Part 15

The existence he had been living would have inevitably ruined him, when a new turn arrived with the panic of ’93. In a fortnight, as a result of the treachery of an executor, he found himself bankrupt. The news made a sensation here and abroad. The army of friends melted away. Creditors descended on him and drove him from his palace, and the woman he had adored departed overnight in the company of a Swedish count. When the news was brought to him, he began by flying into a paroxysm of despair and ended by bursting into laughter. The next day, with the best of good humor, he packed up his effects and moved over into a studio in the Rue d’Assas off the Luxembourg Gardens. His mother gave him an allowance of one hundred dollars a month, which, in his new surroundings, was a fortune. In a month he had found his happiness in a life of work among these democrats of the soul.

If he did not at once forget the woman, the memory of his existence of luxury never returned to embitter him. For years he lived with his comrades of the _atelier_, adopting their flowing dress and easy customs, a leader in their revelries, but a madman for work, as completely divorced from his past existence as though he had died and been born again. The two experiences as a boy and as a man had left him distrustful of women or, at least, recoiling before the intense outpouring of emotion which love meant to him. During this long student period, no woman touched his heart beyond a womanly sympathy. In fact, his attitude was the occasion of numerous jests among the more catholicly inclined, while those of more romantic persuasion did him the honor to ascribe it to the tragedy of a “_grande passion_.” His studio, which was magnificent for the quarter, became the refuge of the whole tribe of models and others whose living was even more precarious. At any hour of the day and night, they arrived for a bit of food, a night’s shelter, or to give him their tragic confidence, and these flitting children of the sidewalks, cynical, hardened, and sly in their dealings with other men, would melt into tears or burst into angry tirades against the injustice of established order, sitting alone with him into the long night. They taught him much of their dreadful vision of mankind and suffering in such hours of confession, which he would never have known had he approached them differently. At the bottom, pity was too deep in his soul to have permitted any other sentiment. All adored him and one, Pepita, a little Spanish model, loved him with the love of a dog for its master. For his part, he took no credit for this open charity. As a matter of fact, it was a privileged glance into a hidden life, that interested him intensely, that roused in him long periods of meditation and revolt, that was as much a part of the architectural structure of his artistic conscience, as his boyhood, his life on the prairies, his wildness at college, or his rapid plunge through the dissipations of the brilliant world. He became known not only as an artist of bold and daring originality, but as a man who thought and reasoned.

In his third year, an event came which occasioned a new outburst of public curiosity. An aunt died and left him a legacy of fifty thousand dollars. He reappeared in society in a brilliant renaissance, took up his old habits, just as though nothing had happened; reassembled the former acquaintances, gave dinners and balls, and won enormous sums at baccarat. This lasted for almost two months, at the end of which a streak of luck set in against him and he found himself again bankrupt. Seven weeks after his departure from the studio of the Rue d’Assas, he returned penniless but happy, and announced:

“Now, if no more aunts die, I shall become an artist.”

His return was made a gala night; the quarter packed in to hear his adventures, and, in the end, the renegade was received back into the sacred enclosure, while his dress clothes and the offending hat were burned with imposing ceremonies.

* * * * *

When the death of his mother brought him a fortune, he remained true to his oath and the left bank of the Seine. By this time he had won his medals in the Salon and had achieved the honor of a private exhibition of water-colors which he had brought back from Algeria and the East. There were some critics who complained of the theatric quality of his art, but all conceded the individuality and the boldness of his new conceptions. His sudden spring into fame was as instantaneous as all the other phases of his existence. Everything seemed to open ahead of him for a long and brilliant career of highest achievement, when fate, which had played him a dozen queer turns, returned to intrude once more into his existence.

He was motoring along the Riviera, on a trip he had long planned to Venice and the galleries of Florence, when, as his car swerved out and around a jutting corner of rock, a sudden gust of wind caught his hat and whirled it into the lap of a young woman who was passing in a phaeton. This gust of wind decided his whole life. He fell in love with her at the first sight of her wistful Madonnalike face and trusting eyes, that strangely enough reminded him of the idealized vision of his boyhood. She was a divorcée, scarcely twenty-one, from the South, who had resumed her maiden name, Louise Fortier. He knew absolutely nothing about her except the story she told of childish innocence and the whims of a selfish libertine. Two weeks later, they returned to Paris, engaged. He had thrown himself into this new experience without the slightest distrust, with the rapturous idolatry of the boy he was. He would not have permitted her to be discussed even by his most intimate friends, though, in fact, several made hints which he was too blind to perceive. They were married a month later. One painful incident occurred. Pepita, the little Spanish model who had been devoted to him for years, attempted to take her life by swallowing poison, and though her act was detected in time to save her, the occurrence cast a shadow over the wedding.

During the first months, he found himself incomprehensibly, riotously happy. He was charmed and bewildered by his wife. They made a romantic trip through Italy and into the East, during which she assumed subtly a great influence over his moods and ambitions. When they returned to Paris, he was more in love than ever; only, there was one thing which had gone completely out of his day, of which he never thought--his work. Their coming to New York was her suggestion. The return home was a triumph for him. For the first time, he tasted the completeness of personal success. His friends of the quarter who had returned before him hailed him as a leader. He became a personality; his eccentricities of speech and thought, the dramatic wildness, even, of his past life were now registered in his favor. He took a studio and began to work, and success continued his. Yet, at the bottom, he became conscious of a growing restlessness, of an inability to enjoy what he had won.

Gradually, the obsession which had clouded his vision began to lift from his eyes. He saw her as she was, this woman to whom he had chosen to fasten the chains of his existence. He was proud of her, of her charm, of the magnetism she exerted over other men, of the admiration she evoked in the brilliant formal society into which she had led him, but he perceived at last that she neither understood what he was working for nor was able to assist him in the least. He found himself divided against himself, as it were, leading two opposite lives.

He began to ask himself questions. He said to himself that he was famous and envied, that everything he did succeeded, and that yet he was not happy. He sought in himself some explanation. He recalled two sayings, one that of his uncle who, at the end of a life heaped with honors, could say: “I die a disappointed man,” and the remark of his old professor: “In art, the critical age is forty, up to then one can promise, after then one must achieve.” He began to feel this crisis in his life, to ask himself whether he had in him the strength to revolt or whether he would renounce the ambitious flights of his old ideals in the easy satisfaction of what the public called success. For he perceived clearly that the fault lay in him, that he no longer lived in his art, that he served two gods, and that in this divided allegiance lay the death of all his struggling toward true greatness. He sought to make his wife understand and found a blank incomprehension. Then he tried to order his life on new lines, to divide the year into two parts, and to regain in solitary summers on unfrequented islands something of the old enthusiastic concentration.

But he found that the habits of home, of pleasant friends, of the woman who held him by mysterious impulses, were too strong, and he came to the day when he understood his uncle, and said to himself:

“It is ended. I shall not do what I want to do. It is beyond me, as my life has been cast.”

A profound melancholy came over him and, in his secret heart, undivined by his closest friends the cancer of disillusionment began to grow. His eccentricities increased. He had scenes with his wife in which he burst into violent tirades or scornful laughter which she could not understand. Though he never accused her, he repeated often bitterly to himself that his career was a sacrifice to the woman, who neither appreciated nor perceived the sacrifice.

During these years, he had never, for an instant, entertained the slightest suspicion of his wife. He gave her absolute faith. His theory of marriage was not as a reciprocal tyranny but as a free union. He did not claim any right over her actions or attempt to limit her interests in other men. In the beginning he had explained himself at length.

“If the day ever comes when you find that you love another man, come to me and tell me,” he said. “I shall not stand in your way, no matter how I may feel. Marriage exists only so long as it is voluntary on both sides. All I demand is that there should be no deceit, that each should remember the dignity of the other.”

“If you say that you don’t love me!” she said, laughing, but a little anxious.

“You are wrong; I love you in my own way.”

She was silent quite a while, watching him.

“And if--if the other thing should happen,” she said, pretending to make a jest of it. “If I did deceive you, what would you do?”

“Don’t joke about such things,” he said, frowning; “I am serious, Louise.”

Several times, as though to tease him, she came back to this question, but each time peremptorily he refused to discuss it.

He was not jealous, or, rather, he held jealousy unworthy of him. He would have scorned to exercise the slightest supervision over his wife’s actions. On one occasion, when he had taken up a branch telephone, he had cut in on a conversation which would have aroused any one but a man as blind or as loyal as he was. He had replaced the receiver. He would have been ashamed to listen, and even referred to it jestingly, without notice of the alarm which showed in her eyes. One afternoon, coming home contrary to his habit, he let himself into his apartment and stopped at the sound of voices from his wife’s salon. He listened and discovered, without shadow of a doubt, that the man with whom she was arguing was her lover.

XXII

The discovery of his wife’s infidelity was so swift, so convincing, so utterly unexpected that every mental function seemed to stop. Garford stood still, a long moment, doing absolutely nothing. Then his whole body was seized with a confusing fever; his heart seemed to swell within him and to leap against its walls. In a flash, his head cleared as though swept by a gust of wind. He felt a tingling, throbbing sensation throughout his body, accompanying this abrupt mental clarity; all other sounds without him ceased. It was as though only one thing existed, something which echoed through his brain--one question: “What am I going to do?”

If he had gone in, he would have killed them, then and there, under his hands, one after the other, blindly, unreasoningly, in brute instinct, without knowing just what he was doing. Only a door stood between him and a crime. At this moment, the bell rang. On such trivialities destinies turn. The shrill, piercing sound recalled him to the outer world. He was able to add to the obsessing question in the hollow of his consciousness one other thought: “Some one is coming.” Registering two perceptions, he became again a reasoning man. He withdrew softly, mounted to the mezzanine floor of the apartment, and went out.

When he had, in some measure, recovered control over his reason, the first emotion was one of complete stupefaction. Why had she done this? He had given her everything. He had given her even the sacrifice of his deepest ambitions without ever reproaching her. And he had been rewarded by the lowest deceit.

“Has a woman no gratitude?” he asked himself, in man’s eternal miscomprehension of feminine motives.

This was the one thing he could not comprehend. He could not forbid her loving another. This was something in the domain of the instincts which might conceivably happen. But he had a right to demand that she should not strike him in his private honor. At first, no other thought came to him than that his wife loved the man whose voice he had recognized. That she could have been actuated by any other emotion was too horrible to contemplate. Yet he could not comprehend the choice.

“She loves him--Reggie Bowden--Bowden, of all men! How is it possible?” he kept repeating to himself.

Of all the men who surrounded her and paid her court, the discovery that he had been betrayed for young Bowden wounded him most. For Bowden was of the type he particularly detested, a trifler in all things, drifting through life on a family name, a smiling face and a well-groomed body, social jester and leader of cotillions, a tyrant of the ballroom. That this man could be preferred to him curiously enough humiliated him more than if her choice had been one who was her intellectual equal. The more he analyzed the situation, the more a tormenting doubt returned. A hundred trivial incidents of the past thronged to his memory with a new significance until he felt he should go mad unless he knew the truth.

In three months, it lay before him in its multiplied, shameful detail--not only the present but the past, the record of her first marriage and even before. He went to the friends who, he remembered, had dropped vague hints and forced from them what they knew or suspected. Then, for the first time, it flashed over how his name had been bandied about, a thing of mockery and light contempt, even to the point that he might have been held cognizant, and he said to himself in dull rage: “I was wrong; I should have killed her--that would have been my justification.”

During these three months there were moments when he felt himself perilously close to the borders of his sanity. Added to the disillusion and melancholy of the artist, the blow to the man himself had been so crushing and so penetrating that every illusion had gone as completely from his mental outlook as though, at a stroke, all colors had been lifted from the visible world. Only one thought upheld him--the idea of vengeance and the cleansing of his name. When he was completely satisfied with his investigations, he left ostensibly on a hunting-trip, returned to New York secretly, and advised by his detectives, came to his apartment-building at night.

He tried the door with his latch-key and found it barred. He mounted to the mezzanine floor, tried the door, and found it locked. At that hour, the servants would have left the apartment. He descended, had himself taken up by the service elevator and entered by the kitchen. He knew where he would find them. On the second floor was a little salon which gave into his wife’s bedroom, from which it formed the only exit. They had just returned from the opera; the young man’s coat and hat were on a chair, the odor of a cigar in the corridors.

Bowden was alone, in an armchair by the little lamp, skimming a paper while waiting for Mrs. Garford to return from her bedroom. All at once a sense of something unusual in the air made him lower his paper and glance up. At his side, the husband was standing. He started to his feet with a smothered exclamation, but a hand restrained him.

“Not a sound; I want to give her a surprise.”

There was a smile on Garford’s lips as he laid his finger across them in warning, but this smile terrified the lover. He felt himself trapped, unable to warn the woman, forced helplessly to await the moment of her reëntry and the shock of her surprise. He did not make a sound because he still hoped and because he was a coward. The two men remained thus a full five minutes, without moving, awaiting her return. All at once, from the further room, a light voice began to hum an aria of the evening, broke off, and called out:

“Getting impatient?”

At these words, Bowden felt the blood running out of his veins. Then there came the rustle of a dress and Louise, in an Oriental negligée of gold, blended with greens and reds, came lightly to the door.

Garford had placed himself so that he could observe Bowden’s actions in the reflection of a mirror, while turning his back to him. The young man’s hand went up in frantic warning.

At the sight of her husband, she stood transfixed, unable to move or utter a sound, and the color went out of her face so abruptly that the dabs of rouge on her cheeks stood hideously out.

“Quite a surprise, isn’t it?” Garford said with a laugh.

She murmured something inaudible.

“What! You don’t kiss me?”

She looked at him a moment, looked at Bowden, and came slowly across the yellow Chinese rug, a long moment when she felt her knees sagging under her.

“He knows!” she said to herself. “Will he strangle me?”

And she reached him and offered up her cold lips. He kissed them. At the moment his arms touched her she could not repress a shudder.

“What’s the matter?” he said, looking at her.

“You frightened me,” she said, in a whisper, her hand to her heart, for the test had been almost beyond her strength.

“What! I frightened you?”

“You know sudden surprises affect me like this,” she said, trying to recover her wits.

“You don’t ask me why I have come,” he said quietly.

“Bad news?” she forced herself to say.

“You might call it that.”

This gave Bowden his opportunity. He rose hastily.

“I hope it’s not serious,” he said glibly. “If you’ll permit me--” He offered his hand. “I know you wish to talk this over alone. Mrs. Garford, I hope your headache will be better to-morrow. It was a shame to miss that last act.”

He had quite recovered himself with the prospect of a flight that providentially opened to him. He bowed a little doubtfully to Garford, but the husband nodded and sat down. Bowden exchanged glances with the wife, slipped on his coat, and took up his hat. The woman looked at him in terror; she saw to the bottom of his soul and comprehended that he was deserting her. Garford, meanwhile, had risen, gone to the table and turned, his arms folded, leaning against its side.

Bowden made a final bow and went to the door. Almost immediately he came back.

“Why, it’s locked!”

“What’s that?” said Garford, lifting his head.

“Why, it’s locked!” said Bowden, who felt the room beginning to reel about him.

“Yes; I locked it.”

Despite the uncanny sense of terror which began to creep over him, the young man managed to blurt out:

“But why--what does this mean?”

The woman, who understood by this time that she was fighting for her life, joined in his remonstrances.

“Dan--are you crazy--you can’t act this way--what do you mean?”

Garford returned to the chair, and this nervous shifting did not escape her, or the straining of his clasped fingers held against his lips as he answered, with forced calm:

“You should know.”

She tried, while gaining time, to turn it off lightly while assuming an attitude of frankness:

“Surely, you don’t object to Mr. Bowden’s coming in here for a nightcap and a cigar! You are not as prudish as that, and if you were, you know I have done it a hundred times; that would be too ridiculous, Dan! You aren’t going to make a scene over this!”

“Is that all you have to say to me--that I should know,” he asked, when she had finished.

She bit her lip, tried to answer, and succeeded only in staring at him. She also began to be horribly afraid.

“And you, Mr. Bowden?”

The young fellow had an answer ready, glib on his tongue, but, at the look in the husband’s eyes, it vanished. In the palms of his hands the perspiration began to rise. Before the avenging dignity in the glance of this man whom he had so many times smiled at in the satisfied disdain of the social freebooter, he felt himself all at once insignificant, as a chip of wood swept under a great surf. She understood that she could expect no help from him and desperately began to counterfeit anger.

“I will not be insulted like this,” she cried furiously. “I demand that you open that door and end this absurd, this humiliating scene. I----”

“Stop!” he said roughly, and she comprehended how completely he dominated the scene by the cold weakness, the powerless sense of inaction which fell on her at the sound of his voice. “Tell Mr. Bowden what I laid down to you as the rules of our marriage.”

“What do you mean?” she stammered.

“Tell him what I have told you I expected from you as my due.”

“But I don’t understand why--why----”

“Tell him.”

“Why, you said, you said,” she faltered, “in case either of us found--no--no, this is too absurd----”

“Either of us found we had come to love another,” he took up; “go on.”

“That we should tell the other,” she said, hardly able to get the words out.

“Honestly and loyally,” he broke in, “and that there should be no restraint on this liberty of choice as there could be no deceit out of respect for the other. Is that right?”

She nodded, staring at his arms and great hands, fearing their brute strength.

“You did not tell that to Mr. Bowden,” he continued.

Bowden, who felt himself cornered, advanced, and said with a last show of courage:

“Mr. Garford, I don’t understand this scene in the least and I must insist--_insist_, do you hear--that you open that door.”

Garford rose, and, though his voice still maintained a certain calm, his hands twitched at his sides, as he said,

“Bowden, you don’t think this was an accident, do you?”

“Why, what--what do you mean?”

“I _know_!”

As he said this for the first time, the rage in his soul came thronging into the exclamation. He caught at a chair to steady himself. Bowden recoiled in terror; the woman, shrieking, flung herself at the feet of her husband, crying:

“Don’t kill me, Dan; don’t kill me!”

He stood swaying under the shock of her body against his knees, recovering his self-control, with a smile of contempt at the young coward shrinking against the wall, a moment that paid him back for the humiliation of months.

“I am not going to kill you--not yet,” he said slowly. “Get up!”

She obeyed.

“This man is your lover, then?”

She looked at him, did not dare to equivocate, and bent her head in acquiescence.

“That is so, isn’t it, Bowden?” he said, without doing him the honor to look at him.

“Yes.”

“That is all that is necessary,” he said; but the shock of the answers had been so intense that it was a moment before he could continue. “I shall trouble you only a moment. The case is quite plain. I am the third. You would have saved us all this if you had come to me openly.”

Then she understood his object. She put out her hands frantically.

“You’re going to divorce me,” she cried hysterically.