“Everything awaits madame,” he said.
CHAPTER XV.
A FLICKERING FIRE.
THEY made several journeys to Monsieur Germain that fall, as he did not close his inn and return to Philadelphia until the second week in December. He had the instinctive French passion for the romantically unconventional; and, while he was a severely proper person in his own domestic relations, the mystery of the quiet visits of this handsome young couple delighted him. He made them very comfortable indeed, and his big smooth face shone like a sun upon their happiness.
As Marlowe had always been most irregular in his appearances at the office, Emily’s absences did not connect her with him in the minds of their acquaintances. Even Joan suspected nothing. She saw that Marlowe was devoted to her beautiful friend and she believed that Emily loved him, but she had seen love go too often to be much affected by its coming.
After three months of this prolonged and peculiar honeymoon, Marlowe showed the first faint signs of impatience. It was a new part to him, this of being the eluded instead of the eluder, the uncertain, not the creator of uncertainty. And it was a part that baffled his love and irritated his vanity. He thought much upon ways and means of converting his Spartan marriage into one in which his authority, his headship would be recognized, and at last hit upon a plan of action which he ventured to hope might bring her to terms. He stayed away from her for two weeks, then went to Chicago for a month, writing her only an occasional brief note.
Before he left for Chicago, Emily was exceeding sick at heart. She kept up appearances at the office, but at home went about with a long and sad face. “They’ve quarrelled,” thought Joan, “and she’s taking it hard.” Emily was tempted to do many foolish things—for example, she wrote a dozen notes at least, each more or less ingeniously disguising its real purpose. But she sent none of them. “If he doesn’t care,” she reflected, “it would be humiliating myself to no purpose. And if he does care, he has a good reason which he’ll tell when he can.”
Then came his almost curt note announcing his departure for Chicago. She was angry—“he’s treating his wife as he wouldn’t treat a girl he’d been merely attentive to.” But, worse than angry, she was wounded, in the mortal spot in her love for him—her unquestioning confidence in him.
This might be called her introduction to the real Marlowe, the beginning of her acquaintance with the man she had married after a look at the outside of him and a distorted glimpse of such parts of the inside man as are shown by one bent upon making the most favourable impression.
When he had been in Chicago three weeks, came a long letter from him—“Forgive me. I was not content as we were living. I want you—all of you, all of the time. I want you as my very own. And I thought to win you to my way of thinking. But you seem to be stronger than I.” And so on through many pages, filled with passionate outpourings—extravagant compliments, alternations of pride and humility, all the eloquence of a lover with an emotional nature and a gift for writing. It was to her an irresistible appeal, so intensely did she long for him. But there drifted through her mind, to find lodgment in an obscure corner, the thought: “Why is he dissatisfied with a happiness that satisfies me? Why do I feel none of this desire to abandon my independence and submerge myself?” At the moment her answer was, that if she were to do as he wished he would remain free, while she would become his dependent. Afterward that answer did not satisfy her.
He came back, and their life went on as before until——