MR. INCOUL IS PREOCCUPIED.
Mr. Incoul’s attitude to his wife had, meanwhile, in no wise altered.
To an observer, nay, to Maida herself, he was as silent, methodical and
self-abnegatory as he had been from the first. He had indeed caused her
to send a regret to Ballister without giving any reason why the regret
should be sent, but otherwise he showed himself very indulgent.
He cared little for the stage, yet to gratify Maida he engaged boxes
for the season at the Français and at the Opéra. Now and then in the
early autumn when summer was still in the air he took her to dine in
the Bois, at Madrid or Armenenville, and drove home with her in the
cool of the evening, stopping, perhaps, for a moment at some one of the
different concerts that lined the Champs Elysées. And sometimes he went
with her to Versailles and at others to Vincennes, and one Sunday to
Bougival. But there Maida would never return; it was crowded with a
set of people the like of which she had never seen before, with women
whose voices were high pitched and unmodulated, and men in queer coats
who stared at her and smiled if they caught her eye.
But with the first tingle that accompanies the falling leaves, the
open-air restaurants and concerts closed their doors. There was a
succession of new plays which Vitu always praised and Sarcey always
damned. The verdict of the latter gentleman, however, did not affect
Maida in the least. She went bravely to the Odéon and liked it, to the
Cluny where she saw a shocking play that made her laugh till she cried.
She went to the Nations and saw Lacressonière and shuddered before
the art of that wonderful actor. At the Gymnase she saw the “Maître des
Forges” and when she went home her eyes were wet; she saw “Nitouche”
and would have willingly gone back the next night to see it again;
even Mr. Incoul smiled; nothing more irresistibly amusing than Baron
could be imagined; she saw, too, Bartet and Delaunay, and for the first
time heard French well spoken. But of all entertainments the Opéra
pleasured her most. Already, under Mapleson’s reign, she had wearied
of mere sweetness in music; she felt that she would enjoy Wagner and
even planned a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, but meanwhile Meyerbeer had the
power to intoxicate her very soul. The septette in the second act of
“L’Africaine” affected her as had never anything before; it vibrated
from her fingertips to the back of her neck; the entire score, from the
opening notes of the overture to the farewell of Zuleika’s that fuses
with the murmur of the sea, thrilled her with abrupt surprises, with
series and excesses of delight.
There were, of course, many evenings when neither opera nor theatre was
attractive, and on such evenings invitations from resident friends and
acquaintances were sometimes accepted and sometimes open house was held.
On these occasions, Maida found herself an envied bride. It was not
merely that her husband was rich enough to buy a principality and
hand it over for charitable purposes, it was not merely that he was
willing to give her everything that feminine heart could desire, it
was that, however crowded the halls might be, he seemed conscious of
the existence of but one woman, and that woman was his wife. There
were triflers who said that this attitude was _bourgeois_; there were
others--more witty--who said that it was immoral; but, be this as it
may, the South American highwaymen, who called themselves generals, the
Russian princesses, the Roumanian boyards, the attachés, embassadors,
and other accredited bores, the contingent from the Faubourg, the
American residents, who, were they sent in a body to the rack, could
not have confessed to an original thought among them, all these,
together with a sprinkling of Spaniards and English, the Tout-Paris,
in fact, agreed, as it was intended they should, on this one point, to
wit, that Mr. Incoul was the most devoted of husbands.
And such apparently he was. If Maida had any lingering doubts as to
the real reason of their return to Paris, little by little they faded.
After her fright she made with herself several little compacts, and
that she might carry them out the better she wrote to Lenox a short,
decisive note. She determined that he should never enter her life
again. It was no longer his, he had let it go without an effort to
detain it, and in Biarritz if it had seemed that he still held the
key of her heart, it was owing as much to the unexpectedness of his
presence as to the languors of the afternoons. In marrying, she had
meant to be brave; indeed, she had been so--when there was no danger;
and if in spite of her intentions she had faltered, the faltering
had at least served as a lesson which she would never need to learn
again. Over the cinders of her youth she would write a Requiescat. Her
girlhood had been her own to give, but her womanhood she had pledged to
another.
As she thought of these things she wondered at her husband. He had done
what she had hardly dared to expect--he had observed their ante-nuptial
agreement to the letter. A brother could not have treated her with
greater respect. Surely if ever a man set out to win his wife’s
affection he had chosen the surest way. And why had he so acted if it
were not as he had said, that given time and opportunity he _would_
win her affection. He was doing so, Maida felt, and with infinitely
greater speed than she had ever deemed possible. Beside, if the mangled
remnants of her heart seemed attractive, why should he be debarred from
their possession? Yet, that was precisely the point; he did not know of
the mangled remnants, he thought her heart-whole and virginal. But what
would he do if he learned the truth? And as she wondered, suddenly the
consciousness came to her that she was living with a stranger.
Heretofore she had not puzzled over the possible intricacies of her
husband’s inner nature. She had known that he was of a grave and silent
disposition, and as such she had been content to accept him, without
question or query. But as she collected some of the scattered threads
and memories of their life in common, it seemed to her that latterly
he had become even graver and more silent than before. And this merely
when they were alone. In the presence of a third person, when they
went abroad as guests, or when they remained at home as hosts, he
put his gravity aside like a garment. He encouraged her in whatever
conversation she might have engaged in, he aided her with a word or
a suggestion, he made a point of consulting her openly, and smiled
approvingly at any bright remark she chanced to make.
But when they were alone, unless she personally addressed him, he
seldom spoke, and the answers that he gave her, while perfectly
courteous in tone and couching, struck her, now that she reflected, as
automatic, like phrases learned by rote. It is true they were rarely
alone. In the mornings he busied himself with his correspondence,
and in the afternoons she found herself fully occupied with shops and
visits, while in the evenings there was usually a dinner, a play, or
a reception, sometimes all three. Since the season had begun, it was
only now and then, once in ten days perhaps, that an evening was passed
_en tête-à-tête_. On such occasions he would take up a book and read
persistently, or he would smoke, flicking the ashes from the cigar
abstractedly with his little finger, and so sit motionless for hours,
his eyes fixed on the cornice.
It was this silence that puzzled her. It was evident that he was
thinking of something, but of what? It could not be archæology, he
seemed to have given it up, and he was not a metaphysician, the only
thinker, be it said, to whom silence is at all times permissible.
At first she feared that his preoccupation might in some way be
connected with the episodes at Biarritz, but this fear faded. Mr.
Incoul had been made a member of the Cercle des Capucines, and now and
then looked in there ostensibly to glance at the papers or to take a
hand at whist. One day he said casually, “I saw your friend Leigh at
the club. You might ask him to dinner.” The invitation was sent, but
Lenox had regretted. After that incident it was impossible for her to
suppose that her husband’s preoccupation was in anywise connected with
the intimacy which had subsisted between the young man and herself.
There seemed left to her then but one tenable supposition. Her husband
had been indulgence personified. He had been courteous, refined and
foreseeing, in fact a gentleman, and, if silent, was it not possible
that the silence was due to a self-restraining delicacy, to a feeling
that did he speak he would plead, and that, perhaps, when pleading
would be distasteful to her?
To this solution Maida inclined. It was indeed the only one at which
she could arrive, and, moreover, it conveyed that little bouquet of
flattery which has been found grateful by many far less young and
feminine than she. And so, one evening, for the further elucidation
of the enigma, and with the idea that perhaps it needed but a word
from her to cause her husband to say something of that which was on
his mind, and which she was at once longing and dreading to hear--one
evening when he had seemed particularly abstracted, she bent forward
and said, “Harmon, of what are you thinking?”
She had never called him by his given name before. He started, and half
turned.
“Of you,” he answered.
But Maida’s heart sank. She saw that his eyes were not in hers, that
they looked over and beyond her, as though they followed the fringes of
an escaping dream.