Jerry did not protest. The dream of passion was at an end. The Mercedes he had come to know in the intimacy of married life was so different a being from the Mercedes who had beguiled him in the summer, that he was not sorry to have her leave him. His pride was hurt and he felt angry and bitter against her, but he had no poignant regrets. Neither had loved. The ignoble instincts that had drawn them together were satiated. Her woman’s spite had worked itself out. His lust for her wealth, his desire for her possession, were satisfied. They were willing to part.
She left in April, it being understood that Jerry was to “go below” to see her every two weeks. The story that her health had been impaired by a climate which had proved too severe for many before her, was given out as the reason for her departure. Black Dan even was made to believe it. He also believed her assurances that she would return in the summer. He thought the few tears she shed were grief at parting with a husband whom he supposed she loved. He determined to watch Jerry closer than ever, and for this purpose moved into the house on B Street, where the husband was now left alone.
Thus it fell out for June that she was spared the sight of Jerry as a joyous bridegroom. Almost simultaneously with the Allens’ move to Virginia, Mercedes left it. June and Rosamund were arranging the Murchison mansion on B Street when Mrs. Jerome Barclay was beginning those extensive purchases in San Francisco which were to render her home on Van Ness Avenue a truly “palatial residence.”
June saw her old lover often. The contracted size of the town made it impossible for her to avoid him. More than once they encountered each other in the houses of friends, and were forced to interchange the little dead phrases of society. Both were shaken by these accidental meetings. June dreaded and shrank from the sight of his face and the sound of his voice; but Jerry went away from her presence, stirred and uplifted, his mind full of the thought of her, his sense of her charm reawakened.
His life, crowded with the strenuous business of men, was empty of what had been for years its main interest and preoccupation. The vain man, confident of his attractions, had been played with and scornfully cast aside. The bitterness of his marriage was as wormwood to him. He felt sore toward Mercedes, whose indifference toward him had roused in him the angry amaze that a spoiled child feels toward the stranger who is proof against its blandishments. He felt himself wronged, and in a way, trapped. They made him work like a day laborer for his salary, and his wife had left him. That was what he’d got by marrying! Lupé, poor, dead Lupé, would not have treated him so! And June—what a fool he’d been! He forgot that June had no money, and for that reason he had put her resolutely aside. He forgot that last year he had avoided her and tried to banish all thought of her. In his longing for the adulation and tenderness upon which he had lived her image came nearer and nearer, grew more and more disturbing and sweet.
Early in May Rosamund left for a week’s visit to San Francisco to accomplish the major part of her trousseau-buying. June, left in the Murchison mansion to “keep house”—a duty which she performed but ill—found many empty hours on her hands. She had made few friends in the new town. The apathy which had fallen on her at the time of Jerry’s engagement had not lifted, and the coming loss of Rosamund weighed heavier every day. In the tumult around her her life was quiet and colorless. She told the Colonel that he was the only constant visitor she had.
“If you’ve another as regular as I am,” he had answered, “I’ll have to look into it.”
Then he had added, in what he fondly thought was a light, unmeaning tone, “Don’t even see much of Rion?”
“Rion?” June had replied with the arched eyebrows of surprised query. “I don’t see him at all.”
After that there was nothing more to be said, except of course for the Colonel to go to Rion and ask him why he had not called on Miss Allen, and for Rion, red and embarrassed, to answer that he did not suppose Miss Allen would care to see him, but if she did he would go.