Chapter 13

Marian pushed herself closer against him and presently said dreamily: “So much happiness, such utter happiness which no one, nothing can take away. I wonder when and how the first storm will come?”

“It needn’t come at all--not for a long, long time. And when it does--we can weather it, don’t you think?”

* * * * *

During the next two months they were together more than they had been in the spring. He imposed day office hours upon himself and did no work in the evenings except the correcting of editorial proofs which he had sent to him at the house, at the theatre, or at whatever restaurant they were dining. And at midnight he called up the office on the telephone and talked with Mr. King or Mr. Vroom about the news in hand and the programme for presenting it in the next morning’s paper.

But as “people”--meaning Marian’s friends--returned to town, they fell into the former routine. It was in part his doing, in part hers. He was now thirty-seven years old and his mind, always of a serious cast, was intolerant of trifles and triflers.

Marian’s range of interests was shallower but much wider than his. Her beauty, her cleverness, her tact caused her to be sought. She invited many to their house and accepted more and more invitations. At first she never went without him. But he was sometimes compelled by his work to send her alone. He rarely went except for her sake--because he thought going about amused her. And he was glad and relieved when she began to go without him, instead of spending the evenings in solitude.

“There is no reason why you should punish yourself and punish me because you had the ill luck to marry a working-man,” he said. “It cannot be agreeable to sit here all by yourself evening after evening. And it depresses me when I am at the office at night to think of you as lonely. It makes me happier in my work--my pleasure, you know--to think of you enjoying yourself.”

“But aren’t you afraid that some one will steal me?” she asked, laughingly.

“Not I.” He was smiling proudly at her. “If you could be stolen, if you could be happier anywhere than with me, you have only to let me into the plot.”

“There are some women who would not like that.”

“And there are men who wouldn’t feel as I do. But you and I, we belong to a class all by ourselves, don’t we?”

Apparently they were as devoted each to the other as ever. But each now sought a separate happiness--he perforce in his work, she perforce in the only way left open to her. When they were together, which meant several hours every day and usually one whole day in the week, they were at once seemingly absorbed each in the other with all the rest as background. But none the less, they were leading separate lives, with separate interests, separate tastes, separate modes of thinking. The “bourgeois” life which they had planned--both standing behind the counter and both adding up the results of the day’s business after they had put up the shutters, two as one in all the interests of life--became a dead and forgotten dream.

XXII.

THE SHENSTONE EPISODE.

On the way to or from the opera or a party, she would peep in on him, watching the back of his head as he bent over his desk or read away at some dull-looking book, wishing that he would feel her presence and turn with that smile which was always hers from him, yet fearing to make a sound and compel his attention.

“At times I think,” she said one day when he caught her in his arms on a sudden impulse and kissed her, “that the reason you don’t try to rule me is because you don’t care enough.”

“That’s precisely it.” He was smoothing her eyebrows with his forefinger. “I don’t care enough about ruling. I don’t care enough for the sort of love that responds to ‘must.’”

“But a woman likes to have ‘must’ said to her sometimes.”

“Does she? Do you? Well--I’ll say ‘must’ to you. You must love me freely and voluntarily, or not at all. You must do as you please.”

“But don’t you see that that drives me from you often, keeps us apart in many ways. Now if you compelled me to think as you do, to like what you like--”

“But I couldn’t. Then you would no longer be _you_. And I like you so well just as you are that I would not change an idea in your head.”

Marian sighed and went away to her dinner party. She felt that she was in danger. “Not of falling in love with some other man,” she thought, “for that’s impossible. But if a man were to come along who invited me to be interested in his work, to keep him at whatever he was doing, I’d accept and that would lead on and on--where?”

She soon had an opportunity to answer that question. Howard went away to Washington to assist the party leaders in putting through a difficult tariff-reform bill which all the protected interests were fighting. He expected to be gone a week; but week after week passed and he was still at the capital, directing the paper by telegraph and sending Marian hurried notes postponing his return. She was going about daily, early and late, her life vacant, her mind restlessly seeking occupation, interest.

After he had been gone three weeks she found herself at dinner at Mrs. Provost’s next to a tall, fair-haired athletic young man of about her own age. Something in his expression--perhaps the amused way in which he studied the faces of the others--attracted her to him. She glanced over at his card. It read “Mr. Shenstone.”

“It doesn’t add much to your information, does it?” he smiled, as he caught her glance rising from the card.

“Nothing,” she confessed candidly. “I never heard of you before.”

“And yet I’ve been splashing about, trying to attract attention to myself, for twelve years.”

“Perhaps not in this particular pond.”

“No, that is true.”

“I was wondering what you do--lawyer, doctor, journalist, business man or what.

“And what did you conclude?”

“I concluded that you did nothing.”

“You are right. But I try--I paint.”

“Portraits?”

“Yes.”

“That explains your way of looking at people. Only, you’ll get no customers if you paint them as you see them.”

“I only see what they see when they look in the mirror.”

“Yes, but you see it impartial--or rather, I should say, cynically.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For calling me cynical. The two keenest pleasures a man can attain are for a woman to call him a cynic and for a woman to call him a devil with the women.”

“Are you a ‘devil with the women’?”

“Not I--not any more than I am a cynic. But let us talk about you--I am about exhausted as a topic of conversation. Why do you look so discontented?”

“Because I have nothing to occupy my mind.”

“No children?”

“None--and no dogs.”

“No husband?”

“Husbands are busy.”

“So you are the typical American woman--the American instinct for doing, the universal woman’s instinct for sunshine and laziness; the husband absorbed in his business or profession with his domestic life as an incident; the wife--like you.”

“That is right, and wrong--nearer right than wrong, a little unjust to the husband.”

“Oh, it’s probably your fault that you are not absorbed in his business or profession. It ought to be as much yours as his. What does he do?”

“He edits a newspaper.”

“Oh, he’s _the_ Mr. Howard. A very interesting, a very remarkable man.”

Marian was delighted by this appreciation. She talked with Shenstone again after dinner and was pleased that he was to be in the same box with her at the opera the next night. He had spent much of his time on the other side of the Atlantic. He was unusually well educated for an artist’s, and his mind was not developed in one direction only. Like Marian, his point of view was artistic and emotional. Like her he had a reverence for tradition, a deference to caste--the latter not offensive for the same reason that hers was not, because good birth and good breeding made him of the “high caste” and not a cringer with his eyes craned upward. It seemed in him, as in her, a sort of self-respect.

Marian showed a candid liking for his society and he was quick to take advantage of it. For a month they saw more and more each of the other, she discreet without deliberation and he discreet with deliberation. He talked to her of his work, of his ambition. He showed her himself without egotism. He made an impression upon her so distinct and so favourable that she admitted to herself that he was the most fascinating man--except one--whom she had ever met.

When Howard at last returned, defeated by corruption within his own party and for the time disgusted with politics, she at once had Shenstone at the house to dine. “What do you think of Mr. Shenstone?” she asked when they were alone.

“No wonder you’re enthusiastic about him. As he talked to me, I could hardly keep from laughing. It was your own views, almost your own words. He has the look of a great man. I think he will ‘arrive,’ as they say in the Bowery.”

Howard went out of his way to be agreeable to Shenstone, often inviting him to the house and giving him a commission to paint Marian. For the rest of the winter Shenstone was constantly in Marian’s company; so constantly that they were gossiped about, and all the women who were unpleasantly discussed “for cause” conspired to throw them together as much as possible.

One evening in the very end of the winter, Howard called to Marian from his dressing room: “Why, lady, Shenstone’s gone, hasn’t he? I’ve just read a note from him.”

There was a pause before Marian answered in a constrained voice: “Yes, he sailed to-day.”

Howard was tying his bow. He paused at the curious tone, then smiled mysteriously to himself. He put on his waistcoat and coat and knocked on the half-open door. “May I come in?” he asked.

“Yes--I’m waiting for dinner to be announced.”

She was sitting before the fire, very beautiful in her evening gown. She seemed not to observe that he had entered but stared on into the flames. He stood beside her, looking down at her with the half mocking, half tender smile. Presently he sat upon the arm of her chair and took one of her hands. “Poor, friendless, beautiful lady,” he said softly.

She glanced up quickly, her cheeks flaming but her eyes clear and frank. “Why do you say that?” she asked in the tone of one who knows why.

“Other women will not be her friends because they are jealous of her, and as for the men--how can a man be really a friend to a woman, a fascinating, sympathetic woman?”

Marian hid her face against the lapel of his coat. “He told me,” she whispered, “and then he went away.”

“He always does tell her. But----”

“But--what?”

“She doesn’t always send him away. Poor fellow! Still, he went into it with his eyes open.”

“He was very nice. He told it in a roundabout way. And I wasn’t a bit afraid that he’d--he’d--you know. But I got to thinking about how I’d feel if he did--did touch me. And it made me--nervous.”

There was a long pause, then she went on: “I wonder how you’d feel about touching another woman?”

“I? Dear me, I wonder! I never thought. You see I’m such a domestic, unattractive creature----”

“Don’t laugh at me, please,” she pleaded.

“I’m not laughing. Underneath, I’m thinking--thinking what I would do if I met you and lost you. It’s very black on the Atlantic for one pair of eyes to-night.”

“And the worst of it is,” she said, “that my vanity is flattered and I’m not really sorry for him.”

“Rather proud of her conquest, is she?”

“Yes, it pleased me to have him care.”

“She likes to think that he’ll carry his broken heart to the grave, does she?”

“Yes. Isn’t it shameful?”

“Shameful? Shameless. I have always held that even the best woman dearly loves to ruin a man. It’s such a triumph. And the more she loves him, the more she’d like to ruin him--that is, if ruin came solely through love for her and didn’t involve her.”

“But I would not want to ruin you.”

“If that seemed to be the supreme test of my love for you--are you sure? I’m not. There’s Thomas, knocking to announce dinner.”

The Shenstone incident was apparently closed. Marian, a most attractive woman of thirty, absorbed in a social life that demanded all her physical and mental energy as well as all of her time, did not long vividly remember him. But he had given her a standard by which she unconsciously measured her husband. She contrasted the life he had promised her, the life Shenstone reminded her of, with the life that was--so material, so suspiciously physical when it professed to be loving, so suspiciously chill when it professed to be friendly. She thrust aside these thoughts as disloyal and false. But they persisted in returning.

If she had been less appreciative of Howard’s intellect, less fascinated by the charm of his personality, she would soon have become one of the “misunderstood” women in search of “consolation.” Instead, she turned her mind in the direction natural to her character--social ambition.

XXIII.

EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING.

In such a city as New York, to be deliberately careful about money is the only way to keep within one’s income, whether it be vast or small. There are temptations to buy at the end of every glance of the eye. The merchants are crafty in producing new and insidious allurements, in creating new and expensive tastes. But these might be resisted were it not that the habits of all one’s associates are constantly and all but irresistibly stimulating the faculty of imitation.

Neither Howard nor Marian had been brought up to be watchful about money. Both had been accustomed to having their wants supplied. And now that they had a household and a growing income, it was a matter of course that their expenditures should steadily expand. Before three years had passed they were spending more than double the sum which at the outset they had fixed upon as their limit. A merely decent and self-respecting return of the hospitalities they accepted, a carriage and pair and two saddle horses and the servants to look after them--these items accounted for the increase. They looked upon this as really necessary expenditure and soon would have found that curtailment involved genuine deprivation. From the very beginning each step in expansion made the next logical and inevitable, made the plea of necessity seem valid.

An aunt of Marian’s died, leaving her a “small” house--worth perhaps a quarter of a million--near the Avenue in Sixty-fifth Street, and eighty thousand in cash. About the same time Stokely told Howard of a fine speculative opportunity in certain copper properties. Howard hesitated. He knew that the way of speculation was the way of bondage for his newspaper and for him. But this particular adventure seemed harmless and he yielded. The money was invested and within a few months was producing an income of fifteen thousand a year which promised to be steady. Howard’s ownership of stock in the paper increased; and as the profits advanced swiftly with its swift growth in its illustrated form, his own income was nearly fifty thousand a year. They were growing very rich. There was no longer the slightest anxiety as to money in his mind.

“You know the great dread I had in marrying,” he said to her one day, “was lest I should make myself and you dependents, should some day sacrifice my freedom to my fear of losing--happiness.”

“Yes, and very foolish you were, not to have more confidence in yourself and in me.”

“Perhaps. But what I am thinking is that you have brought me luck. I am free, beyond anybody’s reach. I could quit the paper to-morrow and we should hardly have to change our style of living even if I did not get something else to do.”

“Style of living--” in that phrase lay the key to the change that was swiftly going on in Howard’s mind and mental attitude. It is not easy for a man with environment wholly in his favour to keep his point of view correct, to keep his horizon wide and clear, his sense of proportion just. It is next to impossible for him to do so when his environment opposes.

The man who looks out from misery and squalor upon misery and squalor is, if he thinks at all, naturally an anarchist. To him the established order shows only injustice and persistence of injustice. The man who looks out from luxury and ease and well-being upon luxury and ease and well-being is forced by the very limitations of the human mind to an over-reverence for the established order. He is unreasonably suspicious of anything that threatens change. “When I’m comfortable all’s well in the world; change might bring discomfort to me.” And he flatters himself that he is a “conservative.”

Howard had had a long training at the correct standpoint and in right thinking. But the influences were there, were at work, were destroying his devotion to a social and political ideal wholly alien to the life he was now living under the leading of his wife. He did not blame her, indeed he could not justly have blamed her, for his falling away from what he knew were correct principles for him. While she had brought him into this environment, while at first it was in large part for her that he gave so much time and thought to the accumulation of wealth, soon love of luxury, dependence upon a train of servants, fondness for the great extravagances to which New York tempts the rich and those living near the rich, became stronger in him than it was in her. And through the inevitable reaction of environment upon the man, the central point in his valuation of men and women tended to shift from the fundamentals, mind and character, to the surface qualities--dress and style and manners and refinement, and even dress.

This process of demoralisation was well advanced when they moved from the apartment. After four years of “expansion” there, they had begun to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real New York “establishment.”

“Isn’t this just the house for us?” she said. “I hate huge, big houses. Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now this house is just big enough. You don’t know how wonderful it would be.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” he laughed, “and you must try it.” He was as enthusiastic as she.

In the late autumn the house was ready; and there was not a more artistic interior in New York. It was not so much the result of great expense as of intelligence and taste. It was an expression of an individuality--a revelation of a woman’s beautiful mind, inspired by love.

“At last I have something to interest, to occupy me,” she said. “This is our very own, through and through our own. It will be such a pleasure to me to keep it always like this.”

“You--degenerated into a household drudge,” he mocked. “Why, you used to laugh at me when I held up a wife who was a good housekeeper as one of my ideals.”

“Did I?” she answered. “Well, as you would say, see what I’ve come to through living with--a member of the working-classes.”

Howard’s own particular part of this house included a library with a small study next to it. In the study was a most attractive table with plenty of room to spread about books and papers, a huge divan in the corner and a fire-place near by. He found himself doing more and more of his work at home. There were not so many interruptions as at the office, the beauty of the surroundings, the consciousness that “she” was not far away--all combined to keep him at home and to enable him to do more and better work there.

He was justly and greatly proud of her achievement; and where he used to be more regretful than he admitted even to himself when they had guests, he was now glad to see others about, admiring her taste, appreciating her skill as a hostess and giving him opportunities to look at her from an ever new point of view.

Of course these guests were almost all “_their_ kind of people”--amiable, well mannered persons who thought and acted in that most conventional of moulds, the mould of “good society.” They fitted into the surroundings, they did their part toward making those surroundings luxurious--a “wallow of self-complacent content.” And this environment soon suited and fitted him exactly.

But to her he was still The Democrat. She loved him in the way and to the degree which her character, as the years had developed it, permitted her to love. And this love, or rather admiring respect, was wholly based upon her ideal of him, her belief in the honesty and intensity of his convictions. While she did not share them, she had breadth enough to admire them and to regard them as high removed above her own ideas to which for herself she held tenaciously, instinct and association and “tradition” triumphing over reason.

Howard retained his ideal of her, never examining her closely, never seeing or suspecting what a pale love she gave him and how shrivelled had become the part of her nature which she and he both assumed was most strongly developed. He knew how she idealised him and did not dare to undeceive her. Therefore he practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no single moment at which he could conveniently halt and “straighten the record.” At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had formerly put upon it. What if she should find him out?

* * * * *

When the famous “coal conspiracy” was formed, three of the men conspicuous in it were among their intimates--that is, their families were often at his house and he and Marian were often at theirs. Yet he had never made a more relentless attack. Nor did he, either in the news columns or on the editorial page, conceal the connection of his three friends with the conspiracy.

“Mrs. Mercer was here this morning,” Marian said as they were waiting for the butler to announce dinner. She was flushed and embarrassed.

Howard laughed. “And did she tell you what a dreadful husband you had?”

“Oh, she didn’t blame you at all. She said they all knew how perfectly upright you were. Only, she said you did not understand and were doing Mr. Mercer a great injustice.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Why--I can’t believe--is it possible, dear--I was just reading one of your editorials. Can Mr. Mercer be in such a scheme? The way she told it to me, he and the others were really doing a lot of people a valuable service, putting their property on a paying basis, enabling the railroads to meet their expenses and to keep thousands and thousands of men employed.”

“Poor Mercer!” Howard said ironically. “Poor misunderstood philanthropist! What a pity that that sort of benevolence has to be carried on by bribing judges and prosecutors and legislatures, by making the poor shiver and freeze, by subtracting from the pleasures and adding to the anxieties of millions. One would almost say that such a philanthropy had better not be undertaken. It is so likely to be misunderstood by the ‘unruly classes.’”

“Oh, I knew you were right. I told her you must be right, that you never wrote until you knew.”

“And what was the result?”

“Well, we are making some very bitter enemies.”

“I doubt it. I suspect that before long they’ll come wheedling about in the hope that I’ll let up on them or be a little easier next time.”

“I’m sure I do not care what they do,” said Marian, drawing herself up. “All I care for is--you, and to see you do your duty at whatever cost or regardless of cost--” she was leaning over the back of his chair with her arms about his neck and her lips very near to his ear--“you are my love without fear and without reproach.”