Part 16

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 when _he_ wasn'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 more afraid. 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 authority he 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.

XIX

HUSBAND AND WIFE

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; Muriel had 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 to give 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 with X, 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 until after 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 I _said_ I 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 always _knew_ that _you_ had all _you_ wanted. 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 I sinned 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 I _was_ hungry. 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----"