YOUR husband seems to be having a good time,” Dr. Vessinger observed, twirling his champagne glass between his strong bony fingers. “Does he often enjoy—these good spirits—this—enthusiasm?”
Below them in the main portion of the large dining-room of Mrs. Bellflower’s house, the guests were supping at small tables. Dr. Vessinger had captured one of the few tables in the breakfast room at one side. Simmons was seated next to Mrs. Bellflower. His good-natured, bearded face was thrown back, and his eyes shone with champagne. His wife looked at him with surprise; she had not noticed him before. He was talking a great deal, and repeating what he said to right and left, in a loud voice, with much laughter. She could not hear what he was saying, but she divined that it was silly.
“No! I never saw him so—excited, before,” she answered her companion. “He doesn’t usually drink champagne.”
“He seems to like it rather well,” the doctor replied, watching him drain a fresh glass. “It’s a good thing to have such good spirits, isn’t it?” He turned his eyes to hers, and raised his glass. “To your beautiful self, Evelyn!”
She could feel the warmth of her blood as it rushed over her face and neck, at his deliberate words.
“Why do you call me that?” she asked brusquely.
“You may remember that I called you that once before,” he replied, unperturbed; “and then you had no objection to my familiarity.”
They were both silent, while in their minds rose that “once before”: the roses blooming in the Sicilian garden, husbanded by bees; the young American doctor sent south to recover from a sickness; the romance of their hearts beating in unison with the romance of the place.
Gradually her eyes fell from the doctor’s face. For, later, she had forgotten him, measured him by another and found him less than she desired. She had sent him away, the young American doctor of the Sicilian garden, and had never thought to ask herself before, whether she could regret it. Now she raised her eyes to his face and wondered whether she were regretting it.
He was handsome and mundane. In those eight years he had pushed himself from obscurity to a point of worldly ease. Perhaps she had done that for him by sending him away! To her, now, though married, he was more interesting than ever before. What she had done to him then he had surmounted; and now, somehow, it seemed the gods had put the cards into his hands.
Suddenly, while she was wondering, he leaned nearer to her and said:
“You are miserable. I can tell it from the lines in your forehead. And your eyes are hot with fever.”
He spoke impersonally; it was like the soothing hand of the physician to his patient. Simmons was laughing still more hilariously, and his neighbor, the Magnificent Wreck, was laughing with him; those near them were shouting and clapping their hands; they were urging him to do something. To his wife it all seemed silly.
“Does that worry you?” continued Vessinger, following her eyes.
She looked at her husband again with a sudden sense of detachment from him. He was foolish, like a child, and she suspected why he was foolish and drank too much: he wished not to think. She despised his male way of trying to escape from himself. His was the man’s simple, coarse instinct—to drink, to laugh, to forget!
Suddenly he was just a man in black and white, like all the others who had come to her that evening and said words and smiled and danced and gone away. He was just a man, like one-half creation.
“Yes,” she replied steadily to the doctor. “I am miserable. Does it make you happy to know that?”
She did not comprehend what inferences he might draw from the juxtaposition of acts and words.
“In a way, it does,” he answered calmly. “But I shouldn’t let that bother you. Our hostess, good woman, loves a laughing guest, and your husband is colossal. The best of men forget themselves, you know, and on the morrow they are ashamed. A good wife forgives—that is her métier.”
The racket below increased until every one stopped his eating or his talk to find out what made the disturbance. Simmons was rising somewhat unsteadily to his feet. His tie had come undone. His large brown eyes, usually twinkling with gentle kindliness, flashed with the passion of the moment.
“Bravo! Simmons! Bravo! A song!” rose from some of the guests. “Sing your old song, Sim!” one called out. The guests jostled into the dining-room, deserting the terrace, where they had been supping and flirting. There were some among the men who had been at the School of Mines and knew his college fame.
“So your husband sings?” Dr. Vessinger asked.
“We will hear,” his wife replied tranquilly. “Listen!”
The drinking song, which was not meant for dinner-parties where any proprieties were observed, rolled out, at first uncertainly and then with greater force. At the end of the stanza, young men’s voices from all over the house shouted out the chorus. One or two of the older men shook their heads, and while laughing said: “No, no. That’s too bad! Some one should stop him.”
“It seems to take,” Dr. Vessinger murmured to Mrs. Simmons. “He has chosen that moment of inspiration when we are all drunk enough to think it a great song and not too drunk to join the chorus. Bravo! More, more!” he called with those who were applauding.
It was, apparently, a tremendous success. Men were patting Simmons on the back, and a servant was filling his glass with champagne. The calls for another stanza grew more clamorous.
His wife looked at him stonily. She did not make much of his unaccustomed drinking, of the spectacle he was offering of himself to their public. She was wondering at his male mind. How could he find it in him—just now with the truth they both knew but two hours cold in his memory—how could he find the heart to drink and sing? She had said to him defiantly that she would get joy in spite of all. But was there anything in life which could make her drink and sing and forget? Her heart was shut to pleasure, and she looked at him coldly, as one might look at a bad actor who is much applauded.
He, poor man! had sat down to the feast with the twin devils of despair and remorse by his side. The others around him laughed and were merry. Why should his food taste bitter when to them it seemed sweet? Why should his be the wife and his the child? He felt himself to be a common man, and wished to have their taste for the feast, their content with common life. So he began to drink because it was pleasant to drink. The devils faded as the spirit of champagne entered him. At last he was comfortable, and then happy. The woman by his side, the Magnificent Wreck, became beautiful, witty, and alluring. The woman at his left smiled with a pretty doll’s smile, showing her nice teeth, white like porcelain. He was drunk; he knew it, and he was happy!
So he wanted to sing, to make the room ring with his new joy. There seemed to open a concealed door in his mind, and out tramped words and sounds, expressing beautiful, happy feelings; he was singing....
“On the table! On the table!” they shouted to him. “Up, up!”
The older men were trying to calm the racket to a more decorous note. But already they had cleared the dishes and glass from his end of the table, and the Magnificent Wreck, with glistening eyes, was applauding, urging him on. He hopped on his chair, like a boy, as he had done years ago at college dinners. He placed one foot on the table to steady himself, raised the long-stemmed wine-glass above his head, and, less certainly, out rolled the second stanza.
It was good to be drunk, if this were being drunk! Again, with all the volume of the first time, sprang the notes of the chorus.
Simmons raised his long-stemmed glass and waved it slowly in a circle above his head. They clapped and stamped and sang over again the chorus.
“Why not leave? Why inflict this on yourself?” the doctor asked his companion.
“That does not make me miserable,” she answered coldly, recognizing how he had mistaken her. “It is foolish, of course, to drink too much. He will be sorry to-morrow.”
“What is it then that burns your eyes, and gives you that look of pain?”
“I will never tell you!”
“Perhaps I can guess,” he answered at random.
Her eyes lost their defiance. Perhaps this subtle doctor, who could read the miseries of life, had seen and comprehended all, that afternoon when he had come to call. The shame that she vowed to herself he should know last of all, he knew, perchance, best of all.
“Don’t reject my sympathy,” he added. “I pity you.”
His voice had softened from the tone of irony. His gentleness broke down her pride. There was something humanly warm and kindly in his sympathy. It seemed to reach farther than her husband’s. A mist gathered in her eyes, and she lowered her head that he might not see the possible tears and the quivering lips....
Would her fate have been thus cruel, if, in the years gone by, in the Sicilian garden, she had preferred this man,—if this man, who loved her, had been bound with her? Would she have known the clutch of terror and felt the wound from the arms of her son? The child who was hers and another’s—might he not have been wholly hers?
She thought bitterly how the male heart had its escape from misery,—such an easy, common one! She wanted her escape. She could not drink and shout; she could fly, leave the terror behind her, and seek a new self in a new world.
“To one that loves you as I do, your misery is his misery, and your despair is his.”
She felt that she should resent his words, but her heart welcomed them.
There was a cry in the room below them, then a crash, and the song came to an inglorious end. Simmons had circled the swaying yellow ball of sparkling wine in too ample an arc. The champagne dashed upon the laughing, upturned face of their hostess; the glass shattered on the floor. A kindly hand saved Simmons from falling.
Dr. Vessinger’s sharp eyes detected the glance of contempt in the wife’s face.
“I think a breath of night air would suit us both better than this hubbub,” he suggested, opening the casement window behind him. “Will you take my arm, Evelyn?”
She hesitated a moment, a sense of duty to be done detaining her. Then, with another look at her husband, at the noisy room of flushed people, repugnance mounted too high; she placed her hand on the doctor’s arm, and stepped down to the terrace beneath the casement. Beyond lay the scented gardens, the breadth of cool heavens, the velvet darkness outside the range of light from the cottage windows, pointed in places by tall poplars.
“Let us get beyond the sound of their noise,” the doctor murmured, drawing her more closely to him. A fresh burst of laughter, doubtless caused by some new antic of her husband, sped her steps away from the band of light about the house. She shivered with distaste of it. Not that! Rather to flee away in the cool, dark night, away forever from the life which she had known and which was a failure,—to find escape from the threatening horror which was hers and his!
Vessinger drew her wrap more closely about her, with an air of domination, and she followed submissively through the deserted alleys of the dark garden, listening to his tense words, in a lethargy of spirit....
There was an eruption from the brilliant house. Men’s voices reached the pair in the garden. The voices protested, coaxed; for a time they faded away to the other side of the house. Then they returned, and the woman in the garden heard her husband speaking thickly and loudly.
“That’s all right, boys. But I must find my wife, first. Dixey says he saw her go out here, when I was singing.”
She started involuntarily, but the doctor restrained her.
“They will take him away,” he whispered, “in a minute.”
Evidently that was what his companions were endeavoring to do, but Simmons with drunken obstinacy persisted in his point.
“Yes,” he said, in his loud, confident voice, “I’ll go with you all right, just as soon as I find my wife. Never left my wife. It wouldn’t be right, you know!”
She slipped her arm from her companion, and walked rapidly toward the terrace, Vessinger following her.
“I am here, Olaf,” she said, going up to the knot of men. “Are you looking for me?”
His companions separated awkwardly,—all but one, who held Simmons’s swaying figure.
“That you, Evelyn? Wanted to tell you that I am going in town with these fellows. Let me get the carriage for you. Don’t mind going home alone, do you, Evelyn?”
“I will take Mrs. Simmons to her carriage,” Vessinger offered, stepping forward.
“Excuse me!” Simmons replied, waving him back. “Will you take my arm, Evelyn?”
Together in some fashion, they reached the porte-cochère, and there again Vessinger tried to put Mrs. Simmons in the carriage, to whisper a word privately to her.
“Shan’t I drive back with Mrs. Simmons?” he asked. Simmons wavered unsteadily, looking at Vessinger all the time. Then he said very distinctly:
“No thank you, Vessinger. We can trust the coachman,—good man, the coachman.”
He handed his wife to the carriage.
“Won’t you come, Olaf?” she asked. “I think you had better come with me.”
Her tone was cold and hard. The man drew himself up quickly.
“Thank you, Evelyn. I had rather not. Good-night.”
He closed the carriage door, and turned to the men, who had been awkwardly watching the performance from a distance.
“Drive on, Tom. Ready now, boys.”
