XXI
Helen gathered the wraps she had thrown on the couch and started to leave the room. When she stood at the door her husband said:
“Are you going upstairs?”
“Yes; I’m tired,” she replied, without looking round. She stood, however, as if expecting him to speak again.
“You—you won’t wait till the returns come in?”
She turned slightly. “I’ll come down again,” she replied, glancing at him for an instant.
Briggs walked toward her. “We’ve been such strangers in the past few weeks,” he said, gently, “that I should think you might take advantage of this chance for a chat.”
Helen dropped her wraps on a chair. “I will stay if you wish.”
“If I wish!” he repeated, with quiet bitterness. “I thought perhaps you’d like to stay.You do everything nowadays with the air of a martyr, Helen.”
“I sha’n’t trouble you much longer, Douglas,” she said, lowering her eyes.
“Then there is no way of our coming to an understanding?”
She kept her eyes from him. “We understand each other very well now, I think.”
“Now!” he repeated. Helen started to take up the wraps again. He held out his hand. “Wait a minute. I didn’t detain you to pick a quarrel. I wanted to make one last appeal to you.”
“For what?” she asked.
“I can’t stand living like this any longer,” he went on, desperately, throwing off all self-restraint. “I can’t stand the thought of going back to Washington without you. I’m lonely. I’ve been lonely for months. You know that as well as I do.”
She hesitated, trying to control herself. Then she said, without a trace of feeling in her voice: “You have your work. You have as much as I have.”
“You treat me as if you had no regard, no respect, for me. You make me feel like a criminal.I thought when I threw that man West over——”
She looked him straight in the face. “But why did you do it? Not because he was what you knew him to be, but because he had insulted me. That’s what I can’t forget. All these years you knew what he was.”
They stood looking at each other. “And I was just as bad as he was,” he said, in a low voice. “You mean that, don’t you?”
Helen turned away. “I didn’t say that.”
“And is there nothing I can do to make things right between us?”
“Perhaps, in time, I shall feel different, Douglas.”
He smiled bitterly. “I hope that God isn’t as merciless as good women are!” he said.
She showed resentment at once. “I am not merciless, but I can’t go back to that place to be pointed at, as I should be—to have my name connected with that man’s—” Her voice broke.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean that I have read the article that was published this morning,” she went on, more calmly. “I heard some people at the hotel speak of it while we were waiting to go out into thedining-room. They thought I couldn’t hear them, but I did hear—every word. They laughed, and they said there was a good deal more behind it than the paper said. I knew what that meant. When they went out I looked at the paper on a file. And yet you can ask me to go back to Washington after that?” she said, with reproach and shame in her voice.
Briggs grew pale. “I hoped you might not hear of it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Helen.”
She hesitated, but she resolutely kept her face turned from him. Then she gathered her wraps again and left the room.
For a few moments after she disappeared Douglas Briggs stood motionless. Then he sank into the seat beside the desk. Until now he had believed that a reconciliation with his wife was sure to come in time. Now the situation seemed hopeless. He had lost her. This last humiliation made it impossible for her ever to respect him again. In spite of his resolutions of the past few months, he felt that he deserved his punishment. He had not only blighted his own happiness, he had ruined hers. That was the cruelest pain of all. Now he felt, with a bitterness deeper than he had ever known, that without her love, withouther sympathy and companionship, life had nothing that could give him satisfaction. Why should he go on working? Why not give up his ambitions and his aspirations? They had brought him only disappointment and suffering.