EMILY’S “adventure” lingered with increasing vagueness for a few days, then vanished under a sudden pressure of work. When she was once more at leisure Marlowe came, and she was surprised by the vividness and persistence with which her stranger returned. She struggled in vain against the comparisons that were forced upon her. Marlowe seemed to her a clever “understudy”—“a natural, born, incurable understudy,” she thought, “and now that I’m experienced enough to be able to discriminate, how can I help seeing it?” She was weary of the tricks and the looks of a man whom she now regarded as a trafficker in stolen bits of other men’s individualities—and his tricks and his looks were all there was left of him for her.
“Some people—two I want you to meet, came with me—that is, at the same time,” he said. “Let’s dine with them at Larue’s to-morrow night.”
“Why not to-night? I’ve an engagement to-morrow night. You did not warn me that you were coming.”
Marlowe looked depressed. “Very well,” he said, “I can arrange it, I think.”
“Are they Americans—these friends of yours?”
There was a strain in his voice as he answered, which did not escape Emily’s supersensitive ears. “No—English,” he said. “Lord Kilboggan and Miss Fenton—the actress. You may have heard of her. She has been making a hit in the play every one over there is talking about and running to see—‘The Morals of the Marchioness.’”
“Oh, yes—the play with the title rôle left out.”
“It is pretty ‘thick’—and Miss Fenton was the marchioness. But she’s not a bit like that in private life. Even Kilboggan gives her a certificate of good character.”
“Even Kilboggan?”
“He’s such a scoundrel. He blackguards every one. But he’ll amuse you. He’s witty and good-looking and one of those fascinating financial mysteries. He has no known source of income, yet he’s always idle, always well-dressed, and always in funds. He would have been a famous adventurer if he’d lived a hundred years ago.”
“But as he lives in this practical age, he comes dangerously near to being a plain ‘dead beat’—is that it?” Emily said this carelessly enough, but something in her manner made Marlowe wince.
“Oh, wait until you see him. We can’t carry our American ideas among these English. They look upon work as a greater disgrace than having a mysterious income. Kilboggan is liked by every one, except women with daughters to marry off and husbands whose vanity is tempered by misgivings.”
“And what is your friend doing in Miss Fenton’s train?”
“Well—at first I didn’t know what to make of it. But afterward I saw that I was probably mistaken. I suppose she tolerates him because he’s an earl. It’s in the blood.”
“And why do you tolerate him?” Emily’s tone was teasing, but it made Marlowe wince again.
“I don’t. I went with Denby—the theatrical man over in New York—several times to see Miss Fenton. He has engaged her for next season. And Kilboggan was there or joined us at dinner or supper. They were coming over to Paris at the same time. I thought it might amuse you to meet them.”
Marlowe’s look and speech were frank, yet instinctively Emily paused curiously upon his eager certificate of good character to Miss Fenton in face of circumstances which a man of his experience would regard as conclusive. Also she was puzzled by the elaborateness of his explanation. She wished to see Miss Fenton.
They met that evening at Larue’s and dined downstairs. Emily instantly noted that Marlowe’s description of Kilboggan was accurate. “How can any one be fooled by these frauds?” she thought. “He carries his character in his face, as they all do. I suppose the reason they get on is because the first impression wears away.” Then she passed to her real interest in the party—Miss Fenton. Her first thought was—“How beautiful!” Her second thought—“How shallow and stupid!”
Victoria Fenton was tall and thin—obtrusively thin. Her arms and legs were long, and they and her narrow hips and the great distance from her chin to the swell of her bosom combined to give her an appearance of snake-like grace—uncanny, sensuous, morbidly fascinating. Her features were perfectly regular, her skin like an Amsterdam baby’s, her eyes deep brown, and her hair heavy ropes of gold. Her eyes seemed to be brilliant; but when Emily looked again, she saw that they were dull, and that it was the colouring of her cheeks which made them seem bright. In the mindless expression of her eyes, in her coarse, wide mouth and long white teeth, Emily found the real woman. And she understood why Miss Fenton could say little, and eat and drink greedily, and still could shine.
But, before Miss Fenton began to exhibit her appetite, Emily had made another discovery. As she and Marlowe entered Larue’s, Victoria gave him a look of greeting which a less sagacious woman than she would not have misunderstood. It was unmistakably the look of potential proprietorship.
Emily glanced swiftly but stealthily at Marlowe by way of the mirror behind the table. He was wearing the expression of patient and bored indifference which had become habitual with him since he had been associating with Englishmen. Their eyes met in the mirror—“He is trying to see how I took that woman’s look at him,” she thought, contemptuously. “But he must have known in advance that she would betray herself and him. He must have brought me here deliberately to see it or brought her here to see me—or both.” A little further reflection, and suspicion became certainty, and her eyelids hid a look of scorn.
She made herself agreeable to Kilboggan, who proved to be amusing. As soon as the food and drink came, Victoria neglected Marlowe. He, after struggling to draw her out and succeeding in getting only dull or silly commonplaces, became silent and ill-at-ease. He felt that so far as rousing Emily’s jealousy was concerned, he had failed dismally, “Victoria is at her worst to-night,” he thought. “She couldn’t make anybody jealous.” But he had not the acuteness to see that Emily had penetrated his plan—if he had been thus acute, he would not have tried such a scheme, desperate though he was.
All he had accomplished was to bring the two women before his eyes and mind in the sharpest possible contrast, and so increase his own infatuation for Emily. The climax of his discomfiture came when Victoria, sated by what she had eaten and inflamed by what she had drunk, began to scowl jealously at Emily and Kilboggan. But Marlowe did not observe this; his whole mind was absorbed in Emily. He was not disturbed by her politeness to Kilboggan; he hardly noted it. He was revolving her fascinations, her capriciousness, her unreachableness. “I have laughed at married men,” he said to himself. “They are revenged. Of all husbands I am the most ridiculous.” And he began to see the merits of the system of locking women away in harems.
He and she drove to her apartment in silence. He sent away the cab and joined her at the outside door which the concierge had opened. “Good night.” She spoke distantly, standing in the doorway as if she expected him to leave. “I’m afraid I can’t see you to-morrow. Theresa and her General arrived at the Ritz to-night from Egypt, and I’ve engaged to lunch and drive and dine with them.”
“I will go up with you,” he said, as if she had not spoken. There was sullen resolve in his tone, and so busy was he with his internal commotion that he did not note the danger fire in her eyes. But she decided that it would not be wise to oppose him there. When they were in her tiny salon, she seated herself, after a significant glance at the clock. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the mantel-shelf. He could look down at her—if she had been standing also, their eyes would have been upon a level.
“How repellent he looks,” she thought, as she watched him expectantly. “And just when he needs to appear at his best.”
“Emily,” he began with forced calmness, “the time has come when we must have a plain talk. It can’t be put off any longer.”
She was sitting with her arms and her loosely-clasped, still gloved hands upon the table, staring across it into the fire. “I must not anger him,” she was saying to herself. “The time has passed when a plain talk would do any good.” Aloud she said: “I’m tired, George—and not in a good humour. Can’t you——”
Her impatience to be rid of him made him desperate. “I must speak, Emily, I must,” he replied. “For many months—in fact for nearly a year of our year and four months—I’ve seen that our plan was a failure. We’re neither bound nor free, neither married nor single. We—I, at least—am exposed to—all sorts of temptations. I need you—your sympathy, your companionship—all the time. I see you only often enough to tantalise me, to keep me in a turmoil that makes happiness impossible. And,” he looked at her uneasily, appealingly, “each time I see you, I find or seem to find that you have drifted further away from me.”
She did not break the silence—she did not know what to say. To be frank was to anger him. To evade was impossible.
“Emily,” he went on, “you know that I love you. I wish you to be happy and I know that you don’t wish me to be miserable. I ask you to give up, or at least put aside for the time, these ideas of yours. Let us announce our marriage and try to work out our lives in the way that the experience of the world has found best. Let us be happy again—as we were in the beginning.”
His voice vibrated with emotion. She sighed and there were tears in her eyes and her voice was trembling as she answered: “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do, George, to bring back the happiness we had. But—” she shook her head mournfully, “it is gone, dear.” A tear escaped and rolled down her cheek. “It’s gone.”
He was deceived by her manner and by his hopes and longings into believing that he was not appealing in vain; and there came back to him some of the self-confidence that had so often won for him with women. “Not if we both wish it, and will it, and try for it, Emily.”
“It’s gone,” she repeated, “gone. We can’t call it back.”
“Why do you say that, dear?”
“Don’t ask me. I can’t be untruthful with you, and telling the truth would only rouse the worst in us both. You know, George, that I wouldn’t be hopeless about it, if there were any hope. We’ve drifted apart. We can go on as we are now—friends. Or we can—can—drift still further—apart. But we can’t come together again.”
“Those are very serious words, my dear,” he said, trying to hide his anger. “Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?”
“Please, George—let me write it to you, if you must have it. Spare me. It is so hard to speak honestly. Please!”
“If you can find the courage to speak, I can find the patience to listen,” he said with sarcasm. “As we are both intelligent and sensible, I don’t think you need be alarmed about there being a ‘scene.’ What is the matter, Emily? Let us clear the air.”
“We’ve changed—that’s all. I’m not regretting what we did. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. But—we’ve changed.”
“I have not changed. I’m the same now as then, except that I appreciate you more than I did at first. Month by month you’ve grown dearer to me. And——”
“Well, then, it is I who have changed,” she interrupted, desperately. “It’s not strange, is it, George? I was, in a way, inexperienced when we were married, though I didn’t think so. And life looks very different to me now.” She could not go on without telling him that she had found him out, without telling him how he had shrivelled and shrunk until the garb of the ideal in which she had once clothed him was now a giant’s suit upon a pigmy—pitiful, ridiculous. “How can I help it that my mind has changed? I thought so and so—I no longer think so and so. Put yourself in my place, dear—the same thing might have happened to you about me.”
Many times the very same ideas had formed in his mind as he had exhausted his interest in one woman after another. They were familiar to him—these ideas. And how they mocked him now! It seemed incredible that he, hitherto always the one who had broken it off, should be in this humiliating position.
“It’s all due to that absurd plan of ours,” he said bitterly. “If we had gone about marriage in a sensible way, we should have grown together. As it is, you’ve exaggerated trifles into mountains and are letting them crush our happiness to death.” His tone became an appeal. “Emily—my dear—my wife—you must not!”
She did not answer. “If we’d lived together I’d have found him out just the same—more quickly,” she thought. “And either I’d have degraded myself through timidity and dependence, or else I’d have left him.”
“You admit that our plan has been a failure?” he went on.
She nodded.
“Then we must take the alternative.”
She grew pale and looked at him with dread in her eyes—the universal human dread of finalities.
“We must try my plan,” he said. “We must try married life in the way that has succeeded—at least in some fashion—far oftener than it has failed.”
“Oh!” She felt relieved, but also she regretted that he had not spoken as she feared he would speak. She paused to gather courage, turned her face almost humbly up to him, and said: “I wish I could, George. But don’t urge me to do that. Let us go on as we are, until—until—Let us wait. Let us——”
He threw back his head haughtily. The patience of his vanity was worn through. “No,” he said. “That would be folly. It must be settled one way or the other, Emily.” He looked at her, his courage quailing before the boldness of his words. But he saw that she was white and trembling, and misunderstood it. He said to himself: “She must be firmly dealt with. She’s giving in—a woman always does in the last ditch.”
“No,” he repeated. “The door must be either open or shut. Either I am your husband, or I go out of your life.”
“You can’t mean that, George?” She was so agitated that she rose and came round the table to face him. “Why shouldn’t we wait—and hope? We still care each for the other, and—it hurts, oh, how it hurts—even to think of you as out of my life.”
He believed that she was yielding. He put his hand on her arm. “Dearest, there has been too much indecision already. You must choose between your theories and our happiness. Which will you take? You must choose here and now. Shall I go or stay?”
She went slowly back to her chair and sat down and again stared into the fire. “To-morrow,” she said at last. “I will decide to-morrow.”
“No—to-night—now.” He went to her and sat beside her. He put his arm around her. “I love you—I love you,” he said in a low tone, kissing her. “You—my dearest—how can you be so cruel? Love is best. Let us be happy.”
At the clasp of his arm and the touch of his lips, once so potent to thrill her, she grew cold all over.
What he had thought would be the triumphant climax of his appeal made every nerve in her body cry out in protest against a future spent with him. She would have pushed him away, if she had not pitied him and wished not to offend him. “Don’t ask me to decide to-night,” she pleaded. “Please!”
“But you have decided, dearest. We shall be happy. We shall——”
She gradually drew away from him, and to the surface of her expression rose that iron inflexibility, usually so completely concealed by her beauty and gentleness and sweetness. “If I must decide—if you force me to decide, then—George, my heart is aching with the past, aching with the loneliness that stares horribly from the future. But I cannot, I cannot do as you ask.” And she burst into tears, sobbing as if her heart were breaking. “I cannot,” she repeated. “I must not.”
All the ugliness which years of unbridled indulgence of his vanity had bred in him was roused by her words. Such insolence from a woman, one of the sex that had been his willing, yielding instrument to amusement, and that woman his wife! But he had talked so freely to her of his alleged beliefs in the equality of the sexes, he had urged and boasted and professed so earnestly, that he did not dare unmask himself. Instead, with an effort at self-control that whitened his lips, he said: “You no doubt have reasons for this—this remarkable attitude. Might I venture to inquire what they are? I do not fancy the idea of being condemned unheard.”
“Unheard? I—condemn you unheard! George, do not be unjust to me. You know—you must know—that there was not a moment when my heart was not pleading your cause. Do you think I have not suffered as I saw my love being murdered—my love which I held sacred while you were outraging and desecrating it.”
“It is incredible!” he exclaimed. “Emily, who has been lying to you about me? Who has been poisoning your mind against me?”
“You—George.” She said it quietly, sadly. “No one else in all this world could have destroyed you with me.”
“I do not understand,” he protested. But his eyes shifted rapidly, then turned away from her full gaze, fixed upon him without resentment or anger, with only sorrow and a desire to spare him pain.
“I could remind you of several things—you remember them, do you not? But they were not the real cause. It was, I think, the little things—it always is the little things, like drops of water wearing away the stone. And they wore away the feeling I had for you—carried it away grain by grain. Forgive me, George—.” The tears were streaming down her face. “I loved you—you were my life—I have lost you. And I’m alone—and a woman. No, no—don’t misunderstand my crying—my love is dead. Sometimes I think I ought to hate you for killing it. But I don’t.”
“Thank you,” he said, springing to his feet. His lips were drawn back in a sneer and he was shaking with anger. He took up his hat and coat. “I shall not intrude longer.” He bowed with mock respect. “Good-night—good-bye.”
“George!” She started up. “We must not part, with you in anger against me.”
He gave her a furious look and left the apartment. “What a marriage!” he said to himself. “Bah! She’ll send me a note in the morning.” But this prophecy was instantly faced with the memory of her expression as she gave her decision.
And Emily did not send for him. She tore up in the morning the note she rose in the night to write.
The next evening while she and the Waylands were dining at the Ritz, Victoria Fenton came in with Kilboggan and sat where Emily could study her at leisure.
“Isn’t that a beautiful woman?” she said to Theresa.
“Yes—a gorgeous animal,” Theresa replied, after a critical survey. “And how she does love food!”
Emily was grateful.
“She looks rather common too,” Theresa continued. “What a bad face the fellow she’s with has.”
Emily tried to extract comfort out of these confirmations of her opinion of the couple she was blaming for Marlowe’s forcing the inevitable issue at a most inopportune time. But her spirits refused to rise. “It’s of no use to deny it,” she said to herself, with a sick and sinking heart. “I shall miss him dreadfully. What can take his place?”
She wished to be alone; the dinner seemed an interminable prospect, was an hour and a half of counted and lingering minutes. When the coffee was served she announced a severe headache, insisted on going at once and alone, would permit escort only to a cab. As she went she seemed to be passing, deserted and forlorn, through a world of comrades and lovers—men two and two, women two and two, men and women together in pairs or in parties. Out in the Champs Elysees, stars and soft, warm air, and love-inviting shadows among the trees; here and there the sudden dazzling blaze of the lights of a café chantant, and music; a multitude of cabs rolling by, laughter or a suggestion of romance floating in the wake of each. “Hide yourself!” the city and the night were saying to her, “Hide your heartache! Nobody cares, nobody wishes to see!”
And she hastened to hide herself, to lie stunned in the beat of a black and bitter sea.