But you who have an impressionable heart and a keen sense of your own shortcomings can guess what it was. Edna and I resumed the relations of affectionate husband and wife for the rest of my—brief—stop in London. I remained several days longer than I had intended—stayed on because I did not wish to hurt her feelings. And I bought her and Margot all sorts of jewelry and gew-gaws, largely increased her personal fortune, did not utter a word that would ruffle either of them. And I left them convinced that I was going only because business not to be neglected compelled.
They say that the hypocrite wife is a common occurrence. I wonder if the hypocrite husband is rare. I wonder if there are not more instances than this one of the husband and the wife playing a cross game of hypocrisy, with each fancying the other deceived?
So busy was I with my own laborings to deceive my wife as to the true state of my feelings toward her that not until I was halfway across the Atlantic did I happen to think the obvious thought. You, gentle reader, have not thought it. But perhaps some more intelligent species of reader has. In mid-Atlantic, I suddenly thought: “Why she—she and Margot—were playing a game—the same game. For what purpose?”
It was not many months before I found out.
VII
That summer Armitage was spending the week ends out on Long Island at the country place of his sister, Mrs. Kirkwood. He kept his yacht in the tiny harbor there and made short cruises in the Sound and up the New England coast. Naturally I often went with him. Those parties usually amused me. He knew a dozen interesting people—working people—such as Boris Raphael, the painter, and his wife, the architect, the Horace Armstrongs who had been divorced and remarried, a novelist named Beechman who wrote about the woods and lived in the wilderness in the Southwest most of the year, Susan Lenox the actress—several others of the same kind. Then there was his sister—Mary Kirkwood.
For a reason which will presently appear I have not before spoken of Mrs. Kirkwood, though I had known her longer than I had known Armitage. Her husband had been treasurer of the road when I was an under Vice President. He speculated in the road’s funds and it so happened that, when he was about to be caught, I was the only man who could save him from exposure. Instead of asking me directly, he sent his wife to me. I can see her now as she was that day—pale, haggard, but with that perfect composure which deceives the average human being into thinking, “Here is a person without nerves.” She told me the whole story in the manner of one relating a matter in which he has a sympathetic but remote interest. She made not the smallest attempt to work upon my feelings, to move me to pity. “And,” she ended, “if you will help him cover up the shortage, it will be made good and he will resign. I shall see to it that he does not take another position of trust.”
“Why didn’t he come to me, himself?” said I. “Why did he send you?”
She looked at me—a steady gaze from a pair of melancholy gray eyes. “I cannot answer that,” said she.
“I beg your pardon,” stammered I; for I guessed the answer to my question even as I was asking it. I knew the man—an arrogant coward, with the vanity to lure him into doing preposterous things and wilting weakness the instant trouble began to gather. “You wish me to save him?” I said, still confused and not knowing how to meet the situation.