Chapter 6

A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks. Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery. Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he asked for some flowers.

“Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the dripping counter.

Glennard shook his head.

“Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn’s nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....

The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.

XII

The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a final effort of escape from his wife’s inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife’s indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes seemed, understood without knowing.

In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.

To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually led him to the Park and its outlying regions.

One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon streaked with east wind. Glennard’s cab advanced slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that wound under bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple, who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait to a conversation marked by meditative intervals. Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife’s profile. The man was Flamel.

The blood rushed to Glennard’s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called out--“Turn--drive back--anywhere--I’m in a hurry--”

As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.

“My God, my God--” he groaned.

It was hideous--it was abominable--he could not understand it. The woman was nothing to him--less than nothing--yet the blood hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt--almost a physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably sick....

He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.

He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out. His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he had written.

“MY DEAR FLAMEL,”

“Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters.”

“Trusting you will excuse the oversight,

“Yours truly,

“STEPHEN GLENNARD.”

He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the post-box at the corner.

The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.

The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.

“My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?” Glennard recognized his check.

“That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before.”

Flamel’s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his accent changed and he asked, quickly: “On what ground?”

Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. “On the ground that you sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is entitled to a percentage on the sale.”

Flamel paused before answering. “You find, you say. It’s a recent discovery?”

“Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I’m new to the business.”

“And since when have you discovered that there was any question of business, as far as I was concerned?”

Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. “Are you reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?”

Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice, rejoined, good-humoredly, “Upon my soul, I don’t understand you!”

The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. “It’s simple enough--” he muttered.

“Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly service? I don’t know what your other friends expect!”

“Some of my friends wouldn’t have undertaken the job. Those who would have done so would probably have expected to be paid.”

He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other. Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate note. “If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I’ve never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the letters.”

“That’s just it!”

“What--?”

“The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man’s got stolen goods to pawn he doesn’t take them to the police-station.”

“Stolen?” Flamel echoed. “The letters were stolen?”

Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. “How much longer do you expect me to keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were written to me.”

Flamel looked at him in silence. “Were they?” he said at length. “I didn’t know it.”

“And didn’t suspect it, I suppose,” Glennard sneered.

The other was again silent; then he said, “I may remind you that, supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the originals.”

“What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It’s the kind of thing one can easily do.”

Flamel glanced at him with contempt. “Our ideas probably differ as to what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me.”

Glennard’s anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought. “It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES know about the letters--has known for some months....”

“Ah,” said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel’s muscles were under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to speak.

“If she knows, it’s not through me.” It was what Glennard had waited for.

“Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed of my actions? I didn’t suppose even such egregious conceit as yours could delude a man to that degree!” Struggling for a foothold in the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, “My wife learned the facts from me.”

Flamel received this in silence. The other’s outbreak seemed to have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a deliberation implying that his course was chosen. “In that case I understand still less--”

“Still less--?”

“The meaning of this.” He pointed to the check. “When you began to speak I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was intended as a random insult. In either case, here’s my answer.”

He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.

Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel’s, the result had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel’s unwillingness to quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.

In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife’s indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.

It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis. He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his vision, she had once more become the central point of consciousness.

XIII

It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have missed the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related to the private business of some client? What, for instance, was to prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown person who had sold the “Aubyn Letters.” The subject was one not likely to fix her attention--she was not a curious woman.

Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel’s company; the attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough, after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone else.

As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place. Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.

She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the mantel.

Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.

He moved across the room and stood before her.

“There’s something that I want to say to you,” he began in a low tone.

She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her ironically.

“I’ve never prevented your seeing your friends here,” he broke out. “Why do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so cheap--”

She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive,” he went on, the utterance of the charge reviving his anger.

“Ah,” she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.

Her silence exasperated him.

“Well?” he burst out. “Is that all you have to say?”

“Do you wish me to explain?” she asked, proudly.

“Do you imply I haven’t the right to?”

“I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to.”

“I didn’t suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a sensible woman doesn’t do. She doesn’t slink about in out-of-the-way streets with men. Why couldn’t you have seen him here?”

She hesitated. “Because he wanted to see me alone.”

“Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal alacrity?”

“I don’t know that he has any others where I am concerned.” She paused again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an under-note of warning. “He wished to bid me good-by. He’s going away.”

Glennard turned on her a startled glance. “Going away?”

“He’s going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you knew.”

The last phrase revived his irritation. “You forget that I depend on you for my information about Flamel. He’s your friend and not mine. In fact, I’ve sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to him when you must see plainly enough that I don’t like him.”

Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare him.

“He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish me to like him.”

Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had expected: she was certainly not a clever woman.

“Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it’s not the first time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige me.”

She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its efficacy.

“Is that what you imply?” he pressed her.

“No,” she answered with sudden directness. “I noticed some time ago that you seemed to dislike him, but since then--”

“Well--since then?”

“I’ve imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to him, as you call it.”

“Ah,” said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped, for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind speech.

“And why did you imagine this?” The blood mounted to his forehead. “Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?”

She turned pale. “Under obligations?”

“Oh, don’t let’s beat about the bush. Didn’t he tell you it was I who published Mrs. Aubyn’s letters? Answer me that.”

“No,” she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of alternatives, she added: “No one told me.”

“You didn’t know then?”

She seemed to speak with an effort. “Not until--not until--”

“Till I gave you those papers to sort?”

Her head sank.

“You understood then?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her immovable face. “Had you suspected--before?” was slowly wrung from him.

“At times--yes--” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“Why? From anything that was said--?”

There was a shade of pity in her glance. “No one said anything--no one told me anything.” She looked away from him. “It was your manner--”

“My manner?”

“Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said--once or twice--your irritation--I can’t explain--”

Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who has been running. “You knew, then, you knew”--he stammered. The avowal of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered her less remote. “You knew--you knew--” he repeated; and suddenly his anguish gathered voice. “My God!” he cried, “you suspected it first, you say--and then you knew it--this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew it months ago--it’s months since I put that paper in your way--and yet you’ve done nothing, you’ve said nothing, you’ve made no sign, you’ve lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference--no difference in either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don’t you see the hideous ignominy of it? Don’t you see how you’ve shared in my disgrace? Or haven’t you any sense of shame?”

He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn.

He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.

“Haven’t you had enough--without that?” she said, in a strange voice of pity.

He stared at her. “Enough--?”

“Of misery....”

An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. “You saw then...?” he whispered.

“Oh, God----oh, God----” she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in silence, a long time, driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.

When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have hurt him less than the tears on his hands.

She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping. “It was for the money--?”

His lips shaped an assent.

“That was the inheritance--that we married on?”

“Yes.”

She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered away from him.

“You hate me,” broke from him.

She made no answer.

“Say you hate me!” he persisted.

“That would have been so simple,” she answered with a strange smile. She dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead on her hand.

“Was it much--?” she began at length.

“Much--?” he returned, vaguely.

“The money.”

“The money?” That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment he did not follow her thought.

“It must be paid back,” she insisted. “Can you do it?”

“Oh, yes,” he returned, listlessly. “I can do it.”

“I would make any sacrifice for that!” she urged.

He nodded. “Of course.” He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt. “Do you count on its making much difference?”

“Much difference?”

“In the way I feel--or you feel about me?”

She shook her head.

“It’s the least part of it,” he groaned.

“It’s the only part we can repair.”

“Good heavens! If there were any reparation--” He rose quickly and crossed the space that divided them. “Why did you never speak?” he asked.

“Haven’t you answered that yourself?”

“Answered it?”

“Just now--when you told me you did it for me.” She paused a moment and then went on with a deepening note--“I would have spoken if I could have helped you.”

“But you must have despised me.”

“I’ve told you that would have been simpler.”

“But how could you go on like this--hating the money?”

“I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I did.”

He gazed at her with a kind of awe. “You’re wonderful,” he murmured. “But you don’t yet know the depths I’ve reached.”

She raised an entreating hand. “I don’t want to!”

“You’re afraid, then, that you’ll hate me?”

“No--but that you’ll hate ME. Let me understand without your telling me.”

“You can’t. It’s too base. I thought you didn’t care because you loved Flamel.”

She blushed deeply. “Don’t--don’t--” she warned him.

“I haven’t the right to, you mean?”

“I mean that you’ll be sorry.”

He stood imploringly before her. “I want to say something worse--something more outrageous. If you don’t understand THIS you’ll be perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house.”

She answered him with a glance of divination. “I shall understand--but you’ll be sorry.”

“I must take my chance of that.” He moved away and tossed the books about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. “Does Flamel care for you?” he asked.

Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. “What would be the use?” she said with a note of sadness.

“Ah, I didn’t ask THAT,” he penitently murmured.

“Well, then--”

To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense redistribution of meanings.

“I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”

He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an effort--“Don’t blame him--he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man... a man who was dead....”

She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.

“You DO despise me!” he insisted.

“Ah, that poor woman--that poor woman--” he heard her murmur.

“I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face hidden.

“You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.

“Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any check on his gathering purpose.

“He cared for you--he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told you of the letters--”

She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you? THAT--!”

Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon... like another....”

“A scoundrel’s!”

He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”