The man handed it over without demur. Bryan ripped it open and read the message through. He looked thoughtful.
"How long has this been here?"
"Two days, Sir Bryan."
"Didn't they try to get it through by wireless?"
"I can't say, Sir Bryan. I'll ask if you wish."
"No: it doesn't matter. Bring me a 'John Henry'."
He slipped the opened telegram into his coat pocket and, lighting a cigar, proceeded to read his mail through, systematically, but with a pre-occupied brow.
The past twelve months had dealt hardly with Bryan. There is probably in the life of most of us some day, or preferably some night, when fate chooses to pay us the arrears of years, in which the hours as they pass over our heads grizzle them, and our tears, if tears we can shed, are a corrosive acid that bite their record upon our cheeks for all time. No one honestly mistook Lumsden for a young man after his little son's death.
It may have been something in one of the letters he had just read—may be, who knows, something even in the telegram, that made him, after he had swept his correspondence, with various pencil scribblings on the margins, into the dispatch case, recall that night with rather more deliberation than he usually permitted himself, and stare gloomily at the group into which, with much embracing and chatter, pitched in a key of congratulatory envy, Fenella had been drawn.
How she had changed! How she had changed since then! To-day, as for many a day past, it was in nothing more precise than this loose mental phrase that his ill-defined dissatisfaction could find vent. Beyond it he seemed unable to go, and was even forced to admit a certain flimsiness in a charge out of which no better indictment could be framed. Because, whatever strain upon his finer perceptions had made the year of probation the torture it had undoubtedly been, he could not deny that she had remained true as steel to the bargain made with him in the house of death—a bargain so vague that scarcely any pretext would have been too tawdry to discharge her from it had she wished. She had sacrificed her good repute to him forthwith; had even seemed eager for circumstances that, as far as the world was concerned, should put the sacrifice past doubt, and if, of late, it had been coming back to her, as most women's is conveyed from them, in whispers, the rehabilitation was not of her own devising, but rather part of the observed tendency of murder and other violations of established usage to "out." Strangely enough, her fame fared better at women's hands than at men's, and worse among those who were convinced of her technical integrity (the phrase was even invented for her) than with those who inclined to give the ominous face of appearances its full value. I don't know why this should have been so. Perhaps vice has its own hypocrisies and canting code of law, and her resistance to the spirit after the letter had been so admirably fulfilled was held an outrage. At least she gave him no anxiety, although he knew that temptation had reached her, once from a quarter so exalted that it is not usually taken into account—even suspected one wooing as honorable as perfunctory, and although all his money and all his good will could not make him as young as the hot blood that besieged her. Her house was always open to him, at hours which his own forbearance was trusted to keep within the limits set by decorum; she kept whisky and cigars for him in her sideboard, with even the little sprig of vanilla in the cigar cabinet that she must have seen and taken note of in his own rooms. She never denied him her company nor discovered affinities among his friends; she even seemed to have a tender conscience in this regard, and looked round anxiously for him whenever the ripple of her little triumphs carried her temporarily out of hail. Whence then his secret dissatisfaction? Oh, this termless war of attainment with desire, old in human story as the history of David's unruly sons! Was Bryan the first to set a snare and grudge the fair plumage he had coveted for the marks of his own springe upon it?