In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife’s feelings for Flamel. From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed….
Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He always skipped the “literary notices” in the papers and he had small leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the “Aubyn Letters” had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.
But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses—the tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death….
He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him with her blood….
That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her—
Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
“Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I’d left it on this table.” He said nothing, and she went on: “You haven’t seen it?”
“No,” he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he looked up he met her tentative gaze. “I was reading an article in it—a review of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters,” she added, slowly, with her deep, deliberate blush.
Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish that she would not speak the other woman’s name; nothing else seemed to matter. “You seem to do a lot of reading,” he said.
She still earnestly confronted him. “I was keeping this for you—I thought it might interest you,” she said, with an air of gentle insistence.
He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
“I haven’t time for such things,” he said, indifferently. As he moved to the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.
XI
As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases; the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by Margaret Aubyn’s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental reparation, but rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the reality of the tie between them.
The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to share the narrow hospitality of her husband’s last lodging; but though Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse; she had died alone, as she had lived; and the “distinguished mourners” who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the living. Glennard’s eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues.
“How she would have hated it!” he murmured.
A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks. Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery. Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he asked for some flowers.
“Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the dripping counter.
Glennard shoo
k his head.
“Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn’s nearness—not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms….
The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.
XII
The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a final effort of escape from his wife’s inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife’s indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes seemed, understood without knowing.
In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.
To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually led him to the Park and its outlying regions.
One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon streaked with east wind. Glennard’s cab advanced slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that wound under bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple, who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait to a conversation marked by meditative intervals. Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife’s profile. The man was Flamel.
The blood rushed to Glennard’s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called out—“Turn—drive back—anywhere—I’m in a hurry—”
As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.
“My God, my God—” he groaned.
It was hideous—it was abominable—he could not understand it. The woman was nothing to him—less than nothing—yet the blood hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt—almost a physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably sick….
He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.
He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out. His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought reverberated endlessly…. At length he drew his chair to the table and began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he had written.
“MY DEAR FLAMEL,”
“Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters.”
“Trusting you will excuse the oversight,
“Yours truly,
“STEPHEN GLENNARD.”
He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the post-box at the corner.
The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
“My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?” Glennard recognized his check.
“That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before.”
Flamel’s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his accent changed and he asked, quickly: “On what ground?”
Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. “On the ground that you sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is entitled to a percentage on the sale.”
Flamel paused before answering. “You find, you say. It’s a recent discovery?”
“Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I’m new to the business.”
“And since when have you discovered that there was any question of business, as far as I was concerned?”
Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. “Are you reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?”
Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice, rejoined, good-humoredly, “Upon my soul, I don’t understand you!”
The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. “It’s simple enough—” he muttered.
“Simple enough—your offering me money in return for a friendly service? I don’t know what your other friends expect!”
“Some of my friends wouldn’t have undertaken the job. Those who would have done so would probably have expected to be paid.”
He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other. Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate note. “If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I’ve never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the letters.”
“That’s just it!”
“What—?”
“The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man’s got stolen goods to pawn he doesn’t take them to the police-station.”
“Stolen?” Flamel echoed. “The letters were stolen?”
Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. “How much longer to you expect me to keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were written to me.”
Flamel looked at him in silence. “Were they?” he said at length. “I didn’t know it.”
“And didn’t suspect it, I suppose,” Glennard sneered.
The other was again silent; then he said, “I may remind you that, supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the originals.”
“What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It’s the kind of thing one can easily do.”
Flamel glanced at him with contempt. “Our ideas probably differ as to what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me.”
“Ah,” said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel’s muscles were under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to speak.
“If she knows, it’s not through me.” It was what Glennard had waited for.
“Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed of my actions? I didn’t suppose even such egregious conceit as yours could delude a man to that degree!” Struggling for a foothold in the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, “My wife learned the facts from me.”
Flamel received this in silence. The other’s outbreak seemed to have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a deliberation implying that his course was chosen. “In that case I understand still less—”
“Still less—?”
“The meaning of this.” He pointed to the check. “When you began to speak I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was intended as a random insult. In either case, here’s my answer.”
The Touchstone Page 7