CHAPTER XXIX.
A MAN AND A “PAST.”
HAD Emily and Stilson been idlers or of those workers who look upon work as a curse, they would have taken one of two courses. Either Stilson would have repudiated his obligations and they would have rushed together to hurry on to what would have been for them a moral catastrophe, or they would have remained apart to sink separately into mental and physical ruin. As it was, they worked—steadily, earnestly, using their daily routine of labour to give them strength for the fight against depression and despair.
Stilson, with the tenacity of purpose that made life for him one long battle, fought hopelessly. To him hope seemed always only the delusive foreshadow of oncoming disappointment, a lying messenger sent ahead by fate in cynical mockery of its human prey. And whenever his routine relaxed its compulsion, he laid himself on the rack and tortured himself with memories and with dreams.
Emily was aided by her temperament. She loved life and passionately believed in it. She was mentally incapable of long accepting an adverse decree of destiny as final. But at best it was a wintry light that hope shed—between storms—upon her heart. Her chief source of courage was her ideal of him—the strong, the brave, the inflexible. “Forgive me!” she would say, humbling herself before his image in her mind after her outbursts of protest or her attacks of despondency. “I am not worthy of you. But oh,—I want you—need you—so!”
Within a short time it was apparent that from the professional standpoint she had done well in going to the World of Women. After the newspaper, the magazine seemed play. In the Democrat office she had not been looked upon as extraordinary. Here they regarded her as a person of amazing talent—for a woman. They marvelled at her energy, at her quickness, at her flow of plans for articles and illustrations. And without a hint from her they raised her salary to what she had been getting, besides accepting proposals she made for several articles to be written by herself.
They were especially delighted with her management of “the old lady”—the only name ever given Mrs. Parrott when she was out of hearing. She patronised Emily in a motherly way, and Emily submitted like a dutiful daughter. She accepted Emily’s suggestions as her own. “My dear,” she said one day, “I’m so glad I’ve got you here to help me put my ideas through. I’ve been suggesting and suggesting in vain for years.” And Emily looked grateful and refused to respond to the sly smile from Mr. Burnham who had overheard.
Emily did not under-estimate Mrs. Parrott’s usefulness to her. In thirty years of experience as a writer and an editor, “the old lady” had accumulated much that was of permanent value, as well as a mass of antiquated or antiquating trash. Emily belonged to the advance guard of a generation that had small reverence for the “prim ideals of the past.” Mrs. Parrott knew the “provincial mind,” the magazine-reading mind, better than did Emily—or at least was more respectful of its ideas, more cautious of offending its notions of what it believed or thought it ought to believe. And often when Emily through ignorance or intolerance would have “gone too far” for any but a New York constituency, Mrs. Parrott interposed with a remonstrance or a suggestion which Emily was acute enough to appreciate. She laughed at these “hypocrisies” but—she always had circulation in mind. She liked to startle, but she knew that she must startle in ways that would attract, not frighten away.
But conscientious though she was in her work, and careful to have her evenings occupied, she was still forlorn. Life was purposeless to her. She was working for self alone, and she who had never cared to excess for self, now cared nothing at all. In her own eyes her one value was her value to Stilson. She reproached herself for what seemed to her a low, a degrading view, traversing all she had theretofore preached and tried to practice. But she had only to pause to have her heart aching for him and her thoughts wandering in speculations about him or memories of him.
Her friends—Joan, Evelyn, Theresa—wondered at the radical changes in her, at her abstraction, her nervousness, her outbursts of bitterness. She shocked Joan and Evelyn, both now married, with mockeries at marriage, at love, at every sentiment of which they took a serious view. One day—at Joan’s, after a tirade against the cruelty, selfishness, and folly of bringing children into the world—she startled her by snatching up the baby and burying her face in its voluminous skirts and bursting into a storm of sobs and tears.
“What is it, Emmy?” asked Joan, taking away the baby as he, recovering from his amazement, set up a lusty-lunged protest against such conduct and his enforced participation therein.
Emily dried her eyes and fell to laughing as hysterically as she had wept. “Poor baby,” she said. “Let me take him again, Joan.” And she soon had him quiet, and staring at a large heart-shaped locket which she slowly swung to and fro just beyond the point, or rather, the cap, of his little lump of a nose. “I’m in a bad way, Joan,” she went on. “I can’t tell you. Telling would do no good. But my life is in a wretched tangle, and I don’t see anything ahead but—but—tangles. And as I can’t get what I want, I won’t take anything at all.”
“You are old enough to know better. Your good sense teaches you that if you did get what you want, you’d probably wish you hadn’t.”
“That’s the trouble,” said Emily, shaking her head sadly at the baby. “My good sense in this case teaches me just the reverse. I’ve seen a man—a real man this time—my man morally, mentally, physically. He’s a man with a mind, and a heart, and what I call a conscience. He’s been through—oh, everything. And error and suffering have made him what he is—a man. He’s a man to look up to, a man to lean upon, a man to—to care for.” Her expression impressed Joan’s skepticism. “Do you wonder?” she said.
“No.” Joan looked away. “But—forget—put him out of your life. You are trying to—aren’t you?”
“To forget? No—I can’t even try. It would be useless. Besides, who wants to forget? And there’s always a chance.”
“At least”—Joan spoke with conviction—“you’re not likely to do anything—absurd.”
“That’s true—unfortunately. I couldn’t be trusted. I’m afraid. But—” Emily’s laugh was short and cynical—“my man can.”
“He must be a—a sort of prig.” Joan felt suspicious of a masculine that could stand out against the temptation of such a feminine as her adored Emily.
“See! Even you couldn’t be trusted. But no, he’s not a prig—just plain honourable and decent, in an old-fashioned way that exasperates me—and thrills me. That’s why I say he’s a man to lean upon and believe in.”
Emily felt better for having talked with some one about him and went away almost cheerful. But she was soon down again, and time seemed only to aggravate her unhappiness. “I must be brave,” she said. “But why? Why should I go on? He has Mary—I have nothing.” And the great dread formed in her mind—the dread that he was forgetting her. If not, why did he not seek her out, at least reassure himself with his own eyes that she was still alive? And she had to look steadily at her memory-pictures, at his eyes, and the set of his jaw, to feel at all hopeful that he was remembering, was living his real life for her.
Three weeks after Emily’s departure, on a Thursday night, Stilson left his assistant in charge and went home at eleven. As he entered his house—in West Seventy-third street near the river—he saw strange wraps on the table in the entrance-hall, heard voices in the drawing-room. He went on upstairs. As he was hurrying into evening dress he suddenly paused, put on a dressing-gown, and went along the hall. He gently turned the knob of a door at the end and entered. There was a dim light, as in the hall, and he could at once make out all the objects in the room.
He crossed to the little bed, and stood looking down at Mary—her yellow hair in a coil on top of her head, one small hand clinched and thrust between the pillow and her cheek, the other lying white and limp upon the coverlid. He stood there several minutes without motion. When he reappeared in the bright light of his dressing-room, his face was calm, a complete change from its dark and drawn expression of a few minutes before.
He was soon dressed, and descended to the drawing-room. Like the hall, like the whole house, like its mistress, this room was rather gaudy, but not offensive or tasteless. The most conspicuous objects in its decoration were two pictures. One was a big photograph of a slim, ethereal-looking girl—the dancer he had loved and married. She was dressed to reveal all those charms of youth apparently just emerging from childhood—a bouquet of budding flowers fresh from the garden in the early morning. The other was a portrait of her by a distinguished artist—the face and form of the famous dancer of the day. The face was older and bolder, with the sleepy sensuousness and sadness that characterised her now. The neck and arms were bare; and the translucent and clinging gown, aided by the pose, offered, yet refused, a view of every line of her figure.
Marguerite was sitting almost under the portrait; on the same sofa was Victoria Fenton, looking much as when Stilson first met her—on her trip to America in the autumn in which Emily returned from Paris. She still had to the unobservant that charm of “the unawakened”—as if there were behind her surface-beauty not good-natured animalism, but a soul awaiting the right conjurer to rouse it to conscious life.
Marlowe was seated on the arm of a chair, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed carefully as always, and in the latest English fashion. He had an air of prosperity and contented indifference. His once keen face was somewhat fat and, taken with his eyes and mouth, suggested that his wife’s cardinal weakness had infected him. Stilson was late and they went at once to supper—Marlowe and Miss Fenton had been invited for supper because that was the only time convenient for all these night-workers.
“You are having a great success?” said Stilson to Victoria. She was exhibiting at the Lyceum in one of Joan’s plays which had been partly rewritten by Marlowe.
“Yes—the Americans are good to me—so generous and friendly,” replied Victoria. “Of course the play is poor. I couldn’t have done anything with it if George hadn’t made it over so cleverly.”
Stilson smiled. Banning, the dramatic critic, had told him that her part was beyond Miss Fenton, and that only her stage-presence and magnetic voice saved her from failure. “You players must have a mournful time of it with these stupid playwrights,” he said with safe sarcasm.
“You can’t imagine!” Victoria flung out her long, narrow white hand in a stage-gesture of despair. “And they are so ungrateful after we have created their characters for them and have given them reputation and fortune.”
Stilson noted that Marlowe was listening with a faint sneer. His manner towards his wife was a surface-politeness that too carelessly concealed his estimate of her mental limitations. Stilson’s manner toward “Miss Feronia”—he called her that more often than he called her Marguerite—was almost distant courtesy, the manner of one who tenaciously maintains an impenetrable wall between himself and another whose relations to him would naturally be of the closest intimacy. And while Victoria was self-absorbed, obviously never questioning that her husband was her admirer and devoted lover, Marguerite was nervously attentive to Stilson’s words and looks, at once delighted and made ill-at-ease by his presence.
Her eyes were by turns brilliant and stupidly dull. Either a stream of words was issuing from between her shut teeth or her lids were drooped and she seemed to be falling asleep. Marlowe recognised the morphine-eater and thought he understood why Stilson was gloomy and white. Victoria ate, Marguerite talked, and the two men listlessly smoked. At the first opportunity they moved together and Marlowe began asking about the Democrat and his acquaintances there.
“And what has become of Miss Bromfield?” he asked, after many other questions.
“She’s gone to a magazine,” replied Stilson, his voice straining to be colourless. But Marlowe did not note the tone and instantly his wife interrupted:
“Yes, what has become of Miss Bromfield—didn’t I hear George asking after her? You know, Mr. Stilson, I took George away from her. Poor thing, it must have broken her heart to lose him.” And she vented her empty affected stage-laugh.
Colour flared in the faces of both the men, and Stilson went to the open fire and began stirring it savagely.
“Pray don’t think I encouraged my wife to that idea,” Marlowe said, apparently to Marguerite. “It’s one of her fixed delusions.”
Victoria laughed again. “Oh, Kilboggan told me all about you two—in Paris and down at Monte Carlo. He hears everything. I forgot it until you spoke her name. ‘Pasts’ don’t interest me.”
Marlowe flushed angrily and his voice was tense with convincing indignation as he said, “I beg you, Victoria, not to put Miss Bromfield in this false light. No one but a—a Kilboggan would have concocted and spread such a story about such a woman.”
His tone forbade further discussion, and there was a brief, embarrassed silence. Then Marguerite went rattling on again. Stilson came back to the table and lit a cigarette with elaborate and deliberate care. Marlowe continued to stare to the front, his face expressionless, but his eyes taking in Stilson’s expression without seeming to do so. They were talking again presently, but each was constrained toward the other. Marlowe knew that Stilson was suspecting him, but, beyond being flattered by the tribute to his former “gallantry,” he did not especially care—had he not said all that he honourably could say? Emily, not he, had insisted upon secrecy.
As for Stilson, his brain seemed to be submerged in a plunge of boiling blood. Circumstances of Marlowe’s and Emily’s relations rose swiftly one upon another, all linking into proof. “How can I have been so blind?” he thought.
The Marlowes did not linger after supper. Marguerite went to bed and Stilson shut himself in his own suite. He unlocked and opened a drawer in the table in his study. He drew from under several bundles of papers the sketch of Emily which the Democrat had reproduced with her despatch from the Furnaceville strike. He looked contempt and hate at the dreamy, strong yet sweet, young face. “So you are Marlowe’s cast-off?” he said with a sneer. “And I was absurd enough—to believe in you—in any one.”
He flung the picture into the fire. Then he sat in the big chair, his form gradually collapsing and his face taking on that expression of misery which seemed natural to its deep lines and strong features.
“And when Mary grows up,” he said aloud, “no doubt she too—” But he did not clearly finish the thought. He shrank ashamed from the stain with which he in his unreasoning anguish had smirched that white innocence.
After a while he reached into the fireplace and took from the dead coals in the corner the cinder of the picture. Very carefully he drew it out and dropped it into an envelope. That he sealed and put away in the drawer.