XI
I imagine that thereafter for a time John Fulton's attitude toward Lucy was now dignified and manly, and now almost childlike in its despair. Having made her love him once, he must have felt at first that he could make her love him again. I imagine him making love to her with all the chivalry and poetry that was in him, and then breaking off short to rail against fate, against the whole treacherous race of women, perhaps, and to ask what he had done to deserve so much suffering? "Why didn't you do this to me when I was proposing? Why did you wait till I was stone broke and worried half sick, with everything going from bad to worse? Is it anything I've done, anything I've failed to do? Why, Lucy, we were such a model of happiness that people looked up to us. How can anybody suddenly stop caring the way you have? If it had been gradual! But you were in love with me the night I went away, weren't you? Weren't you?"
Here he catches her shoulders and forces that one admission from her, and makes the great praying woebegone eyes meet his. Then, almost, he pushes her away from him.
"And I go away for a few days," he cries, "and come back and everything is changed. I who had a sweetheart, haven't even a wife. Why have you changed so? There must be a reason? What is it? Are you sick? Have you eaten something that has made you forget? Have you been bewitched? That's no fool question. Have you? Have you?"
"Have I what?"
"Have you been bewitched? Tell me, dear, who has done this thing to you?"
Again he has her by the shoulders.
"Lucy, is there someone? Never mind the other things, just tell me that? You've gotten to like someone else? Is that it?"
And Lucy must have answered that there was no one else. And there is no question but that to the best of her belief and knowledge she was telling the truth.
But the mere thought that there might be someone else had moved Fulton as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system, so that only death can wholly cure him.
Like some vile reptile it had found within him some cave from which it might emerge to brandish its hideous envenomed horned head, and into which betimes it might withdraw.
I can imagine no one so stupid as to question any serious statement of fact that Lucy might make. Her eyes were wells of truth; her voice fearless and sure, like that of some kingly boy.
So when she said there was no one, Fulton, who knew her far better than anyone else, believed her without any question. And a great weight must have been lifted from his heart. With the truth that he had wrung from her, I think he must have rested almost content for a few hours.
But contentment is far off from a man who hears the great edifice of love and happiness which he has reared, crashing about his ears.
He could not make up his mind to any definite course of action. Now, calm and judicial, I hear him discussing matters with coolness, and self-forgetfulness.
"If there is any chance for me, ever," he would say, "it would be silly of us to take any action which would be final. And, besides, I don't see how I could reconcile my conscience to giving you a divorce. Or you yours to getting one. It would be hard enough for you to lie about the most trifling thing. You couldn't, you simply couldn't face the court and tell them that I had been cruel and unfaithful. You couldn't accuse me of anything so gross, and so unlike me, as the other woman who would have to be hired for the occasion. There's another side to it. I think the children are better off with you than with me. You're the best mother that ever was, the most sensible and the most careful. But I don't think I could give them up. If you and the babies were all three to drop out of my life, I'd have nothing left but the duty of finding money to support you. There's a certain pleasure in doing your duty, of course, but in this case hardly enough. Honestly, dear, with never a sight or touch of you, I simply couldn't keep things going long."
Then perhaps Lucy asked some such question as this: "Don't people often, when they've stopped caring about each other, go on living together just the same, as far as other people know? And really just be good friends and live their own lives?"
"This is very different. We haven't stopped caring about each other. You've stopped caring about me. I care about you, just as I did in the beginning, and always shall. We couldn't lead separate lives under the same roof. God knows I feel old enough, but I'm still a young man, and like it or not, you are still my wife. It is something to own the shell that once contained the pearl."
Another time he goes hurrying through the house, prayer-book in hand, a thumb marking the marriage ceremony. He has been brooding and brooding and snatching at straws.
"Read this, Lucy. Just look it over. It's what you and I stood up and promised before a lot of people. I'm glad I looked it up. You'll see right away that it's a contract which nobody could have the face to break. I want you to read it over to yourself."
