Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in his studio, reeking with perspiration and breathless. He must almost have run. He struck a match with a shaking hand and looked at his face in the glass. He expected to see the bleeding marks of her nails on his cheeks, but he could see nothing. He groveled inwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar; it was all so just and apt to his deserts.
There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on the mantel which he had kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area. He took it and sat looking into the muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him. It slipped through his hand and struck the floor, and there was a report; he sprang into the air, feeling that he had been shot. But he found himself still alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as one of Christine’s fingernails might have left.
He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact that he had got his punishment in the right way and that his case was not to be dignified into tragedy.
XVIII
THE MARCHES, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French steamer. There was no longer any business obligation on them to be civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason in the attention they offered. Every Other Week had been made over to the joint ownership of March and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a hardness on Dryfoos’ side, which certainly left Mrs. March with a sense of his incomplete regeneration. Yet when she saw him there on the steamer, she pitied him; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife, with her twitching head and her prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely out while she clung to Mrs. March’s hand where they sat together till the leavetakers were ordered ashore, was less pathetic. Mela was looking after both of them and trying to cheer them in a joyful excitement. “I tell ‘em it’s goun’ to add ten years to both their lives,” she said. “The voyage’ll do their healths good, and then we’re gittun’ away from that miser’ble pack o’ servants that was eatun’ us up there in New York. I hate the place!” she said, as if they had already left it. “Yes, Mrs. Mandel’s goun’ too,” she added, following the direction of Mrs. March’s eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel speaking to Christine on the other side of the cabin. “Her and Christine had a kind of a spat, and she was goun’ to leave; but here only the other day, Christine offered to make it up with her, and now they’re as thick as thieves. Well, I reckon we couldn’t very well ’a got along without her. She’s about the only one that speaks French in this family.”
Mrs. March’s eyes still dwelt upon Christine’s face: it was full of a furtive wildness. She seemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself from looking as if she were looking for someone.
“Do you know,” Mrs. March said to her husband as they jingled along homeward in the Christopher Street bobtail car, “I thought she was in love with that detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time and that he was amusing himself with her.”
“I can bear a good deal, Isabel,” said March, “but I wish you wouldn’t attribute Beaton to me. He’s the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of yours.”
“Well, at any rate I hope now you’ll both get rid of him in the reforms you’re going to carry out.”
These reforms were for a greater economy in the management of Every Other Week, but in their very nature they could not include the suppression of Beaton. He had always shown himself capable and loyal to the interests of the magazine, and both the new owners were glad to keep him. He was glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretense of indifference when they came to look over the new arrangement with him. In his heart he knew that he was a fraud, but at least he could say to himself with truth that he had not now the shame of taking Dryfoos’ money.
March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points where it had seemed indispensable to spend as long as they were not spending their own; that was only human. Fulkerson absorbed Conrad’s department into his, and March found that he could dispense with Kendricks in the place of assistant which he had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that March was overworked. They reduced the number of illustrated articles and they systematized the payment of contributors strictly according to the sales of each number, on their original plan of cooperation; they had got to paying rather lavishly for material without reference to the sales.
Fulkerson took a little time to get married and went on his wedding journey out to Niagara and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line of travel that the Marches had taken in their wedding journey. He had the pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebec on the same boat on which he first met March.
They have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners. At first Mrs. March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson’s speaking of her husband as the ownah, and March as the edito’, but it appeared that this was only a convenient method of recognizing the predominant quality in each and was meant neither to affirm nor to deny anything. Colonel Woodburn offered as his contribution to the celebration of the copartnership, which Fulkerson could not be prevented from dedicating with a little dinner, the story of Fulkerson’s magnanimous behavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial moment when it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos or give up March. Fulkerson winced at it, but Mrs. March told her husband that now, whatever happened, she should never have any misgivings of Fulkerson again, and she asked him if he did not think he ought to apologize to him for the doubts with which he had once inspired her. March said that he did not think so.
The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotel in easy reach of the city, but they returned early to Mrs. Leighton’s, with whom they are to board till spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson’s bachelor apartment for housekeeping. Mrs. March, with her Boston scruple, thinks it will be odd, living over the Every Other Week offices, but there will be a separate street entrance to the apartment, and besides, in New York you may do anything.
The future of the Leightons promises no immediate change. Kendricks goes there a good deal to see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes to see Alma. He has seemed taken with her ever since he first met her at Dryfoos’ the day of Lindau’s funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, he justly argues with March that there can be no harm in it and that we are liable to be struck by lightning any time. In the meanwhile there is no proof that Alma returns Kendricks’ interest, if he feels any. She has got a little bit of color into the fall exhibition, but the fall exhibition is never so good as the spring exhibition. Wetmore is rather sorry she has succeeded in this, though he promoted her success. He says her real hope is in black and white and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her original aim of drawing for illustration.
News has come from Paris of the engagement of Christine Dryfoos. There the Dryfooses met with the success denied them in New York; many American plutocrats must await their apotheosis in Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation. Shortly after their arrival they were celebrated in the newspapers as the first millionaire American family of natural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capital of civilization, and at a French watering place Christine encountered her fate: a nobleman full of present debts and of duels in the past. Fulkerson says the old man can manage the debtor and Christine can look out for the duelist. “They say those fellows generally whip their wives. He’d better not try it with Christine, I reckon, unless he’s practiced with a panther.”
One day, shortly after their return to town in the autumn from the brief summer outing they permitted themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance. At first they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhood which she wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gaily on seeing them, and though she hurried by with the sister who accompanied her, and did not stay to speak, they felt that the peace that passeth understanding had looked at them from her eyes.
“Well, she is at rest, there can’t be any doubt of that,” he said as he glanced round at the drifting black robe which followed her fre
e, nunlike walk.
“Yes, now she can do all the good she likes,” sighed his wife. “I wonder—I wonder if she ever told his father about her talk with poor Conrad that day he was shot?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. In any event if would be right. She did nothing wrong. If she unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to die for God’s sake, for man’s sake.”
“Yes—yes. But still ”
“Well, we must trust that look of hers.”
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