Left alone to his task, Belhaven lost no time in stating the case
plainly and without mercy to the unfortunate talebearer; he presented
it with a peculiar nakedness that would be popularly described as
being "without frills." Sidney Billop, like all other busybodies
when confronted with the result of their labors, was seized with an
overwhelming panic. His hand shook slightly as he held the damning
sheet close to his face and his near-sighted eyes seemed to fade with
fright, while he occupied considerable time in adjusting his glasses to
read an article that he already knew by heart. For he and his mother
had been filled with mingled feelings of alarm and amusement on reading
it at the breakfast-table that morning. They had relished the whispered
discussions in cosy corners and the hints over a cup of tea, but the
actual appearance of the story in type was rather discomfiting, for
they had never intended it to get that far, and were not even certain
how it had traveled, growing in size and momentum like a snow-ball,
until it finally exploded in the open and spattered the surrounding
landscape with the fragments.
Belhaven watched him moodily, his handsome, haggard face dark with
contending emotions. "I suppose you know that story is framed by the
malice of a discharged servant now in the employ of your mother?"
Sidney wriggled. "Of course I don't know anything about this," he said.
"Probably not; but you do know the things that started it, the whispers
and chatterings and talebearings. You know, too, that the girl--I
believe her name is Zélie--is employed by your mother."
"Yes; that is, I know she's got a French maid."
"Then you can see that she's discharged."
"Oh, come now! Isn't that butting into our affairs?"
"Can you deny discussing her story, her malicious, scandalous story, in
public?"
"I don't know that I have. Perhaps we've heard things, and, good
heavens, man, things travel!"
"In the usual channel, yes," Belhaven assented dryly. "Come, Billop,
you're a man, you'll have to answer for this; we'll have to settle it
once for all."
"Oh, I say--do you think this is just the time or the--the place?"
Sidney glanced miserably about the room for a means of escape.
"Astry knows that I intend to settle it," Belhaven replied sternly. "We
may as well do it here as anywhere--unless you prefer the terrace," he
added grimly.
"Oh, I say--perhaps--"
"A woman may gossip with impunity, but a man can't lend himself to a
thing like this. You'll be glad no doubt to prove that you had no hand
in circulating a villainous scandal; we're giving you the opportunity
to clear yourself, Billop."
Sidney was angry; his flaccid face was purple and his watery eyes
winked restlessly, but his courage was not equal to the emergency; he
was not fond of heroics.
"Oh, I say--I hate a scene, you know."
"So do I," agreed Belhaven grimly, "let's avoid one. We can settle it
quietly; make a statement here in writing that you'll discharge the
girl from the employ of your family."
"Oh, but that's butting in; you know she's my mother's maid and--"
"Do you prefer to stand for it?"
Belhaven's words snapped clear as a pistol shot. He was standing
opposite the culprit, one hand resting on the table, the other hanging
at his side. All the agony and piled-up fury of the last few weeks
burned in his eyes. The primeval instinct to kill an adversary was
mingled, at the moment, with the impulse that makes a man grind a
venomous snake under his heel.
"Oh, I say--I think you ought to give a fellow time to--to answer! I'm
not the French maid, you know, and my mother--why, my mother manages
her own affairs. I don't see but that it's all a devilish bad mix-up
and I don't want to commit myself; I don't know what you're driving at
anyhow, don't you see?"
"Well, I'm in a position to let you know it. See here, Billop, this has
got to stop."
It always seemed to Sidney a miracle that a servant came to the door at
that very moment.
"A telephone for you, Mr. Billop; we're holding the wire."
"You'll have to excuse me for a minute, Belhaven." Sidney flushed
with relief; even ten minutes' respite would be a godsend, for he was
entirely at loss what to say to his interrogator.
In fact he was thinking, with an inward shudder, of the terrible
face of the man as he made his way across the wide hall and down a
little entry to the telephone room. A black-uniformed, white-capped
maid was at the 'phone but Sidney was too confused to even give her
a languishing glance as he took the receiver. It was a call from his
mother and she wanted him home at once; the storm was frightful and
increasing so that she feared he would be in danger on his way home.
Besides, the weather-man had threatened a blizzard and he knew he was
subject to tonsilitis,--Sidney, not the weather-man, she said,--and
if dinner happened to be over he must come at once; she had sent a
taxicab.
"Make any excuse," she 'phoned wildly. "Come--it's a blizzard and you
always take cold when you get your feet wet. I had overshoes put in the
cab."
He made a reassuring reply, hung up the receiver and looked around. The
little room was empty; beyond, the hall was empty too; only a discreet
footman sat by the front door, and Sidney remembered that, for some
providential reason, he had left his coat and hat in the hall instead
of going up to the dressing-room. For a moment he hesitated, his face
deeply flushed, then the recollection of the figure waiting in the den,
of that inexorable look in Belhaven's eyes, decided his wavering mood.
He went quietly out, almost on tiptoe; he passed the conservatory and
the drawing-room door unobserved, and in another moment the footman had
him into his fur coat and the taxi was waiting at the terrace step.
Sidney scribbled a line on a card for Mrs. Astry,--he had been summoned
home by his mother, he said,--and then he gave the man a dollar, for
he was really grateful, and went out rather hurriedly and got into
the cab. But he did not breathe freely until it was speeding swiftly
down-hill toward the city with the snow white on the glass of the
windows and the wind driving past like a hurricane.
Belhaven waited a long time. The cowardly absurdity of Billop's
attitude had not affected him as it would have done at another time.
Where he would only have felt contempt, he was experiencing a feverish
rage; he longed to take the fool, as he called him, and shut his mouth
forever. Billop's very cowardice, his patent desire to escape even for
a moment, only added fuel to the other man's wrath. What right had this
idiot to thrust himself into a situation so delicate and so painful, to
tattle of it to the world for his own amusement?
Belhaven walked restlessly about the room, storming against the fate
that permitted such imbeciles a place in civilized communities, and it
was not until the clock on the mantel suddenly chimed the hour that he
awoke to the possibility that "the idiot" had decamped. After a moment
of angry amazement he went to the door and summoned the same servant
who had delivered the telephone call. It happened that the man had
seen Sidney's abrupt departure, and Belhaven had the mortification of
finding that his quarry had slipped through his fingers. That flight
was an admission of guilt would amount to nothing with a man like
Sidney Billop, and Belhaven realized that he would probably evade
another climax, or meet it only under his mother's sheltering wing, and
he experienced a maddened feeling of defeat. For the time, at least,
"the idiot" had got the better of him.
At every point, then, he was facing defeat and mortification. He had
been insulted by Charter, tortured by Astry, and yet was unable to
defend himself without tearing open the gaping seams of the scandal.
For he was trapped, crucified, made helpless by his own act. He
felt that Rachel must despise him, that she must remember that his
acceptance of her sacrifice had caused the whole miserable situation,
that had he faced Astry like a man and taken his punishment, he would
have been delivered from the shackles that bound him. If he had died
by Astry's hand, he would, at least, have died a free man; now he
could turn neither to the right nor to the left, and he felt that
the immeasurable distance between Rachel and himself could never be
spanned,--she would always regard him as her sister's discarded lover,
as the poltroon who refused to face her sister's husband. Even a kind
glance, a reassuring word, a smile from her, meant nothing but pity,
pity for the weakness that had cowed him in horror of his own moral
obliquity. The terrible clarity of this new mental vision showed him
the lasting shame of his punishment, the disgrace of cowardice!
In crossing the hall he heard the sound of voices in the drawing-room
and Pamela's light touch on the piano. Some one laughed gayly and the
parrot in the conservatory suddenly screamed out its mocking cry of
"Eva, Eva!" He had again the feeling of being outside of it all, of
viewing it with the detachment of a stranger, and even recalled that
moment, earlier in the evening, when he had thought that things would
look thus to his disembodied spirit. His intimacy with the place, the
people, the artificial life they led, seemed to have dissolved; he
no longer belonged to them, or if he did, he was so greatly changed
that, if they recognized him at all, they would disown him. He had
forfeited his place among them, he had forfeited his right to a place
among men; he was a coward! The thought stung him so keenly that he
shrank, naturally and unconsciously, from that familiar scene in the
drawing-room; he could not force himself to go in and see Pamela
lightly strumming out a popular tune and Sedley playing bridge! He
turned, instead, and unnoticed except by one of the servants, went on
into the library. As he passed through the room, he glanced around at
the warm, tinted walls, the richly lined book-shelves, the big table
with its study lamp, the fire on the hearth; and the comfort and the
luxury of it touched some incoherent consciousness of home. He sighed,
and going to the fire, tore up and burned the scurrilous paper that
Astry had given him, watching it until the last charred fragment fell
into a blackened cinder. Then he opened one of the long, French windows
and, closing it carefully behind him, went out on the terrace.
He was greeted with the sting of sleet in his face and the sudden shock
of unprecedented cold roused him from the stupor of despair into which
he had fallen. He was without coat or hat and his thin evening clothes
felt like so much paper in the gale. For an instant he hesitated,
half inclined to go back, and then the same impulse that had driven
him out returned with overwhelming force. He must find a way out of
it, he must force Rachel to accept her freedom; he could no longer
hold her to her bargain and feel that by the very act of her marriage
she had made him a miserable creature ready to seek shelter behind a
woman rather than face the man against whom he had planned an injury
as cowardly as it was base. He had traveled so far upon that long road
that it seemed incredible that he had ever deliberately chosen it, that
his moral turpitude had been so great that he had not recognized that
his waywardness could never prevail against the eternal principles of
right and wrong, and that his sins would only invoke an inevitable
and complete retribution, that he would be crushed at last beneath
the weight of that edifice which he had erected in the days of his
transgressions. He believed vaguely in God and for a moment he almost
cried out incoherently to that Supreme Being Who had created him and
against Whom he had deliberately sinned. But there seemed to be no ear,
even the Eternal One, that could hear him through the blasts of that
fearful storm, and, smitten alike with cold and despair, he plunged
forward into a space that seemed to be limited to a frozen circle of
white, in which he turned around and around, and which never expanded
beyond the ring that his dazed senses made in the mist of the tempest.
Yet the one idea that survived the whirlpool of his mood was the desire
to see Rachel, to beg her to forgive him, to set her free, even if by
that one act of renunciation he wiped out forever the desire of life.
With this thought in his heart he turned and made his way blindly
across the terrace, and the greatest snow-storm of many seasons,
driving around the northeast corner, enfolded him deeply and softly in
its heavy flakes.