A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

His anger mastered him again, he could not breathe properly, he bent over the side of the chair that he had gripped with shaking hands. When he tried to rise it seemed to him, for a moment, that he could not.

At this he became alarmed. "Mustn't go on like this!" he told himself, and instantly his muscles relaxed and he fell back in the chair, while rings of light seemed to shift before his eyes. When he sat up, wiping his hand across his wet forehead, he had collected himself, his anger was finally under his control. He was able to think about what he had better do, what he should say to Trent, what Lang would have found.

He left the chair and walked slowly to his desk. His desk, broad, massive, designed and equipped solely to serve his purpose, reassured him and gave him back for a moment his sense of dignity. With its smooth leather under his arms he could not doubt of his success—he had planned so many things at that desk, and compelled so much success. There were a hundred reasons why Mary should return at once, before anyone knew, if only he could get them in order. His head was full of them already—they crowded upon him. There must be a hundred ways, too, of forcing her to come back if only he could find them. He had merely to think, to set his brain to work. Unfortunately he did not want to think. He wanted to be angry, to give full scope to his indignation, and to find that the sheer force of it had brought her back. Since his childhood James had respected his anger. It was an important weapon, dreaded and deprecated by thousands of human beings. And since it was always effective he had lost the habit of calling it in question or asking himself whether it could be unjust. Now it seemed strange to him that, angry as he was, nothing happened. If Mary had been there she would have been terrified by his anger; now, simply because she had gone, because there was a little space between them, it was nothing to her. He did not understand clearly what was the matter, but he felt an odd sensation of discomfort, of discouragement, of frustration. He sought in his mind, vaguely, for some violent thing that he could do—something that would prove his power. Then he brought himself sharply back to the matter in hand. "What's wrong with me?" he thought. "Why am I doing nothing? By this time I ought to have decided what I mean to do!"

His discouragement deepened and with it grew a fear of this strange incapacity. "I'm not usually like this," he thought—if only Mary had been there, there was so much that he could have said to her! But she was gone.

He made a last effort to think of some way of finding her immediately. He could put the screw on to the manager of the bank and make him give up her address—he could set detectives to find her. But he did not care for either of these plans. The manager would not like going back on Mary, nor did he believe in any but the acquisitive powers of detectives. Sooner or later of course Mary, being a woman, would give herself away; meanwhile he must wait.

He must wait—impotent, tortured by his own useless rage—the notion appalled him. He was not a man who was accustomed to wait, to suffer—every force that was in him struggled against the idea. Then, as he could still find no immediate solution, his alarm returned. The state of affairs was wrong, unnatural, something must be the matter. "Perhaps I was too angry," he thought, "I have upset myself!" He walked to a small mirror that hung over a side table and looked at himself in the glass. He looked tired and shaken, he decided, and with the thought came a sensation of weakness and fatigue. He turned away from the mirror and went back, mechanically, to his desk. "After all," he thought, "I am getting old—I can't stand these things as I used to!" It was a moment before he grasped the significance of the words.

Then his hatred of Mary blazed out again. That was why she had done it—he was old—she had taken advantage of his age—ten years ago she would not have dared to defy him! She had left him, as he saw it now, with the callous indifference of youth. She was younger than he—she had not borne the burden of ceaseless work! She was a woman, she worshipped strength—to her he was merely an old man, whose strength was leaving him.

Then he made an effort to restore his own confidence. Mary was wrong—she would find out her mistake—only that morning he had felt as young as ever! But he could not deceive himself, he knew that ten years ago he would have taken action instead of wasting his time among ideas. "Here I sit," he thought; "I tell myself that I must do something, find something to do, and still I sit doing nothing!" He was seized again, as he had been seized the night before, with profound despondency. Something was wrong, but its causes lay outside the habitual action of his mind. He sat on, not attempting now to cope with the stream of thoughts that passed before him. He missed, though he did not know it, Mary's audience and her sympathy.

At twenty minutes past six Lang came back with the car. He had done his best, he said, to make the man at the cloak-room attend to him, and the man had admitted finally that he believed, though he wasn't sure, that Mrs. Heyham had fetched her luggage about an hour after she put it in.

James nodded, and Lang went. In another half-hour Trent would be back from the works. He took Mary's letter from his pocket and read it again to see if there was anything in it that he could not show to Trent. The boy, after all, was his partner. He would have to have an explanation of some sort. Plausible explanations of Mary's flight began to develop themselves in James's mind. He did not want Trent to know about Greta—Trent was such a prig. But as the clock struck half-past he decided, in a sudden access of impatience, that he would go out and leave the letter behind him for Trent to find. He would have dinner somewhere where there was a crowd of people. He couldn't face a tongue—tied meal with Trent staring at him across the table, and the servants coming in and out of the room. He couldn't face, either, Trent's surprise and his damn-fool questions. The boy was all right when he'd thought a thing over, but he wasn't quick.