"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.
She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the knuckles—a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white fingers and marked them with a bright stain.
That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature; the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things they had never seen before.
Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.
The circuit was complete.
"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.
From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:
"I love you!"
She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips, in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to the force in her own true being.
"But—but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.
Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.
"But Jim——You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is far, far too good for either of us."
Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost merry kiss.
"He need never know," said the Austrian.
She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.
"You—you——" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"
It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.
"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"
"Go!"
Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with hate and shame.
"Go!"
"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."
"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"
"But, Muriel——"
"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring for the servants."
"Muriel——"
"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again, I'll ring."
He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.
Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination, Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the window.
Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.
"Muriel!" he cried.
She opened her heavy eyes.
"Jim!"
He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father strokes the hair of his weary child.
"My poor little girl!" he said.
Had she thought at all coherently about his coming,she had not meant to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth, or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him while he did that.
"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought—I hardly know what I thought."
"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"
Muriel started.
"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's——" She laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It stuck—the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the pieces from the floor."
She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of marital ethics.
After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of deception. Truth became impossible.
She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossibleit became, the more bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy against her lover and heightened her affection—call it love as she would, it would now be no more than affection—for Jim. She wanted to tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that barred her way.
She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.
"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."
At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.
"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is really no reason for you to worry."
She did not look up, but she shook her head.
"I am not," she repeated.
He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her cheek, which her hands left bare.
"There, there," he said.
At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.
"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."
He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.
"What—what——" he stammered.
"O, Jim!" she cried.
"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What—how? When? You don't mean——"
"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.
Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he began again:
"You don't mean——"
"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"
He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.
"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"
Her head sank lower in her hands.
"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."
"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"
"I suppose so."
"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You must know! How did this happen?"
Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her breast.
"Answer me!" he demanded.
She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into a sheet.
"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a drive. Coming back—here at the hotel—I fell from the cab—getting out. I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor—notBoussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said it was easy—They said I would be all right in a week.—I thought I was—But I have suffered—O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't, please, think——"
She crashed to the floor at his feet.
Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agonythat lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.
Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.
"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have had rest, and instead——Why didn't you tell me? Why?"
"I was afraid," she said, simply.
"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"
Her words were a fresh stab.
"Yes. I knew how much you wanted——And I was afraid."
"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."
"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time, perhaps——Only now—oh, take me away!"
"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to our own country. Back home."
But at that she shuddered.
"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than Paris. Don't you see? We leftthere happy, expecting——Not there. No, I couldn't bear that."
Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand, brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.
She drew the hand from him.
"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."
"It is—there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk about getting away."
"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we were in Italy."
"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."
"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not anything I have said about it?"
"Not that. I don't know. Something before that——"
"Because you lost me in the crowd?"
"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I—I don't like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."
He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in unfamiliarsurroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.
New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris and different from New York.
"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.
She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.
The next morning they left for Marseilles.
For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel, because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however, was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.
"Let's take it," said Muriel.
She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of hotels.
"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may want to be getting back home when—when all's well again."
"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are willing to pay them a little more thanthey would ask on a long lease," Muriel serenely assured him.
Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at once.
They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she was heartily sorry for Jim.
It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to press once more the question of their return to New York. They were sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their villa, and were looking over the blue bay.
"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"
His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.
"Perhaps," she granted.
On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.
The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at the little tiles,from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers answered or to the making of other prayers.
"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused, "that these people wanted."
Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.
"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."
His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.
"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."
"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in here."
"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze out there."
"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."
Muriel's lips tightened.
"Very well," she said.
She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled to the side overlooking the bay.
Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping in thevieux port, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from the foot of the wall and for miles tothe left, across the Cité Chabas and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point, where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue; the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of land where towers the Château d'If.
She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape—of a landscape of which she had only heard:
"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."
"Muriel!"
It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner serious.
"How did you come here?"
The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her weapons of defence.
"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning after you departed—because I had to see you, whether you wished me or not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come here."
His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her poise.
"How dared you come?" she asked.
"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.
"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."
"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."
"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"
"You must." He came nearer to her.
"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."
"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that you have told him nothing."
She eyed him menacingly.
"Are you so sure of that?"
"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no differenceif you have told him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."
"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider me?—But of course you don't!"
"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have come to say—perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear that I should cause you annoyance——"
"You annoy me now."
"But if you have not told him——Well, what I have to say is my excuse. If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste in saying it."
He moved still nearer.
"I have told him," she said.
"No."
"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes, her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.
"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied. I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening,and the absence from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now—now,ach, I know I love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my punishment—for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still be hopeless."
She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the cold.
"Hopeless?" she repeated.
"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."
She remembered her teaching in the convent school.
"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.
"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact, you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."
She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning the corner of the promenade.
"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything. Wait. There will be anotherchance for us: I must have one word alone with you before—before——"
"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our lives."
The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.
"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.
Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself altogether at the best.
"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been homesick for a long time without knowing."
"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"
"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."
"Then you are returning soon?"
"Three weeks from to-day."
Muriel looked at Jim.
"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.
"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed, didn't we, dear?"
She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She could only nod.
"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not mention it to me when we met to-day."
"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."
She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her were not the sense of her deception of him.
"I forgot," she said.
"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing, my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the Captain for a few minutes with hisdubonais. We have an outsidestateroom on the upper deck of thePrinzess Wilhelmina, and we sail from Genoa."
He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced another surprise.
"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."
This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.
"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."
"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you had to to run right off to dress, you know."
"Why must you go?"
"Those French purchasers again."
"I thought you were through with them."
"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I wrote to them and fixed a price on that."
"You don't mean that you tricked them?"
"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of doing business."
"You didn't say you had written them."
"My dear, when do I bore you with businessaffairs?" Stainton turned to von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening and see that she is not too much depressed."
Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house. Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and the Austrian left without naming his hotel.
When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing, although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company. She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:
"Why are you going away to-morrow?"
Jim was surprised.
"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"
"Then I think you might have told me whenhewasn't here."
"My dear, you gave me no chance."
"And you booked passage back, Jim?"
"Passage home, yes."
Muriel's mouth drooped.
"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.
He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked searchingly into hers.
"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"
"I know, Jim, but I never promised——"
"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."
He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that, within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in France or America.
"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want to leave early. We had better go to bed."
She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent, and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and watched him climb aboard his train.
She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none. As the evening came and darkened, she became more and moreafraid. When nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown into her drawing-room.
"You shouldn't," she said—"you shouldn't have come!"
Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young and handsome.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because of Jim."
"He invited me."
"Yes, I know, but——" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted her fingers.
"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."
"He was queer. His manner—I don't know. Only I had not promised to go home in three weeks."
"No?"
"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"
Von Klausen smiled.
"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"
"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."
"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of business. I know that; surely you should know it better."
"That business wasn't like him."
"It was very—shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself. Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once more!'"
She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa, the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.
The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say good-bye forever.
Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether. This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not have with the sanction of holy authorityhe would not now attempt at all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.
They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.
"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now think of as so right might end by being very wrong."
"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be right."
"Not the ruin of our lives?"
"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your husband's——"
"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow—I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him."
"Nevertheless, you are married to him."
"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when——"
"A divorce is always wrong."
"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the marriage a real one?"
"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of any faith is binding."
"But marriage is a contract."
"Marriage is a sacrament."
They would get so far—always darting down this byway and that of casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom—and then she would come back to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile, and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one in a passion of abnegation.
But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung, with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding interview.
In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.
Muriel started.
"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling bell.
"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.
They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of man.
Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.
"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"
With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to chastity.
To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving how much stronger was her hold on him.
"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her hand.
They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment more and they would go on, forever, apart.
He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer, fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high, curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars. He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled her in his arms.
It was then that Stainton entered the room.
They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one glance. Each turned toward the husband.
Stainton smiled heartily.
"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you. But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."
"When——" began Muriel.
"I got as far as Montélimart when they caught me with one of their blue telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles and landed at Lyons before I heard that—I wasn't wanted."
Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Murielhad been on the verge of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian, nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to court it quite another.
"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored your good wife."
"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"
Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last distinctly to say:
"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."
"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.
"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.
"You have said, sir, that it is late."
"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."
The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.
Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left her.
"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an explanation."
She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.
"Don't touch me!" she cried.
She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely, what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual rôle of fond protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.
Jim stopped short.
"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well, you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to me!"
Tradition always shows us the wronged husband in a towering rage, in the throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to her.
"Won't you sit down?" he asked.
Muriel sat down.
"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"
"About my trip to Lyons?"
"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."
"I have some right, I think, to come home."
"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an 'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"
"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has been in my mind for some time."
"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at the first?"
"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"
"Love affair? There has been no love affair."
Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.
"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"
Muriel was silent.
"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the Spanish dancer——"
Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved, with an upward motion, slowly around her.
"You saw that!"
"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and, naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe what it was."
The wife fought for her self-control and won it.
"Deceit! Deceit even then!"
"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris—and I understood later why you wanted to go back."
He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.
"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy, too, there came the night of the fête. I could tell when von Klausen and you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the boulevards: I separated myself from you."
He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.
"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted togive me a fair chance? You threw me into his arms—or tried to—and you call that a fair chance?"
Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he smiled quietly.
"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger; your love for me—or failing your love, your moral strength—need not assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."
"You coward!"
"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full opportunity. Otherwise the fear—a very small one then—would have continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives, his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."
"You dare to say that!"
He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing its point.
"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went on, "a woman compromises herself withX, at least after she has become a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."
Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a lightning-flash on a darkened sea.
"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she declared.
He raised a steady hand.
"Only a moment more, please," he said.
Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:
"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I took you away from Paris again—the next day, wasn't it?—because you wanted to go,but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I decided to make an end of it. Now"—he spoke as if he were concluding an affair of business—"I have made that end."
"How have you made that end?"
Stainton smiled wanly.
"My dear——" he said.
"Don't call me that."
"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."
"How have you made an end?"
"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."
"You mean that you think—that you dare to think that I—that the Captain and—that we——"
"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know. Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this house——"
"At your invitation!"
"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained alone with you in this room untilafter midnight—I say, given all these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I wanted—the evidence of seeing you in his arms—no man in his senses would for one moment doubt——"
"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.
"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say——"
"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You unclean-minded old man!"
He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.
At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been so long festering in her mind—at first unguessed, then vehemently denied, but always there and always becoming more and more poisonous—the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had achieved maturity.
"Now you listen to me," she commanded.
Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.
Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself.He gripped its back and leaned across the back toward her.
So they stood, facing each other.
"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to hope—actually to hope!—for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young, and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one minute your wife."
Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.
"You were a good imitation," he said.
"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife, anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real, so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house, and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"
"For a time you were a good imitation."
"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things would change, that they were so bad they must change—and they wouldn't."
"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper lip.
"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't you remember, at the very start, how IsaidI wanted to be honest? But somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened, seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie, and so all we did was lies and lies."
"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."
"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to give—not what I gave you—not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you alwaysknewthatyouhad allyouwanted. Well, you had. But did you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but Isinned against Nature. I let myself be married to a man three times my age—and this is Nature's punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger, and because Iwashungry. We had only one thing in common, and that was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"—she flashed it out at him—"what happened to me while you were selling the mine was not an accident!"
This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger and horror struggled for him.
"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean——"
"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go crazy—crazy! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother against my will!"
He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her deed. He could not try to indicatethe injury that she had most likely done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:
"You loved him—then?"
"I didn't love you."
"Did you love him?"
"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But then, when I didthatthing, I only knew what I've told you."
Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself, but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the door.
Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.
"But I love him now," she said.
"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.
"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing—nothing. I was no more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so little, were fit to be my husband."
Stainton half turned.
"And he?" Jim asked.
"He loves me: you only liked having me."
He turned slowly away again.
She thought that she heard him whisper:
"No child!"
"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a baby, a little dead baby.It will never leave me: it's the little ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."
He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face. One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with him. She was right; he was growing old.