“I used to be afraid that a picturesque and vivid imagination coupled with a certain amount of clairvoyance might seduce me to trickery and charlatanism.
“But if it be charlatanism for a paleontologist to construct a fish out of a single fossil scale, then there may be something of that ability in me. For truly, Clive, I am often at a loss where to draw the line between what I see and what I reason out — between my clairvoyance and my deductions. And if I made mistakes I certainly should be deeply alarmed. But — I don’t,” she added, laughing. “And so, in regard to those two men last night, and in regard to what she and they may be about, I feel not the least concern. And you must not. Promise me, dear.”
But he rose, anxious and depressed, and stood silent for a few moments, her hands clasped tightly in his.
For he could see no way out of it, now. His wife, once merely indifferent, was beginning to evince malice. And what further form that malice might take he could not imagine; for hitherto, she had not desired divorce, and had not concerned herself with him or his behaviour.
As for Athalie, it was now too late for him to step out of her life. He might have been capable of the sacrifice if the pain and unhappiness were to be borne by him alone — or even if he could bring himself to believe or even hope that it might be merely a temporary sorrow to Athalie.
But he could not mistake her, now; their cords of love and life were irrevocably braided together; and to cut one was to sever both. There could be no recovery from such a measure for either, now.
What was he to do? The woman he had married had rejected his loyalty from the very first, suffered none of his ideas of duty to move her from her aloofness. She cared nothing for him, and she let him know it; his notions of marriage, its duties and obligations merely aroused in her contempt. And when he finally understood that the only kindness he could do her was to keep his distance, he had kept it. And what was he to do now? Granted that he had brought it all upon himself, how was he to combat what was threatening Athalie?
His wife had so far desired nothing of him, not even divorce. He could not leave Athalie and he could not marry her. And now, on her young head he had, somehow, loosened this avalanche, whatever it was — a suit for separation, probably — which, if granted, would leave him without his liberty, and Athalie disgraced. And even suppose his wife desired divorce for some new and unknown reason. The sinister advent of those men meant that Athalie would be shamefully named in any such proceedings.
What was he to do? An ugly, hunted look came into his face and he swung around and faced the girl beside him:
“Athalie,” he said, “will you go away with me and let them howl?”
“Dearest, how silly. I’ll stay here with you and let them howl.”
“I don’t want you to face it—”
“I shall not turn my back on it. Oh, Clive, there are so many more important things than what people may say about us!”
“You can’t defy the world!”
“I’m not going to, darling. But I may possibly shock a few of the more orthodox parasites that infest it.”
“No girl can maintain that attitude.”
“A girl can try.... And, if law and malice force me to become your mistress, malice and law may answer for it; not I!”
“I shall have to answer for it.”
“Dearest,” she said with smiling tenderness, “you are still very, very orthodox in your faith in folk-ways. That need not cause me any concern, however. But, Clive, of the two pictures which seems reasonable — your wife who is no wife; your mistress who is more and is considered less?
“Don’t think that I am speaking lightly of wifehood.... I desire it as I desire motherhood. I was made for both. If the world will let me I shall be both wife and mother. But if the world interferes to stultify me, then, nevertheless I shall still be both, and the law can keep the title it refuses me. I deny the right of man to cripple, mar, render sterile my youth and womanhood. I deny the right of the world to forbid me love, and its expression, as long as I harm no one by loving. Clive, it would take a diviner law than man’s notions of divinity, to kill in me the right to live and love and bring the living into life. And if I am forbidden to do it in the name of the law, then I dare do it in the name of One who never turned his back on little children—”
She ceased abruptly; and he saw her eyes suddenly blinded by tears:
“Oh, Clive — if you only could have seen them — the little flower-like faces and pleading arms around — my — neck — warm — Oh, sweet! — sweet against my breast—”
CHAPTER XXV
WINIFRED had grown stout, which, on a slim, small-boned woman is quickly apparent; and, to Clive, her sleepy, uncertain grey eyes seemed even nearer together than he remembered them.
She was seated in the yellow and white living-room of her apartment at the Regina, still holding the card he had sent up; and she made no movement to rise when her maid announced him and ushered him in, or to greet him at all except with a slight nod and a slighter gesture indicating a chair across the room.
He said: “I did not know until this morning that you were in this country.”
“Was it necessary to inform you?”
“No, not necessary,” he said, “unless you have come to some definite decision concerning our future relations.”
Her eyes seemed to grow sleepier and nearer together than ever.
“Why,” he asked, wearily, “have you employed an agency to have me followed?”
She lifted her drooping lids and finely pencilled brows. “Have you been followed?”
“At intervals, as you know. Would you mind saying why? Because you have always been welcome to divorce.”
She sat silent, slowly tearing into tiny squares the card he had sent up. Presently, as at an afterthought, she collected all the fragments and placed them in a heap on the table beside her.
“Well?” she inquired, glancing up at him. “Is that all you have to say?”
“I don’t know what to say until you tell me why you have had me followed and why you yourself are here.”
Her gaze remained fixed on the heap of little pasteboard squares which she shifted across the polished table-top from one position to another. She said:
“The case against you was complete enough before last night. I fancy even you will admit that.”
“You are wrong,” he replied wearily. “Somehow or other I believe you know that you are wrong. But I suppose a jury might not think so.”
“Would you care to tell a jury that this trance-medium is not your mistress?”
“I should not care to defend her on such a charge before a jury or before anybody. There are various ways of damning a woman; and to defend her from that accusation is one of them.”
“And another way?”
“To admit the charge. Either ruin her in the eyes of the truly virtuous.”
“What do you expect to do about it then? Keep silent?”
“That is still a third way of destroying a woman.”
“Really? Then what are you going to do?”
“Whatever you wish,” he said in a low voice, “as long as you do not bring such a charge against Athalie Greensleeve.”
“Would you set your signature to a paper?”
“I have given you my word. I have never lied to you.”
She looked up at him out of narrowing eyes:
“You might this time. I prefer your signature.”
He reddened and sat twirling the silver crook of his walking-stick between restless hands.
“Very well,” he said quietly; “I will sign what you wish, with the understanding that Miss Greensleeve is to remain immune from any lying accusation.... And I’ll tell you now that any accusation questioning her chastity is a falsehood.”
His wife smiled: “You see,” she said, “your signature will be necessary.”
“Do you think I am lying?”
“What do I care whether you are or not? Do you suppose the allege
d chastity of a common fortune-teller interests me? All I know is that you have found your level, and that I need protection. If you choose to concede it to me without a public scandal, I shall permit you to do so. If not, I shall begin an action against you and name the woman with whom you spent last night!”
There was, in the thin, flute-like, and mincingly fastidious voice something so subtly vicious that her words left him silent.
Still leisurely arranging and re-arranging her little heap of pasteboard, her near-set eyes intent on its symmetry, she spoke again:
“I could marry Innisbrae or any one of several others! But I do not care to; I am comfortable. And that is where you have made your mistake. I do not desire a divorce! But,” — she lifted her narrow eyes— “if you force me to a separation I shall not shrink from it. And I shall name that woman.”
“Then — what is it you want?” he asked with a sinking heart.
“Not a divorce; not even a separation; merely respectability. I wish you to give up business in New York and present yourself in England at decent intervals of — say once every year. What you do in the interludes is of no interest to me. As long as you do not establish a business and a residence anywhere I don’t care what you do. You may come back and live with this woman if you choose.”
After a silence he said: “Is that what you propose?”
“It is.”
“And you came over here to collect sufficient evidence to force me?”
“I had no other choice.”
He nodded: “By your own confession, then, you believe either in her chastity and my sense of honour, or that, even guilty, I care so much for her that any threat against her happiness can effectually coerce me.”
“Your language is becoming a trifle involved.”
“No; I am involved. I realise it. And if I am not absolutely honourable and unselfish in this matter I shall involve the woman I had hoped to marry.”
“I thought so,” she said, reverting to her heap of pasteboard.
“If you think so,” he continued, “could you not be a little generous?”
“How?”
“Divorce me — not by naming her — and give me a chance in life.”
“No,” she said coolly, “I don’t care for a divorce. I am comfortable enough. Why should I inconvenience myself because you wish to marry your mistress?”
“In decency and in — charity — to me. It will cost you little. You yourself admit that it is a matter of personal indifference to you whether or not you are entirely and legally free of me.”
“Did you ever do anything to deserve my generosity?” she inquired coldly.
“I don’t know. I have tried.”
“I have never noticed it,” she retorted with a slight sneer.
He said: “Since my first offence against you — and against myself — which was marrying you — I have attempted in every way I knew to repair the offence, and to render the mistake endurable to you. And when I finally learned that there was only one way acceptable to you, I followed that way and kept myself out of your sight.
“My behaviour, perhaps, entitles me to no claim upon your generosity, yet I did my best, Winifred, as unselfishly as I knew how. Could you not; in your turn, be a little unselfish now?... Because I have a chance for happiness — if you would let me take it.”
She glanced at him out of her close-set, sleepy eyes:
“I would not lift a finger to oblige you,” she said. “You have inconvenienced me, annoyed me, disarranged my tranquil, orderly, and blameless mode of living, causing me social annoyance and personal irritation by coming here and engaging in business, and living openly with a common and notorious woman who practises a fraudulent and vulgar business.
“Why should I show you any consideration? And if you really have fallen so low that you are ready to marry her, do you suppose it would be very flattering for me to have it known that your second wife, my successor, was such a woman?”
He sat thinking for a while, his white, care-worn face framed between his gloved hands.
“Your friends,” he said in a low voice, “know you as a devout woman. You adhere very strictly to your creed. Is there nothing in it that teaches forbearance?”
“There is nothing in it that teaches me to compromise with evil,” she retorted; and her small cupid-bow mouth, grew pinched.
“If you honestly believe that this young girl is really my mistress,” he said, “would it not be decent of you, if it lies within your power, to permit me to regularise my position — and hers?”
“Is it any longer my affair if you and she have publicly damned yourselves?”
“Yet if you do believe me guilty, you can scarcely deny me the chance of atonement, if it is within your power.”
She lifted her eyes and coolly inspected him: “And suppose I do not believe you guilty of breaking your marriage vows?” she inquired.
He was silent.
“Am I to understand,” she continued, “that you consider it my duty to suffer the inconvenience of divorcing you in order that you may further advertise this woman by marrying her?”
He looked into her close-set eyes; and hope died. She said: “If you care to affix your signature to the agreement which my attorneys have already drawn up, then matters may remain as they are, provided you carry out your part of the contract. If you don’t, I shall begin action immediately and I shall name the woman on whose account you seem to entertain such touching anxiety.”
“Is that your threat?”
“It is my purpose, dictated by every precept of decency, morality, religion, and the inviolable sanctity of marriage.”
He laughed and gathered up his hat and stick:
“Your moral suasion, I am afraid, slightly resembles a sort of sanctimonious blackmail, Winifred. The combination of morality, religion, and yourself is too powerful for me to combat.... So if my choice must be between permitting morality to publicly besmirch this young girl’s reputation, and affixing my signature to the agreement you suggest, I have no choice but to sign my name.”
“Is that your decision?”
He nodded.
“Very well. My attorneys and a notary are in the next room with the papers necessary. If you would be good enough to step in a moment—”
He looked at her and laughed again: “Is there,” he said, “anything lower than a woman? — or anything higher?”
CHAPTER XXVI
ATHALIE was having a wonderful summer. House and garden continued to enchant her. She brought down Hafiz, who, being a city cat, instantly fled indoors with every symptom of astonishment and terror the first time Athalie placed him on the lawn.
But within a week the dainty Angora had undergone a change of heart. Boldly, now he marched into the garden all by himself; fearlessly he pounced upon such dangerous game as crickets and grasshoppers and the little night moths which drifted among the flowers at twilight, — the favourite prowling hour of Hafiz, the Beautiful.
Also, early in July, Athalie had acquired a fat bay horse and a double buckboard; and, in the seventh heaven now, she jogged about the country through leafy lanes and thistle-bordered by-roads long familiar to her childhood, sometimes with basket, trowel, and garden gloves, intent on the digging and transplanting of ferns, sometimes with field-glasses and books, on ornithological information bent. More often she started out with only a bag of feed for Henry the horse and some luncheon for herself, to picnic all alone in a familiar woodland, haunted by childish memories, and lie there listening to the bees and to the midsummer wind in softly modulated conversation with the little tree-top leaves.
She had brought her maid from the city; Mrs. Connor continued to rule laundry and kitchen. Connor himself decorated the landscape with his straw hat and overalls, weeding, spraying, rolling, driving the lawn-mower, raking bed and path, cutting and training vines, clipping hedges, — a sober, bucolic, agreeable figure to the youthful chatelaine of the house of Greensleeve.
Clive had come once mo
re from town to say that he was sailing for England the following day; that he would be away a month all told, and that he would return by the middle of August.
They had spent the morning driving together in her buckboard — the happiest morning perhaps in their lives.
It promised to be a perfect day; and she was so carefree, so contented, so certain of the world’s kindness, so shyly tender with him, so engagingly humorous at his expense, that the prospect of a month’s separation ceased for the time to appal him.
Concerning his interview with his wife she had asked him nothing; nor even why he was going abroad. Whether she guessed the truth; whether she had come to understand the situation through other and occult agencies, he could not surmise. But one thing was plain enough; nothing that had happened or that threatened to happen was now disturbing her. And her gaiety and high spirits were reassuring him and tranquillising his mind to a degree for which, on reflection, he could scarcely account, knowing the ultimate hopelessness of their situation.
Yet her sheer good spirits carried him with her, heart and mind, that morning. And when it was time for him to go she said good-bye to him with a smile as tenderly gay and as happy and confident as though he were to return on the morrow. And went back to her magic house of dreams and her fairy garden, knowing that, except for him, their rainbow magic must vanish and the tinted spell fade, and the soft enchantment dissolve forever leaving at her feet only a sunlit ruin amid the stillness of desolation.
But the magic held. Every day she wrote him. Wireless messages came to her from him for a while; ceased; then re-commenced, followed presently by cablegrams and finally by letters.
So the magic held through the long sunny summer days. And Athalie worked in her garden and strayed far afield, both driving and afoot. And she studied and practised piano, and made curtains, and purchased furniture.
Also she wrote letters to her sisters, long since wedded to husbands, babies, and homes in the West. Her brother Jack, she learned, had joined the Navy at Puget Sound, and had now become a petty officer aboard the new battle-cruiser Bon Homme Richard in Asiatic waters. She wrote to him, also, and sent him a money order, gaily suggesting that he use it to educate himself as a good sailor should, and that he save his pay for a future wife and baby — the latter, as she wrote, “being doubtless the most desirable attainment this side of Heaven.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 800
