What would be the effect of his disappearance on Sonia and her lover? The question brought a smile to his wan face. She had married his name and his money, and would lose both advantages. He would take his property into exile to the last penny. His name without his income would be a burden to her. His disappearance would cast upon her a reproach, unspoken, unseen, a mere mist enwrapping her fatally, but not to be dispelled. Her mouth would be shut tight; no chance for innuendoes, lest hint might add suspicion to mystery. She would be forced to observe the proprieties to the letter, and the law would not grant her a divorce for years. In time she would learn that her only income was the modest revenue from her own small estate; that he had taken all with him into darkness; and still she would not dare to tell the damaging fact to her friends. She would be forced to keep up appearances, to spend money in a vain search for him, or his wealth; suspecting much yet knowing nothing, miserably certain that he was living somewhere in luxury, and enjoying his vengeance.
He no longer thought of vengeance. He did not desire it. The mills of the gods grind out vengeance enough to glut any appetite. By the mere exercise of his right to disappear he gave the gods many lashes with which to arm the furies against her. He was satisfied with being beyond her reach forever. Now that he knew just what to do, now that with his plan had come release from depression, now that he was himself again almost, he felt that he could meet Sonia Westfield and act the part of a busy husband without being tempted to strangle her. In her very presence he would put in motion the machinery which would strip her of luxury and himself of his present place in the world.
The process took about two months. The first step was a visit to Monsignor O'Donnell, a single visit, and the first result was a single letter, promptly committed to the flames. Then he went home with a story of illness, of a business enterprise which had won his fancy, of necessary visits to the far west; which were all true, but not in the sense in which Sonia took these details. They not only explained his absence, but also excused the oddity of his present behavior. He hardly knew how he behaved with her. He did not act, nor lose self-confidence. He had no desire to harm her. He was simply indifferent, as if from sickness. As the circumstances fell in with her inclinations, though she could not help noticing his new habits and peculiarities, she made no protest and very little comment. He saw her rarely, and in time carried himself with a sardonic good humor as surprising to him as inexplicable to her. She seemed as far from him as if she had suddenly turned Eskimo. Once or twice a sense of loathing invaded him, a flame of hatred blazed up, soon suppressed. He was complete master of himself, and his reward was that he could be her judge, with the indifference of a dignitary of the law. The disposal of his property was accomplished with perfect secrecy, his wife consenting on the plea of a better investment.
So the two months came to an end in peace, and he stood at last before that door which he himself had opened into the new future. Once closed no other hand but his could open it. A time might come when even to his hand the hinge would not respond. Two persons knew his secret in part, the Monsignor and a woman; but they knew nothing more than that he did not belong to them from the beginning, and more than that they would never know, if he carried out his plan of disappearance perfectly. Whatever the result, he felt now that the crisis of his life had come.
At the last moment, however, doubts worried him about thus cutting himself off from his past so utterly, and adopting another personality. Some deep-lying repugnance stirred him against the double process. Would it not be better to live under his own name in remote countries, and thus be ready, if fate allowed, to return home at the proper time? Perhaps. In that case he must be prepared for her pursuit, her letters, her chicanery, which he could not bear. Her safety and his own, if the stain of blood was to be kept off the name of Endicott, demanded the absolute cessation of all relationship between them. Yet that did not contain the whole reason. Lurking somewhere in those dark depths of the soul, where the lead never penetrates, he found the thought of vengeance. After all he did wish to punish her and to see her punishment. He had thought to leave all to the gods, but feared the gods would not do all their duty. If they needed spurring, he would be near to provide new whips and fresher scorpions. He shook off hesitation when the last day of his old life came, and made his farewells with decision. A letter to his aunt and to his friend, bidding each find no wonder and no worry about him in the events of the next month, and lose no time in searching for him; a quiet talk with old Martha on her little verandah; a visit to the pool on a soft August night; and an evening spent alone in his father's house; these were his leave-takings.
They would never find a place in his life again, and he would never dare to return to them; since the return of the criminal over the path by which he escaped into secrecy gave him into the hands of his pursuers. The old house had become the property of strangers. The offset to this grief was the fact that Sonia would never dishonor it again with her presence. Just now dabbling in her sins down by the summer sea, she was probably reading the letter which he had sent her about business in Wisconsin. Later a second letter would bear her the sentence of a living death. The upright judge had made her the executioner. What a long tragedy that would be! He thought of it as he wandered about the lovely rooms of his old home; what long days of doubt before certainty would come; what horror when bit by bit the scheme of his vengeance unfolded: what vain, bitter, furious struggling to find and devour him; and then the miserable ending when time had proved his disappearance absolute and perfect!
At midnight, after a pilgrimage to every loved spot in the household shrine, he slipped away unseen and struck out on foot over the fields for a distant railway station. For two months he lived here and there in California, while his beard grew and his thoughts devoured him. Then one evening he stepped somewhat feebly from the train in New York, crawled into a cab, and drove to No. 127 Mulberry Street. The cabman helped him up the steps and handed him in the door to a brisk old woman, who must have been an actress in her day; for she gave a screech at the sight of him, and threw her arms about him crying out, so that the cabman heard, "Artie, alanna, back from the dead, back from the dead, acushla machree." Then the door closed, and Arthur Dillon was alone with his mother; Arthur Dillon who had run away to California ten years before, and died there, it was supposed; but he had not died, for behold him returned to his mother miraculously. She knew him in spite of the changes, in spite of thin face, wild eyes, and strong beard. The mother-love is not to be deceived by the disguise of time. So Anne Dillon hugged her Arthur with a fervor that surprised him, and wept copious tears; thinking more of the boy that might have come back to her than of this stranger. He lay in his lonely, unknown grave, and the caresses meant for him had been bought by another.