Much of the town's attention fastened itself upon Archibald. Scandals there had been before this, even in its upper circles; but they had maintained hitherto a decent surreptitiousness, had veiled themselves beneath a more or less transparent cover of secrecy, until some climax occurred in the way of pistol-shot or divorce-proceeding. The tertium quid, acknowledged and accepted, was new to the experience of Louisville; and very interesting.
Meanwhile Stefan Nikolai, all unconscious of the stimulus he was offering to general conversation, spent all of his free hours with Joan, having long since faced and discounted the risk of it so far as he was concerned. The risk Joan herself might run appeared to his experience negligible. He had never even in his youth attracted women as less intellectual men attract them.
Doubtless even had he been aware of the town's talk it would not have troubled him. For all his knowledge of humanity, he was no man of the world, in the accepted sense of the term. He lived too much beyond it to attach great importance to its opinion. In only one person he recognized any right of criticism. That was Joan's husband, with whom long since he had come to an understanding.
It is a pity that neither Joan nor Joan's world ever came to know of this understanding, which would have added to the affair a distinct flavor.
Mr. Nikolai had taken a small apartment, where Joan and her husband and occasionally others dined with him, or dropped in for a glass of tea in the Russian fashion and an hour of two of music afterwards. Nikolai, true to the instinct of his race, never made even a temporary home without music in it. He had, in addition to a piano, various instruments collected in different lands, among them a balalaika upon which the servant Sacha could sometimes be induced to play a shy accompaniment to peasant ballads.
But Archie had never come there without Joan; and so one day when he dropped in alone, ostensibly to "hear the Rooshian pick his banjo," Nikolai felt a surprise that he was careful not to show. His trained eyes detected signs of distress in Archie which others, including his wife, had failed to notice. The beaming smile did not conceal from Nikolai a little anxious pucker between the brows, a nervous twitching of the big freckled hands.
The writer was not unused to being taken into the confidence of troubled people. It was one of the things that compensated for the enforced solitude of his life, such an occasional glimpse into the secret hearts of his fellow-men. It is an odd fact that writers and philosophers and even poets, all people who live necessarily a little apart from their kind, are frequently chosen as confessors by those who feel the need of confession.
So Nikolai asked no questions, sure that a friendly silence and a good cigar would produce results. Nor did he ring for Sacha and the "banjo." At length Archie blurted out without preliminaries:
"Joan isn't happy, Mr. Nikolai. I guess you've noticed that! She hasn't been for a long while. I'm not sure she ever was.—I s'pose I was a fool to think a man like me could make her happy."
"It is a large order for any one human being to make another human being happy, Blair."