XIV
It was when Gilbert, after a most affectionate greeting and ten minutes of easy small talk, led her away from the disappointed group, that Alice made her first mistake.
“You don’t look at all well, Gilbert,” she said anxiously.
The very fact that he knew himself to be not at all well made him hate to be told so. An irritable line ran across his forehead. “Oh, yes, I’m well,” he said, “never better. Come along to the summer house and let’s put a dune between us and those vultures.”
He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch of undulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read the morning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux when the moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of the hyena. And there he sat her down and stood in front of her, enigmatically, wondering how much she knew. “If it comes to that,” he said, “you look far from well yourself, Alice.”
And she turned her pretty, prim face up to him with a sudden trembling of the lips. “What do you expect,” she asked, quite simply, “when I’ve only had one short letter from you all the time I’ve been away.”
“I never write letters,” he said. “You know that. How’s your mother?”
“But I wrote every day, and if you read them you’d know.”
He shifted one shoulder. These gentle creatures could be horribly disconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to open more than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration of a love that had never stirred him. “Yes, I’m glad she’s better. I’m afraid you’ve been rather bored. Illness is always boring.”
“I can only have one mother,” said Alice.
Palgrave felt the need of a cigarette. Alice, admirable as she was, had a fatal habit, he thought, of uttering bromides.
And she instantly regretted the remark. She knew that way of his of snapping his cigarette case. Was that heavily be-flowered church a dream and that great house in New York only part of a mirage? He seemed to be the husband of some other girl, barely able to tolerate this interruption. She had come determined to get the truth, however terrible it might be. But it was very difficult, and he was obviously not going to help her, and now that she saw him again, curiously worn and nervous and petulant, she dreaded to ask for facts under which her love was to be laid in waste.
“No wonder you like this place,” she said, beating about the bush.
“I don’t. I loathe it. The everlasting drumming of the sea puts me on edge. It’s as bad as living within sound of the elevated railway. And at night the frogs on the land side of the house add to the racket and make a row like a factory in full blast. I’d rather be condemned to a hospital for incurables than live on a dune.” He said all this with the sort of hysteria that she had never noticed in him before. He was indeed far from well. Hardly, in fact, recognizable. The suave, imperturbable Gilbert, with the quiet air of patronage and the cool irony of the polished man of the world,—what had become of him? Was it possible that Joan had resisted him? She couldn’t believe such a thing.
“Then why have you stayed so long?” she asked, with this new point of view stirring hope.
“There was nowhere else to go to,” he answered, refusing to meet her eyes.
This was too absurd to let pass. “But nothing has happened to the house at Newport, and the yacht’s been lying in the East River since the first of June and you said in your only letter that the two Japanese servants have been at the cottage near Devon for weeks!”
“I’m sick of Newport with all its tuft-hunting women, and the yacht doesn’t call me. As for the cottage, I’m going there to-morrow, possibly to-night.”
Alice got up quickly and stood in front of him. There was a spot of color on both her cheeks, and her hands were clasped together. “Gilbert, let’s both go there. Let’s get away from all these people for a time. I won’t ask you any questions or try and pry into what’s happened to you. I’ll be very quiet and help you to find yourself again.”
She had made another mistake. His sensitiveness gave him as many quills as a porcupine. “Find myself,” he said, quoting her unfortunate words with sarcasm. “What on earth do you mean by that, my good child?”
She forced back her rising tears. Had she utterly lost her rights as a wife? He was speaking to her in the tone that a man uses to an interfering sister. “What’s to become of me?” she asked.
“Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a free hand.”
“And will you join me there, Gilbert?”
“No. I’m not in the mood.”
He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house, and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog took a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. “Don’t you think you’d better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off.”
But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end she must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All her sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her, perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of a debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady and devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgive inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, when necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look of reproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only her future and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom she prayed. They must be considered.
And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompous summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horrible resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.
“Gilbert,” she said, “tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me help you, dear.”
Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing. “Help”—the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow youth crossed in love?
He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in all this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.
“When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?” he asked, with amazing cruelty. “We’re married,—isn’t that enough? I’ve given you everything I have except my independence. You can’t ask for more than that,—from me.”
He added “from me” because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,—more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn’t going to argue about it. The fact remained. “I’ll take you back,” he added.
But she blocked the way. “I only want your love,” she said. “If you’ve taken that away from me, nothing else counts.”
He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,—a caricature of the once easy-going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.
“All right then,” he said, “if you must know, you shall, but do me the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and blurred.” He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.
“This is going to hurt you,” he said, “but you’ve asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you’d better have it, naked and undisguised. In any case, you’re one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it. You’re too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Gilbert,” she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.
There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.
“One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of twenty-one,”—curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain self-consciousness,—“I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked back to the Maurice. It was the first time I’d ever been on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious undergraduate. But the ‘gay Paree’ stuff that was specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic tourist and isn’t really in the least French, bored me, almost at once. And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in life. It contained a woman, of course—a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze of trees. I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine, coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige my mother,—you asked for this,—and imagined that I had settled into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?”
“Please, Gilbert,” said Alice.
He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, “Well, if you enjoy the Christian martyr business it’s entirely your lookout.”
But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became more jerky and real. “I respected you, Alice,” he went on. “I didn’t love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see you in my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrack had ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions, adjust myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a young Gilbert.”
Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he was too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.
“And then,—it’s always the way,—I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I saw the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and the pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungry youth that I had always wanted to be.” He stopped and got up and walked up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back in his face.
“And the girl is Joan?” asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharp note for once.
“Yes,” he said. “Joan.... She’s done it,” he added, no longer choosing his words. “She’s got me. She’s in my blood. I’m insane about her. I follow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word, slinking away with my tail between my legs when she orders me to heel. My God, it’s hell! I’m as near madness as a poor devil of a dope fiend out of reach of his joy. I wish I’d never seen her. She’s made me loathe myself. She’s put me through every stage of humiliation. I’d rather be dead than endure this craving that’s worse than a disease. You were right when you said that I’m ill. I am ill. I’m horribly ill. I’m... I’m...”
He stammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with his hands.
And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true womanly love ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms about his neck and drew his head down on her shoulder.
And he left it there, with tears.
A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.
As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed to be coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play her last card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage of “Mrs. Gray” and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipe between his teeth, was thinking about Joan.
Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having an abscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment of affectation, he had never been so much of a man.
There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything either strange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and was not ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in her own life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could understand, even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to Gilbert. She adopted his words in thinking it all over. They appealed to her as being exactly right.
She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with the aid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be drawn back to her and mended. She almost used Hosack’s caustic expression “rescued.” The word came into her mind but was instantly discarded because it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had played with Gilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know that any girl could see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool she was supremely thankful that the complication was not as tragic as it might have been. So long as Joan held out, the ruin of her marriage was incomplete. Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant light. Gilbert had gone back to youth. It seemed to her that she had better treat him as though he were very young and hurt.
“Dearest,” she said, “I’m going to take you away.”
“Are you, Alice?”
“Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and get your strength back.”
He gave a queer laugh. “You talk like a mother,” he said, with a catch in his voice.
She went forward and kissed him passionately.
“I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man,” she whispered. “Never forget that.”
“You’re,—you’re a good woman, Alice; I’m not worthy of you, my dear.”
It pained her exquisitely to see him so humble.... Wait until she met Joan. She should be made to pay the price for this! “Who cares?” had been her cry. How many others had she made to care?
“I’ll go back to Mrs. Jekyll now,” she went on, almost afraid that things were running too well to be true, “and stay at Southampton to-night. To-morrow I’ll return to New York and have everything packed and ready by the time you join me there. And I’ll send a telegram to Captain Stewart to expect us on Friday. Then we’ll go to sea and be alone and get refreshment from the wide spaces and the clean air.”
“Just as you say,” he said, patting her hand. He was terribly like a boy who had slipped and fallen.
Then she got up, nearer to a breakdown than ever before. It was such a queer reversal of their old positions. And in order that he shouldn’t rise she put her hands on his shoulders and stood close to him so that his head was against her breast.
“God bless you, dearest boy,” she said softly. “Trust in me. Give all your troubles to me. I’m your wife, and I need them. They belong to me. They’re mine. I took them all over when you gave me my ring.” She lifted his face that was worn as from a consuming fire and kissed his unresponsive lips. “Stay here,” she added, “and I’ll go back. To-morrow then, in New York.”
He echoed her. “To-morrow then, in New York,” and held her hand against his forehead.
Just once she looked back, saw him bent double and stopped. A prophetic feeling that she was never to hear his voice again seized her in a cold grip,—but she shook it off and put a smile on her face with which to stand before the scandal-mongers.
And there stood Joan, looking as though she had seen a ghost.