“Excuse me for asking such a silly question. What other crime has he committed besides being old?—I mean Mr. Welles.”
“Stupidity is worse than criminal.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“When does your paper come out?”
“Day after to-morrow. Much obliged. You are a friend in need. Don't ring off yet. Listen! You are also a dirty, low-lived, sneaking, cowardly dog, and a general, all-round, unrelieved, monumental—” It was the one way the editor had of showing that he was better than his anonymous contributor.
Jerningham, of course, went on board the Ruritania to see Frank off. Ashton Welles was also there to say good-by to his young and beautiful wife. It was their first separation, and Welles did not like it. He seemed to feel her absence in advance; it was really that, as the hour drew near, he realized more vividly how lonely she would leave him! They have a saying in Spain that a man may grow accustomed to bearing sorrow, but that nobody can get used to that happiness which comes merely to disappear immediately after. A cigar manufacturer from Havana had once quoted this to Ashton Welles, and Ashton Welles was impressed less by the saying than by the fact that the Spaniard was so serious about it. But now he remembered it.
He was very uncomfortable and this discomfort made his mental machinery act queerly; it seemed to tint his thoughts with strange, unusual hues that made them almost morbid. He would have felt contempt for his own weakness had he not been so full of half-angry regret at being left alone in New York—this man who never had possessed an intimate friend; who not even as a boy had a chum!
Of course it was only a coincidence that young Mr. Francis Wolfe was to be young Mrs. Ashton Welles's fellow-passenger; and it was also a coincidence that Mr. Wolfe's stateroom was just across the passageway from Mrs. Welles's suite. Indeed, neither of the young people had picked out the cabins—but there they were. And there, in Ashton Welles's mind, was another unformulated unpleasantness.
Frank's sisters were so proud Frank was going to put through an important business deal that they showed it. But if they were glad that Mrs. Welles was also going they did not show it. They recalled Frank's desire to meet the pretty young matron whose husband was thirty years older, and they were rather ostentatiously polite to her. Ashton Welles, in his disturbed state of mind, somehow felt that the attitude of Mrs. John Burt and Mrs. Sydney Walsingham was one of blame-fixing; but he could not definitely understand why there should be any blame to fix! He dismissed his semi-suspicions with the thought that women had petty minds. His wife was very pretty and Wolfe's sisters were not as young as they used to be. And youth is a terrible thing—to lose! It is hard to forgive youth for being, after one is past—well, say, past a certain age. And to prove that he himself had nothing to fear—absolutely nothing—he even smiled and said to young Mr. Wolfe:
“I feel certain, of course, that if Mrs. Welles should need anything—”