MR. FORBES was obliged to go that morning to Boston, to remain until the following evening. He did not see his wife before he left—had not seen her since the interview in the library. She had locked herself in her room, and he was not the man to hammer on a sulking woman’s door.
Several men he knew were in his car, and he talked with them until the train reached Boston. There he was engrossed; he had barely time to snatch a few hours for sleep, none for thought. But the next day, after taking his chair in the train for New York, and observing that he knew no one in the car, he became aware that the heart within him was heavy. He and his wife had quarrelled before, for she had a hot Southern temper, and he was by no means without gunpowder of his own; but none of their disputes had left behind it the flavour of this. That she should tolerate such a man as Bosworth, had disappointed him; that she should espouse his pretensions to their only child, filled him with disgust and something like terror; and her snobbery sickened him. But what had stabbed into the quick of his heart were her final words. He repeated them again and again, hoping to dull their edge.
Moreover, she had never let the night set its ugly seal on their quarrels. Her tempers were soon over, and she had invariably come to him and commanded or coaxed for reconciliation, as her mood dictated. He had steered safely through the first trying years of matrimony, and it appalled him to think that perhaps an unreckoned future lay before them both.
When he entered his house something struck him as out of the common. A servant had fetched his portmanteau from the cab. It suddenly occurred to Mr. Forbes that the man had ostentatiously evaded his eye.
He walked toward the stair, hesitated, then turned.
“Is Mrs. Forbes well?” he asked; and he found that he was making an effort to control his voice.
The man flushed and hung his head. “Mrs. Forbes and Miss Augusta sailed for Europe this afternoon, sir. There’s a letter for you on the mantel-piece in the library.”
Mr. Forbes did not trust himself to say, “Ah!” As he turned the knob of the library door his hand trembled. He entered, and locked the door behind him.
He opened the letter at once and read it.
“I think you did not understand on Monday night that I was in earnest,” it ran. “I am so much in earnest that I shall not stay here to bicker with you. That we have never done. I do not wish to run the risk of speaking again as I spoke the last time we were together. I know that I hurt you, and I am very sorry. If I did not believe that you were entirely wrong in the stand you have taken, I should not think of taking any decisive step in the matter myself; for it hurts me to hurt you—please believe that. But I feel sure that as soon as you are alone and think it over calmly, you will see that your opposition is hardly warrantable, and that the wishes of your wife and daughter are worthy of serious consideration. If we remained to renew the subject constantly you would not give it this consideration; there would be an undignified and regrettable war of words every day.
“This is what I have made up my mind to do: if you persist in refusing your consent—which I cannot believe—I shall, on the tenth day of March, turn over all my own property to the Duke: my houses in Newport and Asheville, my horses and yacht, and my jewels. Two days later they will marry. I stand pledged to these two people that they shall marry, and nothing will induce me to break my word.
“I sail to-day with Augusta on the Brétagne; I go to Paris first to order the trousseau. My address will be the ‘Bristol’; but I shall only be in Paris a week. From there I shall go to London—to the ‘Bristol.’ The Duke and Fletcher Cuyler sail to-day on the Majestic.
“I am afraid I have expressed myself brutally. My head aches. I am very nervous. I can hardly get my thoughts together, with all this hurry and confusion, and the unhappy knowledge that I am displeasing you. But this cloud that has fallen between us can be brushed aside; we can be happy again, and at once. It only rests with you.
“VIRGINIA.
“I have told Harriet to make a plausible explanation of our abrupt departure. She has a talent for that sort of thing. No one need know that there has been the slightest difference of opinion.”
Mr. Forbes dropped the letter to the floor, and leaned forward, his elbows digging into his knees, his hands pressed to his head.
He stared at the carpet His face was as white as if someone had struck him a blow in a vital part. The tears gathered slowly in his eyes and rolled over his cheeks. Suddenly his hands covered his face; and sobs shook him from head to foot.
“What have I loved?” he thought. “What have I loved? Have I been in a fool’s paradise for twenty-two years? Oh, my God!”
This woman had been the pre-eminent consideration of the best years of his life. He had loved her supremely. He had been faithful to her. He had poured millions at her feet, delighted to gratify her love of splendour and power. And never had a man seemed more justified. She had half lived in his arms. She had been his comrade and friend, a source of sympathy and repose and diversion and happiness that had never failed him; for nearly a quarter of a century. And now she had sold him, trodden in the dirt his will, his pride, his heart, that she might finger a coronet which could never be hers, but gloat over the tarnish on her fingers.
He sat there for many hours. Dinner was announced, but he paid no heed. He reviewed his married life. It had seemed to him very nearly perfect. It lost nothing in the retrospect. He doubted if many men were as happy as he had been, if many women had as much to give to a man as Virginia Forbes. And now it had come to a full stop; to be resumed, pitted and truncated, in another chapter. The delight of being petted and spoiled and adored by a man whom all men respected, the love and communion upon which she had seemed passionately dependent, were chaff in the scale against her personal and social vanities.
Life had been very kind to him. Money, position, influential friends had been his birthright. His talents had been recognised in his early manhood. He had turned his original thousands into millions. No man in the United States stood higher in the public estimation, nor could have had a wider popularity, had he chosen to send his magnetism to the people. No American was more hospitably received abroad. Probably no man living was the object of more kindly envy. And yet he sat alone in his magnificent house and asked himself, “For what were mortals born?” His heart ached so that he could have torn it out and trampled on it. And the gall that bit the raw wound was the knowledge that he must go on loving this woman so long as life was in him.