'Pardon me, I do not pretend, I do not say, anything of the sort. I am perfectly well aware of the motive which led to Mr. Griswold's making the arrangement which is unpleasant to you, but which I am constrained to commend as a wise and proper one. I merely say that I regret that it is not in my power to inform you of his reasons.'
'You refuse to tell me; you acknowledge that you are in my husband's confidence more completely than I am--you tell me so in fact, commending his unexplained directions to me--and you expect me to tolerate all this. For what do you take me, Mr. Warren?'
The struggle in Helen's mind and feelings while she spoke these brave-sounding words was severe. Under the smooth leisurely manner of Warren there was an ill-disguised consciousness of power which frightened her, and there was that nameless something that had already been haunting her. She was not exactly a courageous, but she was a singularly sincere woman, and there is always more or less bravery in truthful actions. She made a sudden resolution even while her blood was cold, as she asked the question of herself: 'Has Alston put himself in this man's power?' She would quarrel with Warren à l'outrance then and there. She would put an end to this evil influence in her life; it should haunt her no longer. She would justify herself to Alston if he blamed her by confiding in him, as she had not yet done by telling him, the inmost dread of her heart. If he treated it as a folly, she would say let it be a folly in his eyes, let it be a folly of hers, which she should look to him to respect. A full presentiment and an intimation which she truly and fully believed (there was a dash of superstition about Helen Griswold)--with which women with more mind than any one who has taken the trouble to develop, and an unconsciously unsatisfied heart one occasionally possessed--told her that in an utter breach with this man, a determined stand against him, lay her only safety. She would make the utter breach now on the spot; she would take a determined stand.
With the wonderful quickness of thought, all this passed through her mind, and her resolution was taken before Trenton Warren answered her angry question, which he did with considerable deliberation. He too, had been making a resolution; he, too recognised this interview as a crisis in his relations with this woman--this woman so beautiful in his sight, so captivating, so far removed--unless, indeed, his skill and daring, his 'good play,' as he called it ii his inmost thoughts, chanced to bring her near. The events of that morning had curtailed. the space between them in an unexpected, unlooked-for manner. And he entirely misinterpreted the irrepressible symptoms of emotion in Helen's manner. He saw hat, with all her braving out of the position she was afraid of him; and, as he judged her only from the shallow depths of his own consciousness, as one who did not love her husband with passion, and therefore did not love him at all, it never occurred to him that she feared him for her husband's sake--he sought and found a meaner motive for her fear. Why should she fear him? Why should she shrink from the notion of his influence with the husband she assuredly did not love, if she were unconscious that he had not an influence over herself which she dreaded? Fear comes not of indifference, nor is one with disdain! The hope which he had secretly cherished in his treacherous breast in a smouldering state for months past sprang up into a flame under the influence of Helen's misinterpreted anger. The mental process in his case was as swift as in hers, and it was after only a brief pause between question and answer that he replied to her.
'I refuse to tell you, Mrs. Griswold. It is impossible that I should violate your husband's injunctions on this point, and I hasten to reply to your other question. I do expect you to tolerate my conduct, because you must recognise that honour dictates it, though you may not understand what it costs me; and I take you for the best of wives and the most fascinating of women.'
He approached her as he spoke with his hand held out, and a smile upon his face which drove the last faint scruples of prudence far from the exasperated woman whom he had so thoroughly roused; but Helen rolled her chair some feet back upon the castors, and, with a slight wave of her hand, rejected his. Very beautiful she looked--more beautiful than he had ever seen her--her great eyes ablaze, so that they shone like jewels, as she said:
'And I take you for the falsest of men. You have always been my enemy, and I have always known it--known it so long and so well, felt it so constantly, that it is a relief to me to tell you so. Keep this secret from me! Do you think Alston will keep it, when I ask him to explain it to me? No; you know he will not, though you would have made me despise and distrust him, if you could. Yes, you would, and you tried, tried hard, for some purpose of your own--I do not know and I do not care for what purpose--to divide us utterly. You succeeded in part--thank God, only in part did you succeed! Alston would have made me his friend and confidant only for you. But you made him contemptuous of my intelligence; you persuaded him that women are unsafe in matters of business; you divided me from one-half my husband's life, and made it a mystery to me. But for you I should have been his companion in everything. I tell you, Mr. Warren, I distrusted you from the first. I saw you had an influence which you were using ill, I--'
'You did me the honour and yourself the injury of being jealous of me, Mrs. Griswold. It is a mistake which young wives are apt to make with respect to their husbands' friends, and one which frequently costs them a good deal.'
'I was not jealous of you,' she said indignantly. 'I could not entertain so base a feeling. Why should not Alston have friends, as many and as close as he pleased? But you were his enemy--not his friend; because you were my enemy; because you would have degraded me if you could--yes, degraded me, I repeat--by making my husband treat me as a toy or an indulged pet, not as an equal associate.'
'You are simply doing him a monstrous injustice,' said Warren, with a sudden abatement of sarcasm in his tone and manner, and a not unsuccessful assumption of hurt-feeling, of deferential explanatoriness; 'you are imputing that which is in the nature of the man to an external influence. Griswold is a very good fellow, and my best friend; but his notions of women, all his theories about them, differ from mine widely. He believes in the intellectual inferiority of women as he believes in their physical beauty, and likes it as much. Long before he married you, he told me a clever woman was, to his mind, an anomaly, and a clever wife a nuisance; that he did not believe any woman in the world could understand business or hold her tongue; and he meant to conduct his domestic relations, if he ever found any, on Hotspur's theory, and, while giving his wife all due credit for discretion, making sure that she "would not tell that which she did not know." This root of bitterness was none of my planting, nor have I watered it. You have spoken with harsh frankness to me, Mrs. Griswold; let me speak with frankness that shall not be harsh to you. I have contemplated your domestic life with pain--'