smyrna,” she said. “Won’t you read it?”
He handed it back. “You can tell me about it--his hand’s so illegible.”
He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and stood
before her. “I’ve been thinking of writing to Flamel,” he said.
She looked up.
“There’s one point,” he continued, slowly, “that I ought to clear up.
I told him you’d known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do,
of course; but I can’t leave him to that false impression; I must write
him.”
She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, “Why do you
call it a false impression? I did know.”
“Yes, but I implied you didn’t care.”
“Ah!”
He still stood looking down on her. “Don’t you want me to set that
right?” he tentatively pursued.
She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. “It isn’t necessary,” she
said.
Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture
of comprehension, “No,” he said, “with you it couldn’t be; but I might
still set myself right.”
She looked at him gently. “Don’t I,” she murmured, “do that?”
“In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation’s too complete!
You make me seem--to myself even--what I’m not; what I can never be.
I can’t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
enlighten others.”
The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. “Don’t
you see that it’s become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
myself down to the last lie--only there’d always be another one left
under it!--and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least
have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don’t you see that the
worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?”
Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. “Ah, poor woman, poor
woman,” he heard her sigh.
“Don’t pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
You’re both inaccessible! It was myself I sold.”
He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. “How
much longer,” he burst out, “do you suppose you can stand it? You’ve
been magnificent, you’ve been inspired, but what’s the use? You can’t
wipe out the ignominy of it. It’s miserable for you and it does HER no
good!”
She lifted a vivid face. “That’s the thought I can’t bear!” she cried.
“What thought?”
“That it does her no good--all you’re feeling, all you’re suffering. Can
it be that it makes no difference?”
He avoided her challenging glance. “What’s done is done,” he muttered.
“Is it ever, quite, I wonder?” she mused. He made no answer and they
lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
communication.
It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
“Don’t they say,” she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
apprehensiveness, “that the early Christians, instead of pulling down
the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--purified them by
turning them to their own uses? I’ve always thought one might do that
with one’s actions--the actions one loathes but can’t undo. One can
make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
against them....” Her voice wavered on the word. “We can’t always tear
down the temples we’ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put
good spirits in the house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and
understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn’t been in
such great need....”
She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was
bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds--they
quickened the seeds of understanding.
At length he looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, “what spirits have come
to live in the house of evil that I built--but you’re there and that’s
enough for me. It’s strange,” he went on after another pause, “she
wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it’s through her that
it’s come to me. But for her I shouldn’t have known you--it’s through
her that I’ve found you. Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it
hardest--makes me most intolerable to myself. Can’t you see that it’s
the worst thing I’ve got to face? I sometimes think I could have
borne it better if you hadn’t understood! I took everything from
her--everything--even to the poor shelter of loyalty she’d trusted
in--the only thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her,
I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she’s given me YOU
in return!”
His wife’s cry caught him up. “It isn’t that she’s given ME to you--it
is that she’s given you to yourself.” She leaned to him as though swept
forward on a wave of pity. “Don’t you see,” she went on, as his eyes
hung on her, “that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt
you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been
what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into
the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a
woman--that’s the gift she would have wished to give!”
“Ah,” he cried, “but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
her?”
“The happiness of giving,” she said.