Part 29

I mean to go abroad, very secretly, after the sale of certain property and chattels shall have put me in possession of the needed funds. It will be a flight--and a flight from more than you are yet aware of. If we meet abroad--say in Paris--I may even stoop to discuss with you that question of a divorce. It is horrible for me to write these words. It is sin, and I feel the stab of it. But surely Herbert deserves to be rid of me, and perhaps he will come in time to value his freedom. I should want him to have the right of marrying again. Would not that be a possible arrangement? I know almost nothing of the law on these points.

It does not now seem conceivable that I should ever become your wife after I had ceased to be his. I have had enough of marriage without love. But if you should prevail with me, it would be only because of your great wealth, and the ease and distinction that are now slipping away from me. You see I am hideously candid; I don't mince matters ... where would be the use?

Do not answer this, but destroy it immediately. In regard to the last request, I count with perfect confidence upon your honor. Were it not that I did so, I should never send you this imprudent, daring, perilous scrawl.

Do not come to me until I send for you. I cannot tell how long that will be.

C. H.

Before Mrs. Lee refolded the letter which contained these words, she had read them through certainly five successive times.

Not until then had she made up her mind just what to do. She would put the letter in an envelope, and direct this, very legibly, to Herbert Hollister. Her determination was as fixed as fate....

When her guests had all departed, on the afternoon of this same day, Claire slowly walked the spacious drawing-rooms for at least twenty minutes, with her eyes bent upon the floor.

She felt literally hunted down. The end had come; the clock had struck twelve, and her fineries were rags, her coach-and-four was a pumpkin and mice. She had carried it off well until the very last; she was sure of this, and the surety gave her, even now, a bitter pleasure. She had no doubt that the coming of her mother, with imperative demands of support and countenance, would mean a return of all the old taunts and gibes. If Claire's wealthful life of to-day had been destined to continue, this prospect would have opened a less dreary vista; as it was, she foresaw only a dropping back into the former ruts and sloughs of maternal acrimony and intolerance. The history of her past would in a manner repeat itself. There would be poverty again, or something closely akin to it; there would be the mother's unpardoning disapprobation of her child's ill-favored lot. For one marked difference, Herbert would be present, as a fresh, assertive force. And what a miserably adverse force it must prove! To exist with him would be hard enough, now, under any circumstances. But if he felt perpetually the shadow and weight of this second gloomy and heavy personality, what new hostile traits might not his depression, his impatience, his revolt develop?

Claire tried to take a very calm survey of the whole potential consequence. In so doing she regarded the advent of her mother as one factor that consorted with other untoward agencies; the central knot of the tangle would be wrought of several tough and stubborn threads. There could be no unraveling it. 'But the knot could be cut,' she thought, silently continuing her metaphor, as she paced the stately rooms.

It sent a thrill of actual terror to her when she reflected _how_ the knot could be cut. To the feet that have set their tread on slippery ways, evil can do much downward work by a gentle push. Claire felt herself lapsing, now....

What if she wrote to Stuart Goldwin a letter very different from the one she had already written him, and which was then hid under the fleecy laces that clad her bosom? What if she told him that she must fly from it all?--the love that she had outraged by cold hypocrisy, the keen if mute reproaches that would be punishment and torture alike, the thrusts and innuendoes from a tongue whose venom had poisoned her childhood, the tarnish in place of splendor, the dullness in place of brilliance, the obscurity in place of prominence, the service in place of mastery--perhaps even the toil in place of ease?

She tried, in a pitiable way, to rebuff temptation by taking the sole means at hand of ending these desperate reflections. In reality she took the most cogent means of rendering temptation more potent. She tightened its black clutch on her soul; she went upstairs and talked with her mother.

Mrs. Twining had been securely convalescent some time ago. She had passed through a complicated and dangerous illness; she had given Death odds, yet won with him. She was still subject to those attacks of fatigue which are inevitable with one who has proved victor in so grim a wrestle. But she had once more gained a very firm foothold on that solidity which bounds one known side, at least, of the valley of the shadow. She intended, in a physical sense, to live a good many years longer; her freshening vitality was like that of a fire in a forest, which has stretched an arm of flame across a bare space, at the risk of not reaching it, but in the end has caught a mighty supply of woodland fuel.

Claire found her stretched quite luxuriously on a lounge, with a little table beside her, which held the remains of a hearty repast. She had the traditional vast appetite of the recovering invalid. She had devoured enough to have sunk a hearty person of average digestion into abysses of dyspepsia. She had enjoyed her meal very much. It had appeared to her as an earnest of many similar joys.

She promptly began a series of her old characteristic sarcasms and slurs as soon as Claire appeared. Mingled with them was an atmosphere of odious congratulation--a sort of verbal patting on the back--which her daughter found even more baneful than her half-latent sneers. She was thoroughly refreshed; her food (mixed with some admirable claret) had gone straight to the making of bodily repairs. She had never had anything so fine and wholesome in the hospital, though after the patronage of Mrs. Lee she had been supplied with not a few agreeable dainties. The temporary result was that she had become in a great measure her real self.

Claire said very little. She did a large amount of listening. She had never known her mother not to be without a grudge of some sort. It brought back the past with a piercing vividness, now, while she sat and heard. The vision of a pale, refined face, lit by soft, dark-blue eyes, rose before her, and the memory of many a wanton assault, many a surreptitious wound, appealed to her as well. Her father had stood it all so bravely--he had been such a gentleman through it all! _She_ had stood it only with a sturdy, rebellious disapproval through many of the years that preceded his death.

She stood it, now, with a weary tranquillity. When she went away from her mother, these were her parting words:--

"I do not think I shall tell my husband, for some few days, that you are here. There are reasons why I should not. He has some very engrossing matters to occupy him. But you will be perfectly comfortable in the meanwhile. Order what you please. The servants will obey you in every particular. If you should need me, I will come immediately. You have only to send me word. I shall be at home for the rest of to-day, and all through the evening."

Claire went into her own private sitting-room, after that. When she had been there a little while, she had torn up her first letter to Goldwin. When she had been there a little while longer, she had written the second letter. Having finished the last, she promptly dispatched it, by messenger, to Goldwin's private address.

Between the hours of ten and eleven that same evening, the following note from Goldwin was brought to Claire:--

_Friday Night._

In some unaccountable way I have lost the letter which you sent me to-day. I feel in honor bound to tell you of this loss, after a protracted search through my apartments and numerous inquiries and directions at my club. I cannot sufficiently blame myself for not having at once burned it to a crisp. But I thrust it into my pocket after many readings, with the wish to learn each word by heart before it was finally destroyed. Do not feel needlessly worried. I shall do my best to recover it, and even if it should be read by other eyes than yours and mine, the fact of your mere initials being signed to it is an immense safeguard.

S. G.

Claire had grown deathly pale as she finished the perusal of this note. She had prepared herself for a night of wretched unrest, but here was a dagger to murder sleep with even surer poignance.

It was past midnight when she heard Hollister go to his apartments. She fancied that his step was a little unsteady. If this was true, no vinous exhilaration made it so. An excitement of most opposite cause would have explained the altered tread.

A saving hand had interposed between himself and ruin. The chance had been given him of starting again--of meeting all the fiercest of his creditors, and appeasing them. Instead of utter wreck, he had chiefly to think of retrenchment. Perhaps what Claire believed unsteadiness in his step was a brief pause near her own door. But even if an impulse to tell her the good news may for a moment have risen uppermost, there must have swept over him, promptly and sternly, the recollection of a dark and sundering discovery.

Meanwhile Claire, wondering if the lost letter had, through any baleful chance, drifted into his hands, lay pierced by that affrighted remorse which a monition of detected guilt will bring the most hardened criminal, and which of necessity strikes with acuter fang the soul of one yet a neophyte in sin.

XXIII.

Hollister passed downstairs the next morning at a little after nine o'clock. He had obtained some sleep, of which he stood in sad need. The cheerful elasticity of his temperament would have placed him, by natural rebound, well in the sunlight of awakened hope and invigorated energy, and after hours of miserable disquiet he would now have felt relieved and peaceful, but for one leaden and insuperable fact. This had no relation whatever with financial turmoils and embarrassments; it concerned Claire, and the desolate difference with which her image now rose before his spirit.

He had told her that they must henceforth be as strangers, but already the deeps of his unselfish love were stirred by a longing, no less illogical than passionate, to make reality of what had once been illusion, and to verify Claire's indifference through some unknown spell of transformation into that warmth which had thus far proved only lifeless counterfeit. Already Hollister found within him a spacious capacity of pardon toward his wife. Already he had begun to exonerate, to make allowances; and more than all, he had already told himself that to live on without her love would be a hundredfold better than to part with her companionship. Here cropped out the old vein of complaisance and conciliation which had run through his earlier collegiate life, and which later experiences amid all sorts of risk and rivalry had never wholly obscured. It had been his power to concede, his amiable pliancy, wed with a peculiar intellectual shrewdness, that had gone far toward the accomplishment of his phenomenal successes. The man who makes the best of things by instinct is very apt to have the best of things made for him by fortune.

His inalienable love for Claire caused him to regard her long hypocrisy with fondly lenient eyes. The wrong done himself rapidly took a secondary place; it was nearly always thus with Hollister, except in those grosser cases of wanton injury from his own sex; and now, when it became a matter between his heart and the woman that heart devotedly loved, he was ready to forego a most liberal share of the usual human egotism.

He had a hard day before him. Exertion, diplomacy, astuteness, concentration, all were needed. He was still to fall, but no longer with a headlong plunge. He would now fall on his feet, as it were, but it required a certain agile flexibility to make the descent a graceful one. At any other time he would promptly have left the house after breakfasting. As it was, he waited for Claire. She appeared sooner than he had expected her. She had drank her coffee upstairs. He saw her figure, clad in a morning robe of pale-tinted cachemire, enter the front drawing-room. He had lighted a cigarette, and was standing beside the hearth, where a riotous fire flung merry crimson challenge to the sharp weather outside. He at once threw away his cigarette, and went forward to meet her.

She perceived him when he had gained the centre of the second drawing-room. She stood perfectly still, awaiting his approach. There was more than a chill misgiving at her heart lest some inimical hand had sent him her own fatal letter. She did not know how she would act in case he immediately accused her. Hours of sleepless unrest had not supplied her with a single defensive plea.

The new serenity on Hollister's face struck her at a glance. It gave her a sudden relief; it was like a reprieve just before execution. When he said "good morning" she answered him with the same words. She wondered if he had already noticed her pallor, or that a dark line lay under either eye. Her dressing-mirror had told her of these changes.... Might he not guess at sight the guilty agony that she had been enduring?

Her altered looks were not lost upon him. They were a new intercession in her behalf. "I have good news for you," he said, almost tenderly. He went toward the richly-draped mantel just opposite where she stood, and leaned one arm along its edge. He purposely let his eye wander a little, so that she would suspect in him no intentness of scrutiny.

"Good news?" she repeated, softly.

"Yes. I thought it was all up with me, yesterday. But a friend of yours has placed funds at my disposal which will enable me, with wise management, to weather the worst of the storm. He dropped into my office at a very critical moment. He used the nicest delicacy and tact. Before I actually realized that he was offering me very substantial aid, he had done so. And yet, with all his graceful method, he didn't beat about the bush. He was frankly straightforward. He said just why he wished to see my affairs righted--or at least creditably mended. That reason was his deep respect and sincere admiration for you. He told me, with a winning mixture of humor and seriousness, that you represented for him the one great repentance of his bachelorhood. And when I looked at his world-worn sort of face and his decidedly gray locks, and began to wonder whether he meant his amazing proposition in any unpleasant sense, he assured me that he had always seen in you, the daughter whom he had possibly missed being the father of.... Of course you now recognize his portrait; or have I not drawn it clearly enough?"

"Do you mean Beverley Thurston?" asked Claire.

"Yes. You see, now, how generous an act of friendship he performed."

"Yes, I see," Claire murmured.

"The funds he proffered--and which I accepted--are by no means all his own. His influence is so great, his standing is so secure, that he has actually been able to associate four well-known capitalists (one of whom, by the way, chanced to be my personal friend) in carrying out this wonderfully benevolent work." Here Hollister paused for a considerable space. "Of course," he at length went on, "I shall not do more than just escape a positive deadlock. The next few years must be full of cautious living and thinking. I have accepted the burden of a huge debt; but I believe firmly in my power to pay it off. And I have learned a lesson that I shall always profit by. They shall never call me a Wall Street king again. I have seen my last of big ventures. I shall want, if I can manage hereafter when every penny of liabilities shall be settled, to drift slowly but safely into a steady banking channel. I shall have friends enough left on the Street; I shan't have lost caste; I shall still hold my own. At least twenty good men have gone clean down in this flurry, without a chance of ever picking themselves up again. But I am going to pick myself up--that is, thanks to the helping hand of your precious elderly friend; for I could never have done it alone."

Claire knew not what to answer. She was thinking of the sweet, deceitful kindliness that Thurston had employed. She was thinking how little she deserved his timely and inestimable support. She was asking herself whether he would not have shrunk in sorrowful contempt from all such splendid almsgiving if he had known the real truth concerning her recent mad and sinister act.

While she was trying to shape some sort of adequate reply, the entrance of a servant rendered this unnecessary. The man handed Hollister a letter, bowed, and departed.

Claire's heart instantly began to beat hard and fast. A mist obscured her gaze while she watched Hollister tear open the envelope and unfold its contents. There was a sofa quite near; she sank into it; she felt dizzy enough to close her eyes. But she did not. She looked straight at her husband, and saw him begin a perusal of the unfolded sheet. Was it her letter to Goldwin? Why should she even fancy this? Were there not hundreds of other sources whence a letter might come to Herbert?

In a very little while she saw her husband grow exceedingly pale. He left off reading; he looked at her, and said: "Did you write this?" He held the paper out toward her as he spoke.

Claire rose, crossed the room, and cast her eyes over the extended page.

"Yes, it is mine," she answered him.

The voice did not seem his own in which he presently said: "I must read it. I must read it with my full attention. If I leave you for a little while, will you remain here until I return?"

"Yes," she said.

"You promise this?"

"I promise--yes."

Without another word to her, he walked back into the dining-room. Perhaps twenty good minutes passed before he returned. Claire had meanwhile nerved herself to meet something terrible. She had no idea what her husband's wrath would be like, but she felt that there might almost be death in it.

Hollister had hardly begun to address her before she perceived that he did not reveal a single trace of wrath. His eyes were much brighter than usual; he had not a vestige of color; his voice was low and of an increased unfamiliarity, but it did not contain the slightest sign of indignation.

She had seated herself on the sofa again, and he now came very close to her, standing while he spoke. He held the letter in his hand, which trembled a little.

"You wrote this to Goldwin, and it has been lost by him. Some one else has found it, and sent it to me. The handwriting on the envelope is not his."

Claire looked at him in blank amazement. It did not seem to her that he could possibly be the man whom she had thus far known as Herbert Hollister. He appeared radically and utterly changed. She could not understand just where the change lay, or in what it consisted. She was too bewildered to analyze it or in any way draw conclusions from it. She was simply pierced with a pungent sense of its existence.

"He lost it," she said. "He wrote me that he had lost it. You are right in thinking that some one else has sent it to you."

She wondered what he would now say. She forgot even to feel shame in his presence. She was asking herself what had so completely altered him. Why was he neither angry nor reproachful? The very expression of his features looked strangely unusual. It was almost as if the spirit of some new man had entered into his body.

"Whoever has sent this," he soon said, "is your enemy, and wishes you great harm. But thank God I have it!" He crushed the paper in his hand, immediately afterward, and thrust it within his pocket. Claire rose from the sofa. Her hands hung at either side, in a helpless way. Her eyes were still fastened upon his face.

"Are you acting a part?" she asked, with a sort of weary desperation. "I realize that I have done a horrible thing. But tell me at once what course you mean to take. If I am to leave your house, and never to be noticed by you again, order me to go, and I will go. The letter shows you that I care nothing for that man. I don't make excuses; I have none to make. But I am not an adulteress even in thought. Remember what I say. My sin, dark as it is, has not that one hideous element. I wanted to desert you--to go abroad--you read the whole story in the letter. You have only to speak the word, and you shall have looked on me for the last time.... It is your silence that tortures me.... Why are you silent? Here I stand before you, without a shadow of right to defend myself, and yet you force from me a certain kind of miserable defense, because you will not either rebuke or denounce me."

He had been looking at her very steadily. He now caught one of her hands in both his own.

"Claire," he said, "I have only one wish--one thought: to save you."

"Save me?" she repeated.

He went on speaking with great speed. His eyes were fixed on her own, and they were filled with a light that was rich and sweet. She had never known him to be like this before; he was just as tender as of old, but beneath his tenderness there was a strength, a decision, a virile assertion, that gave him a new, startling personality.

"Yes," he said, "to save you. There is no great mischief done, as it is. I think some woman sent me your letter. It is just what some envious or spiteful woman would do. But I have it, and can destroy it. You ask me what course I mean to take. You ask me whether I shall bid you to leave my house. My only answer, Claire, is this: if you have no love for me, then I have a very great love for you. I think you knew this long ago. I am your friend, poor child--not only your husband, but your friend. You shan't go wrong while I have the brain and the nerve to stand between you and folly. Other men might take another course. I don't care. You are pure, still; I am certain of it, and you shall remain pure. You are my wife; I will protect you; it's my duty to protect you. You have never loved me; you married me without a spark of love. But I gave you as large a love as man ever gave to woman. It's in my heart still. It can never die. If it were not so large and so true it would not seek to guard and shield you now. But it does--it must.... Claire, Claire, you have been terribly foolish! A little more, and I could have done nothing to save you. A little more, and I must have cast you off. But as it is, I can and will plant myself between you and disgrace!"

He had been holding her hand all through the utterance of these words. But now he released it, and slightly withdrew from her.

She advanced toward him. There was a look of absolute awe on her face. She recognized how much her own blindness had been hiding from her. His very stature seemed to have risen. His tolerance appealed to her with sublimity. It flashed through her mind: 'What other man would have acted as he has done?'

In a few brief moments she knew him as the noble and high being he really was. The tears besieged her eyes. The enormity of the wrong she had done him horrified her. She stood quivering in his presence. The impulse assailed her literally to kneel before him. She grasped his arm; her dry, tearless eyes searched his pale face with a madness of contrition in their look.