THE MOTH AND THE FLAME
Clayton was standing idly in front of his hotel. Sibyl Dudley and Mary
Jasper were driving by in the cool bright sunshine of the late
afternoon. Sibyl glanced keenly at the well-known figure. Clayton had
lost much in trimness and neatness of appearance by his long sojourn
in Paradise Valley. His clothing was ill-fitting, and his almost
useless left arm appeared to swing more stiffly than ever, as the
crowd jostled him. The contrast between the stylishly-dressed woman in
the carriage and this man who had once been her husband was marked.
Yet the handsome face of the man was still there, almost unseamed, and
it revealed kindness and cultured intelligence, as of old.
“It is Doctor Clayton!” she said. “He looks so lonely and is such a
stranger here that it will be a kindness if we speak to him. I knew
him very well once, you know.”
The horses had trotted on, unnoticed by Clayton. Sibyl spoke now to
the driver, and the carriage was turned and driven back to the hotel.
The old desire to prove her power over this man possessed her. And she
might be able to use him!
“Speak to him,” she said to Mary. “It will please him, I’m sure, to
meet some one he knows. And it’s so long since I met him that he may
have forgotten me entirely.”
The carriage with the well-groomed horses in their shining harness had
drawn up at the curb. Even yet the abstracted doctor had not observed
the occupants of the carriage. But now, when Mary addressed him, he
looked up, almost startled to hear his name spoken there. He
recognized Mary, and his face flushed a deep red when he recognized
also the woman who sat smiling beside her.
“It is Doctor Clayton, is it not?” said Sibyl, speaking to him and
using her utmost witchery. “It seems so strange to see you away from
Paradise Valley. But it is a pleasure.”
He came up to the carriage, hesitating for words. He did not trust
this woman, yet he could not forget what she had once been to him. And
he had always liked Mary, as he liked her crabbed old father. He had
justified himself for not speaking to Sloan Jasper, with the thought
that he really knew nothing concerning the life that Sibyl was living.
When a man cannot justify his actions he loses self-respect, and
Clayton had never lost his self-respect. He had known nothing of
Sibyl’s private life from the moment of his plunge into the
world-forgotten valley of Paradise. He knew nothing now. As he looked
into her eyes, the trepidation and confusion which had produced that
hot flush was mingled with pity and a yearning touch of the old love.
She had faded, she was garish, yet she was Sibyl, and to him still
beautiful; Sibyl, whom he had loved and married, and from whom he had
fled.
“You are looking well,” he said to Mary, though she was not looking
well, for trouble with Ben had set shadows in her dark eyes. “And you,
too Mrs.——”
He hesitated.
“Dudley,” Sibyl supplemented. “We haven’t met for so long that you
have actually forgotten my name!” She smiled amiably. “Won’t you take a
seat with us for a little spin about the streets? This crowd bores
you, I know.”
He still hesitated, hunting for words. He had never felt so awkward,
nor had his clothing ever seemed to set so badly or look so mean. He
began to realize that in Paradise Valley he had lost something. Where
was the neatly-dressed college student, filled with learning and a
desire to please? Apparently only the learning and the desire to
please remained. And that desire to please, which often took the form
of an inability to displease any one, made it impossible for him to
refuse this invitation.
Clayton, entering the carriage, found himself by Sibyl’s dexterous
manipulation placed in the seat at her side, with Mary in the seat in
front of them. He looked at Mary as the carriage started, and he
wondered, and his heart smote him. Then he looked at the woman who sat
with him.
“She is very happy with me,” said Sibyl, as the horses beat their
noisy tattoo through the street, deadening the sound of her voice.
“And there isn’t a better girl in the world!” There was a peculiar
emphasis on the words. “If you thought differently, you have been much
mistaken. She has been as safe with me as that boy Justin has been
with you; and I love her as much as you can possibly love him. She is
a dear, true, simple-hearted girl, and she thinks everything of me.
And I am much better than you have ever thought. So don’t get silly
ideas into your head, simply because you see this carriage and I wear
a few diamonds. The carriage may be hired and the diamonds paste. It
was one of your dogmas, you know, that people should always hold
charitable opinions.”
“And I do. I have always thought kindly of you and had charitable
opinions of you. One never knows what he would do if put in the
position of another. I was hurt, crushed; but I never could have it in
my heart to blame you for anything. Sometimes I felt bitter, but even
the bitterness has long since worn away.”
Mary turned in her seat and began to speak to them, and the
conversation was not taken up until Clayton and Sibyl were alone
together in her home, to which they were driven after they had
traversed a few streets. Sibyl was anxious to get Clayton to herself,
and she therefore cut the drive short, complaining of the chill of
approaching night.
Mary, fluttering about the rooms, came into the parlor and went out
again at intervals. Sibyl had kindly relieved her of the task of
entertaining Clayton. Remembering the story of his broken arm, Mary
felt a deep sympathy for him, yet she had never been able to converse
with him at length. He was so learned and wise, and at times so
strange and silent, that he oppressed her. She revered him, but she
could not talk with him. Besides, she had a letter to write to Ben,
who was coming to Denver in a day or two, and she wanted to think
about Ben and what she should say to him in that letter. The
composition of a letter even to Ben was not always an easy thing; and
though she still wrote to her father each Sunday, what she said to him
was so brief, sometimes, that for all the space required to contain it
she might have sprawled it on a postal card.
While Mary thought of Ben and studied for words and sentences before
secluding herself to begin the actual work of writing, she gave
thought also to Clayton and Sibyl, and was quite sure that Sibyl was
kind and charitable in thus seeking to give pleasure to the lonely
doctor who had been apparently at a loss in the Denver streets. And
then, it came like a flash—what if Clayton should fall in love with
Sibyl, and they should marry? It seemed to her that much stranger
things had happened. And in contemplating this new and bright
suggestion she built up a very pretty little romance, which had a
marked resemblance to some of those which Pearl used to read. Romantic
ideas fluttered in Mary’s pretty head as thickly as butterflies amid
Japanese cherry blossoms.
When she began the composition of her letter, dipping her gold pen in
the blue ink which Ben liked, Sibyl was at the piano and singing in a
way to disturb the flow of her thoughts.
“But she has a beautiful voice!” thought Mary, laying down the pen and
listening with admiration. “Wouldn’t it be strange if they should take
a fancy to each other and marry?”
It appeared entirely possible, now that Mr. Plimpton had departed from
Denver.
Sibyl was singing one of the old songs that touched the deep springs
of the past, and Clayton with inexpressible yearning was wishing that
the years between could drop away and he could be her willing slave
again. The love that had been dead, though it came forth now bound
about with grave-clothes, lived again, and spoke to his heart a
familiar language.
“You remember the song?” she said, looking up into his face and
smiling. He had come forward to the piano.
“Yes,” he confessed. “I shall never forget it. You sang it the evening
you told me you loved me and would be my wife. I wish you had chosen
another.”
“Why?”
She looked steadily into his eyes, half veiling her own with their
dark lashes.
“There is no need to ask,” he said, and retreated to his chair. “The
change since then is too great. I am not the same, and you are not the
same.” He glanced at his stiff arm and his ill-fitting clothing.
“Nothing can ever be the same again.”
She was studying how she might win him, if only temporarily. Certain
plans were no longer fluid, and she believed she could use him.
“That doesn’t sound like you, Curtis.”
“Sibyl,” he threw out his stiff arm with a protesting gesture, “I hope
you are not trying to play with me, as a cat with a mouse. You know
how I have always felt toward you. You know that even after you sold
yourself to that man Plimpton, I——”
She commanded silence by putting her fingers to her lips; and
tip-toeing to the door she closed it, that Mary might not by any
chance hear his unguarded words.
“Even after that I would have taken you back gladly, and could have
forgiven you and loved you, for I was always a fool about you. You
will pardon me for speaking so plainly? I don’t want to hurt your
feelings. I went away, as you know, and have tried to find peace by
burying myself from the world. And I have found peace, of a certain
kind. But I am not the same as I was. I hope I am not as weak as I
was.”
Yet he knew he had at that moment no more stability than water. If he
could have believed any protestation she might make, he would have
done so joyfully, and would have gone far to purchase such a belief.
“I have been a great fool in many ways,” she admitted. “But I hope not
a bigger fool than the man who pitches himself headlong out of the
living world into a desert simply because he and his wife have agreed
to a separation. But as you say, all that is past, and there is no
need to talk about it. Now I want to forget it and be your friend, if
I can’t be anything else.”
“What else would you be?”
He spoke in a hoarse voice.
“At present, just your friend. You need a friend, and I need one. We
have been enemies a good while. Let us forget that, and be friends
again.”
“Mere friendship with you would never satisfy me, Sibyl. You know that
as well as I do. Unless I could be your husband, and hold you
heart-true to me as my wife, I could never be anything to you.”
Though shaken by his emotions he spoke with unusual determination.
Thoughts of Plimpton aroused whatever militant manhood there was in
him. For the instant he felt that he ought to have killed Plimpton,
and that his flight had been the flight of a coward. Sibyl saw that
she was approaching him from the wrong side.
“Yet mere friendship, as you call it, is a good thing. The friendship
between Mary and myself, for instance, and that between you and
Justin—you will not say they are worthless. You even came up to
Denver, I think, to see Justin, because you could not bear to be
separated long from him.”
He looked at her earnestly, with a mental question.
“Don’t put your hands on him!”
“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “Why should I? But I won’t beg for the
favor of your friendship. I thought we might be friends, good friends.
You could establish yourself here in the city, and we could see each
other occasionally, if nothing else. I am a better woman than I used
to be, a very much better woman than you will believe me to be. Mary
has done that for me. And I suppose you thought I would ruin her? That
shows that you never understood me.”
“I couldn’t stay here in Denver!” he protested.
“We might be even more than friends, some time,” she urged sweetly.
“Sibyl,” he seemed about to rise from his chair, but sank back, “if I
could believe you!”
Her words, which he knew to be lies, were still sweet. His heart was
filled with unutterable longing, not for “the touch of a vanished
hand,” but for a vanished past.
“I will be your friend,” he said earnestly, after a moment. “I have
never been anything else, except when I was your devoted lover and
foolish husband. I should like to be both again, if I could.”
“Even that might be. There is such a thing as forgetting, you know.”
“Not for me.”
“Then a forgiving.”
“Yes. Until to-night I thought I had forgiven, and I was trying to
forget. I shall be glad to be your friend, Sibyl. As to establishing
myself in Denver, to be near you, I will think about it. If—if there
were no such thing as memory, we might still be very happy.”
His under-current of common sense told him that he had again entered a
fool’s paradise.
“We can be happy, Curtis. You shall not leave Denver. I need more than
your friendship. I need your love. I tossed it away, but I didn’t know
what I was doing. I need your love, and I know you will not refuse it.
You never refused me anything; whatever I asked, you gave me.”
He had already given her his life!
In his room at the hotel that night Clayton packed and unpacked his
valise, in a state of delirious uncertainty. In the mirror he beheld
his face, ghastly as that of a dead man. But, slowly, his philosophy
came to his aid,
“Lies, and I know it! And I am a coward! The thing for me to do is to
get back into the wilderness.”
The next morning he was gone. The letter which came shortly urged
Justin, in a shaky hand, to stand for principle, no matter what
happened, and explained that the writer felt that he must hurry home.