Thelittle house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random—amid laughing counter-charges of incompetence—had shot up in fragrant defiance of their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried. A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the veranda-rail.
The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have grown opaque.
“Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
“Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a visitor?” he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
“Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
“Flamel? Again?”
She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over here.”
Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him next Sunday.”
Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do you want to?”
“Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
“Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her tea, she returned the feminine answer—“I thought you did.”
“I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would be rather jolly; let’s go.”
She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his eye down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest awaited his sickle.
He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap.”
She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall be almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house... she’ll let us have it for almost nothing....”
“Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
“‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready next week. The Book Of The Year....”
“‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’
Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready next week. The Book Of The Year....”
He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her beyond the reach of rescue....
He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her—she had become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for himself was likely to know how to turn over other people’s money.
But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife’s happiness that Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are as sore to a husband’s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of opportunity. And somehow—in the windowless inner cell of his consciousness where self-criticism cowered—Glennard’s course seemed justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not knowing what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious instrument of his wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it; and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other. It was what she had always wanted—to be with him—and she had gained her point at last....
He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement lifted his wife’s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity—“Any news?”
“No—none—” he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers lay scattered at his feet—what if she were to see them? He stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it? He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance, decidedly.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked.
He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who couldn’t find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He glanced at his watch, “Isn’t it time to dress?”
She rose with serene reluctance. “It’s a pity to go in. The garden looks so lovely.”
They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, “If we mean to go on the yacht next Sunday,” she suggested, “oughtn’t you to let Mr. Flamel know?”
Glennard’s exasperation deflected suddenly. “Of course I shall let him know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to Flamel.”
The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus leaving one space in which to contemplate one’s folly at arm’s length. Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
Theweek in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The party was a small one—Flamel had few intimate friends—but composed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency. Cleverness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of view that goes with the civilized uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife’s attitude implied the same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more and more into Flamel’s intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done for them by the community.
Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on shore, and his wife’s profile, serenely projected against the changing blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious face seem an accidental collocation of features.
The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs. Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who couldn’t “see” Alexa Glennard’s looks; and Mrs. Touchett’s claims to consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady of the trio which Glennard’s fancy had put to such unflattering uses, was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of theRadiator. Mrs. Dresham was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the role of her husband’s exponent and interpreter; and Dresham’s leisure being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his wife’s attitude committed her to the public celebration of their remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that there were people who tookherfor a remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men—the kind of women who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their questions left unanswered.
Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham’s instinct for the remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled dulness among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability to appreciate her. Under Dresham’s tutelage she had developed into a “thoughtful woman,” who read his leaders in theRadiatorand bought the books he recommended. When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know what Mrs. Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her the wide-margined result of his explorations.
Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn’t spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his annoyance to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there remained a latent irritation against the general futility of words.
His wife’s gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when Mrs. Armiger’s voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated potentialities of language.
“You’ve read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?” he heard her ask; and, in reply to Alexa’s vague interrogation—“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’—it’s the only book people are talking of this week.”
Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “Youhaven’tread them? How very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book’s in the air; one breathes it in like the influenza.”
Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
“Perhaps it hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said, with her unruffled smile.
“Oh,dolet me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down. Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”
Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue.”
“I believe itisa vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,’” said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots—her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care; who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too much like listening at a keyhole.”
“But if she wanted it published?”
“Wanted it? How do we know she did?”
“Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man—whoever he is—with directions that they should be published after his death—”
“I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.
“He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.
“Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could have told him to—”
“Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not love-letters.”
“No—that’s the worst of it; they’re unloved letters,” Mrs. Touchett retorted.
“Then, obviously, she needn’t have written them; whereas the man, poor devil, could hardly help receiving them.”
“Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading them,” said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. “From the way you defend him, I believe you know who he is.”
Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of the woman who is in her husband’s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged his shoulders.
“What have I said to defend him?”
“You called him a poor devil—you pitied him.”
“A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course I pity him.”
“Then youmustknow who he is,” cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant air of penetration.
Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. “No one knows; not even the publishers; so they tell me at least.”
“So they tell you to tell us,” Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther, “But even ifhe’sdead andshe’sdead, somebody must have given the letters to the publishers.”
“A little bird, probably,” said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her deduction.
“A little bird of prey then—a vulture, I should say—” another man interpolated.
“Oh, I’m not with you there,” said Dresham, easily. “Those letters belonged to the public.”
“How can any letters belong to the public that weren’t written to the public?” Mrs. Touchett interposed.
“Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn’s belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of thought. It’s the penalty of greatness—one becomes a monument historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public.”
“I don’t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the sanctuary, as it were.”
“Whowashe?” another voice inquired.
“Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy—the letter-box, the slit in the wall through which the letters passed to posterity....”
“But she never meant them for posterity!”
“A woman shouldn’t write such letters if she doesn’t mean them to be published....”
“She shouldn’t write them to such a man!” Mrs. Touchett scornfully corrected.
“I never keep letters,” said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily, “You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their significance as documents. The personal side doesn’t count where there’s so much else.”
“Oh, we all know you haven’t any principles,” Mrs. Armiger declared; and Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: “I shall never write you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel.”
Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel’s crowd—and what business had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...
Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa’s elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....
Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband by an unexpected request.
“Will you bring me those letters from town?” she asked.
“What letters?” he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
“Mrs. Aubyn’s. The book they were all talking about yesterday.”
Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with deliberation, “I didn’t know you cared about that sort of thing.”
She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a gentle tenacity, “I think it would interest me because I read her life last year.”
“Her life? Where did you get that?”
“Someone lent it to me when it came out—Mr. Flamel, I think.”
His first impulse was to exclaim, “Why the devil do you borrow books of Flamel? I can buy you all you want—” but he felt himself irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. “Flamel always has the newest books going, hasn’t he? You must be careful, by the way, about returning what he lends you. He’s rather crotchety about his library.”
“Oh, I’m always very careful,” she said, with a touch of competence that struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: “Don’t forget the letters.”
Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result of some hint of Flamel’s? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put. The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien forces that his own act had set in motion....
Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles, had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked with conspicuously lettered volumes. “Margaret Aubyn” flashed back at him in endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a counter where the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings. It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He caught up a copy, tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.
In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading....
At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
A knockroused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”
The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs.”
The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
“Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books.
“I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”
“I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug; adding, uncontrollably—“I suppose Flamel was there?”
“No; he left on the yacht this morning.”
An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
“Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.
He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the most astounding exceptions!”
Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
“Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible for that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”
Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. “All about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of greatness.
The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct of self-preservation—sometimes the most perilous that man can exercise—made him awkwardly declare—“Oh, I used to see her at people’s houses, that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I simply can’t see what you can find to interest you in such a book.”
She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”
“I glanced at it—I never read such things.”
“Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”
Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge, and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step ahead.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know; won’t you give me some now?” he suggested.
That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his papers he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a night as this? I’ll join you presently outside.”
But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. “I want to look at my book,” she said, taking up the first volume of the “Letters.”
Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. “I’m going to shut the door; I want to be quiet,” he explained from the threshold; and she nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.
He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume in her hand? The door did not shut her out—he saw her distinctly, felt her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.
The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife’s character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects.
To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to dine. The only man in the club was Flamel.
Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as a shield against his wife’s scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.
He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter’s ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn’s name, conspicuously displayed above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.
“We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his watch.
“Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something—”
Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he feared.
The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else’s suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.
Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table. He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like that...?
Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right—itislike listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”
Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another generation the book will be a classic.”
“Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic. It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephendidknow her—”
“Did he?” came from Flamel.
“He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him feel dreadfully... he wouldn’t read it... he didn’t want me to read it. I didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than a stranger’s.”
“Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as he does....”
Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel’s presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against the perpetual criticism of his wife’s belief in him....
The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing, declared the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel’s verdict might be questioned, Dresham’s at least represented the impartial view of the man of letters. As to Alexa’s words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the “nice” woman on a question already decided for her by other “nice” women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by the publication of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters would have betrayed her secrets without a scruple.
The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel, saying, cheerfully—and yet he could have sworn they were the last words he meant to utter!—“Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport you must come out and spend a few days with us—mustn’t he, Alexa?”
Glennardhad, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house—but in this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters” confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a personal guise.
Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who, scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved the American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares. Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity? Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex, more feminine—if he could have counted on her imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness—but he was sure of neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her. Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.
Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a parlour-maid to their small establishment.
Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing on Glennard’s breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters. It happened to be the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the table at his wife, who had come down before him and had probably laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book was still selling far beyond the publisher’s previsions. He put the check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife.
On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it, pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act. It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his friend anew.
When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa’s drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel, for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger’s conversation like the ejaculations of a startled aviary.
She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife, who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the men.
“Oh, go on, go on,” young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger met Glennard’s inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn’t see what there was to laugh at. “I’m sure I feel more like crying. I don’t know what I should have done if Alexa hadn’t been home to give me a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds—yes, another, dear, please—” and as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on the selection of a second lump of sugar, “Why, I’ve just come from the reading, you know—the reading at the Waldorf.”
“I haven’t been in town long enough to know anything,” said Glennard, taking the cup his wife handed him. “Who has been reading what?”
“That lovely girl from the South—Georgie—Georgie what’s her name—Mrs. Dresham’s protegee—unless she’syours, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big ball-room waspacked, and all the women were crying like idiots—it was the most harrowing thing I ever heard—”
“Whatdidyou hear?” Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: “Won’t you have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot toast, please.” Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely amazement.
“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’—didn’t you know about it? The girl read them so beautifully that it was quite horrible—I should have fainted if there’d been a man near enough to carry me out.”
Hartly’s glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, “How like you women to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the blatant publicity of the readings!”
Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal. “Itwashorrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to refuse to take any tickets—even if it was for a charity.”
“Oh,” her hostess murmured, indifferently, “with me charity begins at home. I can’t afford emotional luxuries.”
“A charity? A charity?” Hartly exulted. “I hadn’t seized the full beauty of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters at the Waldorf before five hundred people for a charity!Whatcharity, dear Mrs. Armiger?”
“Why, the Home for Friendless Women—”
“It was well chosen,” Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in the sofa-cushions.
When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea, turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. “Who asked you to take a ticket for that reading?”
“I don’t know, really—Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up.”
“It’s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she’s capable of! It’s loathsome—it’s monstrous—”
His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, “I thought so too. It was for that reason I didn’t go. But you must remember that very few people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do—”
Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. “As I do?” he repeated.
“I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different—”
Glennard gave her a startled look. “Different? Why different?”
“Since you were her friend—”
“Her friend!” He stood up impatiently. “You speak as if she had had only one—the most famous woman of her day!” He moved vaguely about the room, bending down to look at some books on the table. “I hope,” he added, “you didn’t give that as a reason, by the way?”
“A reason?”
“For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed the hand on the trigger.
“I seem,” she said from the threshold, “to have done both in giving my reason to you.”
The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett, who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies’ draperies, followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the discussion of the “Aubyn Letters” and Glennard, hearing his wife questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the “Letters” were concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had organized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself—for he was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife’s glance struck him cold.
She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel’s side, and it appeared to Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard almost cynical—it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa should know too.
He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through his veins? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife’s scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no longer—she would despise him. But this lent a new insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his wife’s indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him....
When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.