ROSSITER—I believe I have mentioned the name of my new secretary—was lying in wait for me at the hotel entrance. He read me a telegram from Margot: Edna was ill, was not expected to live, begged me to come at once.
I wrote to Mary Kirkwood—a brief repetition of what I had said to her—“of what I know both your intelligence and your heart are saying to you, dear.” I told her that Edna was desperately ill and had sent for me, and that I should be back as soon as I could get away. I went on to say many things such as a man deeply in love always says. No doubt it was a commonplace letter, as sincere love letters are apt to be; but because it was from my heart I felt that, for all the shortcomings, it would go to her heart. I admit I am not a facile love-maker. I have had little practice. And I suspect, those who are facile at love-making have got their facility by making love speeches so often when they were not in earnest that they cannot but have lost all capacity to be in earnest.
Toward noon the next day Rossiter and I and my valet were set down at the little station of Kesson Wells, half an hour out from London in Surrey. We were in the midst of about as beautiful a country us I have seen. I am a narrow enough patriot not to take the most favorable view of things foreign. But I must admit that no other countryside can give one the sense of sheer loveliness that one gets in certain parts of England. I am glad we have nothing like it at home; for to have it means rainy weather most of the time, and serf labor, and landlord selfishly indifferent to the misery of the poor human creatures he works and robs. Still, I try to forget the way it came in the joy of the thing itself—as you, gentle reader, forget the suffering and death of the animals that make the artistic and delicious course dinners you eat.
We were received with much ceremony at the station. My money was being exercised by those who knew how to do it. After a drive between perfumed and blossoming hedgerows and over a road as smooth and clean as a floor we came to Garton Hall, the place my son-in-law had leased until his new house should be ready. It was a modern house, as I noted with relief when we were still afar off, and while not large, was a most satisfactory embodiment of that often misused and often misunderstood word comfort. To live in the luxurious yet comfortable comfort obtainable in England only—indoors, in its steam-heated or Americanized portions—one must have English servants. I am glad we do not breed English servants in America; I am glad that when they are imported they soon cease to be the models of menial perfection they are at home. But when I am in England I revel in the English servant. To find him at his best you must see him serving in the establishment of a great noble. And my son-in-law was that; and the establishment over which Margot presided, but with which she was not permitted to interfere in the smallest detail because of her utter ignorance of all the “vulgarities” of life, as became a true lady of our quaint American brand—the establishment was a combination of the best of the city with the best of the country, a skillful mingling of the most attractive features of home, club, and hotel.
My first question at the station had, of course, been as to Mrs. Loring. I was assured that her ladyship’s mother was somewhat better, but still awaiting the dangerous crisis of the fever. Margot, not a whit less girlish for her maternity, met me in the doorway, and had the nurse there with the boy—the Earl of Gorse. They said he looked like me—and he did, though I do not believe they thought so. Why should they say it? I was still a young man and might marry again. I fancy the same prudent instinct prompted them to give him Godfrey as one of his four or five names. Why do I think they did not believe he looked like me? Because all of them were ashamed of everything American. In the frequent quarrels between Margot and Hugh, he never failed to use the shaft that would surely pierce the heart of her vanity and rankle there—her low American birth, in such ghastly and grotesque contrast to the illustrious descent of her husband. She had an acid tongue when it came to quarreling; she could hurl taunts about his shifts to keep up appearances before he met her that made ugly and painful marks on his hide. She had discovered, probably by gossiping with some traitor servant, that he had been flouted by a rich English girl for a chauffeur—and you may be sure she put it to good use. But nothing she could say made him quiver as she quivered when he opened out on the subject of those “filthy bounders in the States.”
Do not imagine, gentle reader, that my daughter was unhappily married. She would not have exchanged places with anyone but the wife of a duke; and Hugh—well, he needed the money. Nor should you think that they lived unhappily together. They saw little of each other alone; and in public they were as smiling and amiable with each other as—perhaps as you and your husband.
A fine baby was the Earl of Gorse—one who in a decent environment would have grown up a sensible, useful person. But hardly, I feared, when he was already living in his own separate apartment, with his name—“The Earl of Gorse”—on a card beside the door, and with all the servants, including his mother, treating him as if he were of superior clay. This when he barely had his sight. They say a baby learns the utility of bawling at about three days old; I should say the germ of snobbishness would get to work very soon thereafter.
You are waiting to hear what was the matter with Edna. No, it was not a fake illness to draw me within reach for some further trimming. She had indeed fallen dangerously ill—did not expect to live when Margot telegraphed me. It was an intestinal fever brought on by the excesses of the London season. I wonder when the biographers, poets, playwrights, novelists, and other gentry who give us the annals of the race will catch up with the progress of science? How long will it be before they stop telling us of germ and filth diseases as if they were the romantic physical expressions of soul states? There was a time when such blunders were excusable. Now, science has shown us that they are so much twaddle. So, gentle reader, I cannot gratify your taste for humbug and moonshine by telling you that Edna was stricken of remorse or of overjoy or of secret grief or of any other soul state whatever. The doctor bosh was, of course, nervous exhaustion. It always is if the patient is above the working class. The truth was that she fell ill, even as you and I. She ate and drank too much, both at and between meals, and did not take proper care of herself in any way. She wore dresses that were nearly nothing in cold carriages and draughty rooms, when she was laden with undigested food. Vulgar—isn’t it? Revolting for me to speak thus of a lady? But I am trying to tell the truth, gentle reader, not to increase your stock of slop and lies which you call “culture.” And if a lady will put herself in such a condition, why should it not be spoken of? Why go on lying about these things, and encouraging people to attribute to sensitive nerves and souls the consequences of gluttony, ignorance, and neglect?
I am not criticising Edna for getting into such an internal physical state that a pestilence began to rage within her. The most intelligent of us is only too foolish and ignorant in these matters, thanks to stupid education from childhood up. And she has the added excuse of having been exposed to the temptations of a London season. She fell; it is hardly in human nature not to fall.
You have been through a London season? It is a mad chase from food to food. You rise and hastily swallow a heavy English breakfast. You ride in the Row a while, ride toward a lunch table—and an English lunch, especially in the season, means a bigger dinner than any Frenchman or other highly civilized person ever willingly sat down to. Hardly is this long lunch over before it is time for tea—which means not merely tea, but toast, and sandwiches, and hot muffins, and many kinds of heavy cake, and often fruit or jam. Tea is to give you an appetite for the dinner that follows—and what a dinner! One rich, heavy course upon another, with drenchings of wine and a poisonous liqueur afterward. You sit about until this has settled a bit, then—on to supper! Not so formidable a meal as the dinner, but still what any reasonable person would call a square meal. Then to bed? By no means. On to a ball, where you eat and drink in desultory fashion until late supper is served. You roll heavily home to sleep. But hardly have your eyes closed when you are roused to eat again. It is breakfast time, and another day of stuffing has begun.
Starvation, they tell me, is one of the regular causes of death in London. But that is in the East End. In the West End—and you, gentle reader, are interested only in that section—death, I’ll wager, reaps twenty from overfeeding to one he gets in the East End through underfeeding. Famine is a dreadful thing. But how characteristic of the shallowness of human beings it is that you can make a poetic horror out of famine, when no one would listen while you told the far more horrible truth of the frightful ravages of overfeeding, chief cause of all the diseases that torture and twist the human body, aging and killing it prematurely.
Edna had been for many years most cautiously careful of her health. She loved her youth, her beautiful body. She fought against her natural fondness for food and wine. I fancy that, for this first season after freedom she relaxed her rules, and turned herself loose to “celebrate.” I know she must have had something of this sort in mind, because her French maid—I could not talk with the Italian—told me that madame had arranged an elaborate programme of “cures” on the Continent after the season. “And they were to be serious cures,” said she.
Her illness took such a course of ups and downs, with death always hovering, that it was impossible for me to leave. I wrote Mary; I got no reply. I sent Rossiter to Paris; he reported that Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Kirkwood had left for the country, but that he could get no address.
You probably picture me as scarcely able to restrain myself from acting like a madman. How little you know of me! Do you think I could have achieved my solid success before I reached forty-five years if I had been one of the little people who fret and fume against the inevitable? All men who amount to anything are violent men. Jesus, the model of serenity and patience, scourged the money changers from the temple. Washington, one more great exemplar of the majesty of repose, swore like a lunatic at the battle of Monmouth. These great ones simply had in the highest form the virtues that make for success in every department of leadership. Certainly, I am a violent man; but I have rarely been foolish enough to go crazy to no purpose.
What could I do but wait? And over that beautiful, quiet country place floated the black cormorant, with wings outspread and hollow, burning eyes bent eagerly downward. I waited, not in fury, but oppressed by a deep melancholy. For the first time in my life I was thinking seriously of death. To any man no decisive event of life is so absolutely unimportant as his own death. I never have wasted, and never shall waste, a moment in thinking of my death. It may concern others, but how does it concern me? When it comes I shall not be there. The death of another, however—that is cause for reflection, for sadness. I knew, as did no one else, how intensely Edna loved life, how in her own way of strain and struggle she enjoyed it. And to me it was pitiful, this spectacle of her sudden arrest, her sudden mortal peril, as she was about to achieve the summit of her ambition.
I wondered as to Frascatoni. I pictured him waiting, with those tranquil, weary eyes already looking about for another means to his aim of large fortune should this means fail. There I misjudged him; for, one day as I stood in a balcony overlooking the drive he came rushing up in a motor, and my first glance at his haggard face told me that he loved her. In a way it is small compliment to a woman to be loved by the fortune-hunting sort of man; for, he does not release himself until he has the permit of basest self-interest. But Frascatoni, having released himself, had fallen in love with all the frenzy of his super-refined, passionately imaginative nature.
After a few minutes he drove away. I do not know what occurred—naturally, they would not speak of his call and I did not ask questions. I can imagine, however. She seemed better that day, and he must have gone away reassured. He was sending, every morning, enormous quantities of flowers; such skill and taste showed in the arranging that I am sure it was not the usual meaningless performance of rich people, who are always trying to make money-spending serve instead of thoughtful and delicate attention.
Nearly a month dragged along before she was able to see me. As I have explained, her beauty was not dependent upon evanescent charms of contour and coloring, but was securely founded in the structure of her head and face and body. So, I saw lying weakly in the bed an emaciated but lovely Edna. Instantly, on sight of her, there came flooding back to me the memory of the birth of Margot, our first child—how Edna had looked when they let me go into the humble, almost squalid little bedroom in the flat of which we were so vain. She was looking exactly so in this bed of state, in this magnificent room with the evidences of wealth and rank and fashion on every side. She smiled faintly; one of the slim weak hands lying upon the cream-white silk coverlet moved. I bent and kissed it.
“Thank you for being here,” she murmured, tears in her eyes. Her lips could scarcely utter the words.
“You must not speak, your ladyship,” warned the nurse. To flatter Americans and to give themselves the comfortable feeling of gratified snobbishness English servants address us—or rather our women—as if we had titles.
“You are to get well rapidly now,” I said.
“You’ll stay until I can talk to you?”
“Yes,” I said—what else could I say?
They motioned me away. I had committed myself to several weeks more of that futile monotony—and I no longer had the restraint of the sense that she might die at any moment.
Even had I been willing to break my promise I could not have done so; for she would have me in every morning and every afternoon to look at me, and they told me that if I were not there to reassure her, it would undoubtedly cause a change for the worse. I stayed on and wrote to Mary Kirkwood—all the time with the fear that my letters were not reaching her, but also with the unshakable conviction that she was mine. You smile at this as proof of my colossal vanity. Well, your smile convicts you of never having loved. The essence of love is congeniality. Appetite is the essence of passion—which, therefore, has no sense of or especial desire for mutuality. Passion is as common as any other physical appetite. Love is as rare as are souls generous enough to experience or to inspire it. The essence of love is congeniality—and I knew there was a sympathy and understanding between me and Mary Kirkwood that made us lovers for all time.
There came a day—how it burned into my memory!—when Edna was well enough to talk with me. Several days before and I saw that it was not far away, and I awaited it with fierce impatience; she would tell me why she had sent for me and I should be free to go. It was one of those soft gray days of alternating rain and sun that are the specialty of the British climate. Edna, with flowers everywhere in her sitting room, was half reclining in an invalid chair, all manner of rich, delicate silk and lace assistants to comfort, luxury and beauty adorning her or forming background for her lovely face and head. I do not think there is a detail of the room or of her appearance that I could not reproduce, though at the time I was unaware of anything but her voice—her words.
I entered, seated myself in the broad low window opposite her. She looked at me a long time, a strange soft expression in her weary eyes—an expression that disquieted me. At last she said:
“It is so good to be getting well.”
“And you are getting well rapidly,” I said. “You have a wonderful constitution.”
“You are glad I am better, Godfrey?”
I laughed. “What a foolish question.”
“I didn’t know,” said she. “I feared— I have acted so badly toward you.”
“No indeed,” replied I. “Don’t worry about those things. I hope you feel as friendly toward me as I do toward you.”
“But you have always been good to me—even when I haven’t deserved it.”
This was most puzzling. Said I vaguely, “I guess we’ve both done the best we could. Do you want to tell me to-day why you sent for me? Or don’t you feel strong enough?”
“Yes—I wish to tell you to-day. But—it isn’t easy to say. I’m very proud, Godfrey—and when I’ve been in the wrong it’s hard for me to admit.”
“Oh, come now, Edna,” said I soothingly. “Let’s not rake up the past. It’s finished—and it has left no hard feeling—at least not in me. Don’t think of anything but of getting well.”
She lay gazing out into the gentle rain with the sunshine glistening upon it. A few large tears rolled down her cheeks.
“There’s nothing to be unhappy about,” said I. “You are far on the way to health. You are as lovely as ever. And you will get everything you want.”
“Oh, it’s so hard to tell you!” she sighed.
“Then don’t,” I urged. “If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know. I’ll be glad to do it.”
She covered her eyes with her thin, beautiful hand. “Love me—love me, Godfrey—as you used to,” she sobbed.
I was dumbfounded. It seemed to me I could not have heard aright. I stared at her until she lowered her hand and looked at me. Then I hastily glanced away.
“I’m sorry for the way I’ve acted,” she went on. “I want you to take me back. That was why I sent for you.”
I puzzled over this. Was she still out of her mind? Or was there some other and sane—and extremely practical—reason behind this strange turn?—for I could not for an instant imagine she was in sane and sober earnest.
“You don’t believe me!” she cried. “No wonder. But it’s so, Godfrey. I want your love—I want you. Won’t you—won’t you—take me—back?”
Her voice sounded pitifully sick and weak; and when I looked at her I could not but see that to refuse to humor her would be to endanger her life. I said:
“Edna, this is an utter surprise for me—about the last thing I expected. I can’t grasp it—so suddenly. I—I— Do you really mean it?”
“I really mean it, dear,” she said earnestly.
It was evident she, in her secret heart, was taking it for granted that her news would be welcome to me; that all she had to do in order to win me back as her devoted, enslaved husband was to announce her willingness to come. I have often marveled at this peculiar vanity of women—their deep, abiding belief in the power of their own charms—the all but impossibility of a man’s ever convincing a woman that he does not love her. They say hope is the hardiest of human emotions. I doubt it. I think vanity, especially the sex vanity both of men and of women, is far and away hardier than even hope. I saw she was assuming I would be delighted, deeply grateful, ardently responsive as soon as I should grasp the dazzling glad tidings. And she so ill and weak that I dared not speak at all frankly to her.
She stretched out her hand for mine. I slowly took it, held it listlessly. I did not know what to do—what to say.
“It is so good to have you again, dear,” she murmured. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
“I don’t understand,” I muttered, dropping her hand and standing up to gaze out over the gardens. “I am stunned.”
“I’ve been cruel to you,” she said with gracious humility. “Can you ever forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. But—” There I halted.
“I’ll make up for it, dear,” she went on, sweetly gracious. “I’m not surprised that you are stunned. You didn’t realize how I loved you. I didn’t myself. I couldn’t believe at first when I found out.”
“You are not strong enough to talk about these things to-day,” said I. “We’ll wait until——”
She interrupted my hesitating speech with a laugh full of gentle gayety. “You’re quite wrong,” said she. “I’m not out of my mind. I mean it, dear—and more. Oh, we shall be so happy! You’ve been far too modest about yourself. You don’t appreciate what a fascinating man you are.”
I’m sure I reddened violently. I sat, rose, sat again. “You’ve given me the shock of my life,” said I, with an embarrassed laugh. “I’ll have to think this over.” I rose.
“No—don’t go yet,” said she, with the graciousness of a princess granting a longer interview. “Let me tell you all about it.”
“Not to-day,” I pleaded. “You must be careful. You mustn’t overtax yourself.”
“Oh, but this does me good. Sit near me, Godfrey, and hold my hand while I tell you.”
I felt like one closeted with an insane person and compelled to humor his caprices. I obediently shifted to a seat near her and took her hand.
“You could never guess how it came about,” she went on.
As she was looking inquiringly at me, I said, “No.”
“It was very strange. For the first few weeks after the divorce—no, not the divorce—but the decree—for it isn’t a divorce yet, thank God!—for the first weeks I was happy—or thought I was. I went early and late. I had never been so gay. I acted like a girl just launched in society. I was in ecstasies over my freedom. Do you mind, dear? Does it hurt you for me to say these things?”
“No—no,” said I. “Go on.”
“How queer you are! But I suppose you are dazed, poor dear. Never mind! When I am better—stronger, I’ll soon convince you.” And she nodded and smiled at me. “Poor dear! How cruel I have been!”
“Yes—we’ll wait till you are stronger,” stammered I, making a move to rise.
“But I must tell you how it came about,” she said, detaining me. “All of a sudden—when I was at my gayest—I began to feel strange and sad—to dislike everyone and everything about me.”
“It was the illness working in you,” said I.
She gave the smile of gentle tolerance with which she received my attempts at humor when she was in an amiable mood. “How like you that is! But it wasn’t the illness at all. It was my inmost heart striving to force open its door and reveal its secret. Do be a little romantic, this once, dear.”
“Well—and then?”
“Then—a paragraph in one of the society papers. Some one sent it to me anonymously. Was it you, dear?—and did you do it to make me jealous?”
She spoke as one who suddenly sees straight into a secret. “I didn’t,” said I hastily. “It never entered my head to think you cared a rap about me.”
“Now, don’t tease me, Godfrey, dear. You must have been making all sorts of plans to win me back.”
“You read the item in the paper?” suggested I.
“Oh, yes—I must finish. I read it. And at first I shrugged my shoulders and said to myself I didn’t in the least care. But I couldn’t get the thing out of mind. Godfrey, I had always been too sure of you. You never seemed to be a single tiny bit interested in other women. So the thought of you and another woman had not once come to me. That item put it there. You—my husband—my Godfrey and another woman! It was like touching a match to powder. I went mad. I——”
She was sitting up, her eyes wild, her voice trembling. “You must not excite yourself, Edna,” I said.
“I went mad,” she repeated, so interested in her emotions that she probably did not hear me. “I rushed down to Margot. I fell ill. I made her telegraph for you. Oh, how I suffered until I knew you were here. If you hadn’t come right away I’d have cabled to my lawyer in New York to have the divorce set aside—or whatever they do. I can have it set aside any time up to the end of the six months, can’t I?”
“Yes,” admitted I, though her tone of positive knowledge made my reply superfluous.
She seemed instinctively to feel a suspicion—an explanation of her amazing about-face—that was slowly gathering in my bewildered mind. She drew from the folds of her negligee a note and handed it to me. She said:
“I haven’t confessed the worst I had done. Read that.”
“Never mind,” said I. “I don’t wish to know.”
“But I wish you to know,” insisted she. “There mustn’t be anything dark between us.”
I reluctantly opened the note and read. It was from Prince Frascatoni—not the cold bid for a break that my suspicion expected but a passionate appeal to her not to break their engagement and throw him over. I could by no reach of the imagination picture that calm, weary-eyed man of the world writing those lines—which shows how ill men understand each other where women are concerned.
“He sent me that note the day I came here,” said she. “I did not answer it.” Her tone was supreme indifference—the peculiar cruelty of woman toward man when she does not care.
“You were engaged to him?” said I—because I could think of nothing else to say.
“Yes,” said she. Then with the chaste pride of the “good” woman, “But not until after the decree was granted. He would have declared himself in New York, but I wouldn’t permit that. At least, Godfrey, I never forgot with other men that I was your wife—or let them forget it. You believe me?”
“I’m sure of it,” said I.
She gazed dreamily into vacancy. “To think,” she mused, “that I imagined I could marry him—any man! How little a woman knows her own heart. I always loved you. Godfrey, I don’t believe there is any such thing as divorce—not for a good woman. When she gives herself”—in a dreamy, musical voice, with a tender pressure of my hand—“it is for time and for eternity.”
Never in all my life had I so welcomed anyone as I welcomed the interrupting nurse. I felt during the whole interview that I was under a strain; until I was in the open air and alone I did not realize how terrific the strain. I walked—on and on, like a madman—vaulting gates and fences, scrambling over hedges, plowing through gardens, leaping brooks—on and on, hour after hour. What should I do? What could I do? Nothing but wait until she was out of danger, wait and study away at this incredible, impossible freak of hers—try to fathom it, if it was not the vagary of a diseased mind. I wished to believe it that, but I could not. There was nothing of insanity in her manner, and from beginning to end her story was coherent and plausible. Plausible, but not believable; for I had no more vanity about her loving me than has the next man when he does not want the love offered him and finds it inconvenient to credit, and so is in the frame of mind to see calmly and clearly.
I wandered so far that I had to hire a conveyance at some village at which I halted toward nightfall. As soon as I was at the house I ordered my valet to pack, and wrote Edna a note saying that neglected business compelled me to bolt for London. “But I’ll be back,” I wrote, at the command of human decency. “I feel that I can go, as you are almost well.” Half an hour later I was in the train for London.
A letter, feebly scrawled, came from her the next day but one—a brief loving note, saying that she understood and that I knew how eagerly she was looking forward to my return—“but don’t worry, dearest, about me. I shall soon be well, now that my conscience is clear and all is peace and love between us. I know how you hate to write letters, but you will telegraph me every day.”
How I got through those next few weeks I cannot tell. I had no sense of the reality of the world about me or of my own thoughts and actions. Every once in a while—sometimes when I was talking with the men whose company I sought, again when I was alone in bed and would start abruptly from sleep—I pinched myself or struck myself violently to see if I was awake. Edna’s letters were daily and long. I read them, stared at them, felt less certain than ever of my sanity or of my being awake. I sent her an occasional telegram, dictated to Rossiter—a vague sentence of congratulation on her better health or something of that kind. Soon this formality degenerated to a request to Rossiter: “And telegraph Mrs. Loring.” Or he would say, “Shall I send Mrs. Loring a telegram?” and I would reply, “Yes—do please.”
It was obviously necessary that I should not see her before she was well enough to be talked to frankly. I invented excuses for staying away until my ability in that direction gave out. Then Rossiter, best of secretaries, divining my plight, came to the rescue. I gave him a free hand. He went too far, created in her predisposed mind the illusion that I was champing with impatience at the business that persisted in keeping me away from her. I do not blame him; he took the only possible course.
At last she was completely restored. The doctors and nurses could find no pretext for lingering, and that in itself was proof positive of her health and strength. She was having her meals with the family, was attending to her correspondence, was alarmed because she was taking on flesh so rapidly. She began offering to join me in London. When she wrote that she was starting the next day I telegraphed her not to come; and, after four more days of delay on various excuses, I went down. I should have liked to postpone this interview a week or ten days. Again I see you smiling at me, posing as madly in love with Mary Kirkwood yet able to put off the joy of being free to go to her. But, gentle reader, you must not forget that I had first to deal with Edna. And, from what you have learned of her, do you think I was wise or foolish to wish to meet her only when she could not possibly prevent candor by pleading a remnant of invalidism?