After the maid had gone Mrs. Treharne went to her desk and wrote to Louise, telling her that she was leaving the house on the Drive, not to return. It was a long, self-reproachful letter, threaded with the wistful but not outrightly expressed hope that the step she was taking would atone, if only in a slight degree, for the "wretched sin," as she called it, of having permitted her daughter to set foot within the Riverside Drive establishment. She did not mention Langdon Jesse's name. She felt a singular uneasiness over the thought that Jesse's approaching visit to London in some way involved the weaving of a net about her daughter; but she dismissed that thought, as often as it recurred, when she considered Louise's poise and her protection by Laura Stedham, an experienced woman of the world. Moreover, Mrs. Treharne would have found it difficult, unless there were some grave actual peril, to mention Jesse's name in a letter to her daughter; for it brought the blood to her face to remember how unconcernedly she had permitted Louise to meet the man—how she had even chided her daughter for not having accepted Jesse's attentions in a more pliant, not to say grateful, spirit.
"I am leaving with Heloise tomorrow, dear, but I have not decided where to go," she concluded. "I shall write or cable you an address before long. I am entirely well, though I believe I need rest and change. Have out your good time—I know that you are in good hands with Laura, to whom my love. I am looking forward to our new, happy life when you return to me."
Then she penned a little note to be left behind for Judd.
"Don't think me unkind for going without seeing you again," she wrote. "We have gone over it all, and we are both of the same opinion as to the need for the step I am taking. I cannot quite tell you how you have advanced in my opinion for some of the things you said tonight. You have been very fair, and I am correspondingly grateful. I will not be so banal as to suggest that, if there be any chance for a reconciliation, or at least a decent armistice, between you and your wife, it might be at least a solution of a sort, considering your children; I only wish that I could suggest that outright without incurring the suspicion that, having made a belated repentance myself, I am seeking to reform the world. One thing, however, I shall say outright: If I had it all to do over again, I should conform. There is no other way for a woman. We seek to ridicule the promptings of conscience by calling conscience an abnormality, a thing installed in us to whip us into line with age-old system. But it won't do. It is, after all, the true voice. I wish I had never closed my ears to its urgings.
"Time heals all. You will find yourself thinking less and less often of me as the days drift by. That is as it should be. I am sorry for the hurt—I did not know until you spoke as you did tonight that it would be a hurt—I am inflicting upon you in thus effacing myself, at such short notice, from your life. But Time heals. Goodbye, and all best wishes."
Before noon, on the following day, Mrs. Treharne and Heloise left the house on the Drive, leaving no word behind as to whither they were bound.
CHAPTER XIII
Langdon Jesse maintained a bachelor apartment in London the year round. When he arrived there, about a fortnight after his turbulent scene with Mrs. Treharne and his signally unsuccessful attempt at an entente with Blythe, he found everything in order, quite as he had left it the year before. Gaskins, factotum and general overseer of the bachelor apartments, of which there were three tiers, Jesse's being the second, was a little more bald and fat, but he still rubbed his hands as a mark of subservience and cocked his head to one side in a bird-like way while engaged in conversation with his supposititious superior. He had a respectful but earnest complaint to make of one of Jesse's New York cronies, a man engaged in the somewhat tempestuous task of drinking himself to death, who had occupied Jesse's apartment for a month during the spring; for it was Jesse's habit to extend the use of his London lodging, which was desirable mainly on account of its highly privileged character, to those of his intimates who happened to be in London while he himself was in New York.
"'E was more than 'arf-seas hover hall the time, sir," Gaskins told Jesse, lamentingly, "which of course was 'is privilege, but 'e did give 'isself some 'orrid bumps when 'e come 'ome along o' three or four o' mornings. Hi'm afraid 'e would 'ave killed 'iself, sir, falling hagainst the furniture, 'ad I not been living on the premises hand come hup hand got 'im straightened hout hin bed. Hand, sir, when Hi didn't come hup, 'e would halways go to sleep in the bath-tub with 'is clothes on. A swift goer, sir, but killing 'isself; killing 'isself fast."