Mr. Broad was becoming embarrassed. “You see Mr. William Gracy rather frequently at his son-in-law’s?”
“He’s living there,” I answered bluntly.
Mr. Broad heaved a sigh. “Yes. It’s a fine thing of Mr. Delane ... but does he quite realize the consequences? His own family side with his wife. You’ll wonder at my speaking with such frankness ... but I’ve been asked ... it has been suggested....”
“If he weren’t there he’d be in the gutter.”
Mr. Broad sighed more deeply. “Ah, it’s a problem.... You may ask why I don’t speak directly to Mr. Delane ... but it’s so delicate, and he’s so uncommunicative. Still, there are Institutions.... You don’t feel there’s anything to be done?”
I was silent, and he shook hands, murmured: “This is confidential,” and made a motion of dismissal. I withdrew to my desk, feeling that the situation must indeed be grave if Mr. Broad could so emphasize it by consulting me.
New York, to ease its mind of the matter, had finally decided that Hayley Delane was “queer.” There were the two of them, madmen both, hobnobbing together under his roof; no wonder poor Leila found the place untenable! That view, bruited about, as such things are, with a mysterious underground rapidity, prepared me for what was to follow.
One day during the Easter holidays I went to dine with the Delanes, and finding my host alone with old Gracy I concluded that Leila had again gone off with the children. She had: she had been gone a week, and had just sent a letter to her husband saying that she was sailing from Montreal with the little girl. The boys would be sent back to Groton with a trusted servant. She would add nothing more, as she did not wish to reflect unkindly on what his own family agreed with her in thinking an act of ill-advised generosity. He knew that she was worn out by the strain he had imposed on her, and would understand her wishing to get away for a while....
She had left him.
Such events were not, in those days, the matters of course they have since become; and I doubt if, on a man like Delane, the blow would ever have fallen lightly. Certainly that evening was the grimmest I ever passed in his company. I had the same impression as on the day of Bolton Byrne’s chastisement: the sense that Delane did not care a fig for public opinion. His knowing that it sided with his wife did not, I believe, affect him in the least; nor did her own view of his conduct—and for that I was unprepared. What really ailed him, I discovered, was his loneliness. He missed her, he wanted her back—her trivial irritating presence was the thing in the world he could least dispense with. But when he told me what she had done he simply added: “I see no help for it; we’ve both of us got a right to our own opinion.”