Chapter XXV LOST IN THE MAZE
Durgan had still one strong emotion regarding his wife; he was able to feel overwhelming shame on her account, and he dreaded any publicity concerning her behavior. She had always lived so as to command the consent of good society to her doings. He had perfectly trusted her social instinct to do this as long as it lay in her power to tell her own story; but he knew, with a sense of bitter degradation, that if someone else had need to tell that story, it would sound very different.
His wife was the daughter of an uneducated hotel-keeper, and had married him, as he afterward discovered, because he had the entrance into certain drawing-rooms and clubs, which, if skilfully used, might have proved the stepping-stone to almost any social eminence. At the time of her marriage she had professed passionate love for him and sympathy for the Southern cause; and her fortune, not small, was naturally to be used in the difficult task of making part of his paternal acres productive by the paid labor of the negroes reared and trained by his father, and justly dear to the son. Disconsolate at the loss of friends and fortune—for all near to him had died in the war, of wounds or sorrow—Durgan repaid the love and sympathy of one who seemed a warm-hearted and impulsive woman with tender gratitude.
A little later, when the wife found out that Durgan would not push himself into the fashionable milieu which was open to him in Europe and America, he began to discover, tho slowly, that she would not bestow affection or time upon any less fashionable pursuit. She needed her whole fortune for the social adventures that she must make alone; and as he would not open the door of Southern pride for her, she fell to knocking at the door of Northern pride for herself. No doubt Providence has a good reason for making men before marriage blind to female character, but it was many years before Durgan bowed to the fate to which defect, not fault, had brought him. Too proud to accept any bounty from such a wife, he had sullenly shielded her from remark till she reached a position of middle-class fashion in which she could stand alone. Having attempted, in the meantime, to increase by speculation the small patrimony left him, and losing much, he had retired from the scene of her struggles some six years before the present time, proudly thankful that any public reproach was directed only at himself. Since then she had scaled social heights seemingly beyond her—he had often wondered how.
That his wife was tricky and false, that the means she had used to cajole or overawe the society she was determined to conquer bore no necessary relation to the truth, he knew; but knowing her also to be clever and cold-hearted, he had not feared that she would so transgress any social law as to make her small or large meannesses known.
But the most surprising thing in his wife's career since he left her was that she had not dropped the medium, Beardsley, as soon as his health and popularity were lost. She had been wont to drop all her instruments as soon as their use was over, and most of them had more attractions than he. The man had been poor, plebeian, and sickly; and Durgan, who had never suspected love as the cause of the odd relationship, had now some cause to suppose it rooted in the unspeakable shame of the worst of crimes. In what possible way this had come about he could not even begin to imagine, but he continued to consider his maturing suspicion in growing consternation.
If Miss Claxton had not told him the truth, she was a more finished actress than the world had yet seen. If what she said of his wife were true, the mulatto's words were corroborated—his wife was nearly connected with this awful crime.
In Durgan's mind the telegraphic address—evidently suggestive to Miss Claxton—had at last become significant. "Beard" suggested Beardsley; "84" was the date of the Claxton murder; "B" might possibly stand for Beardsley, and "D" for his wife. Then the help promised evidently involved his wife's purse. Beardsley had nothing.
If this Beardsley was guilty, he must be a most extraordinary man. It was clear that if it was he whom Hermione Claxton was shielding, she was as much determined to keep his secret to-day as at first. She could not speak of him save in tones of sorrow and tenderness. For him, too, the wife whom Durgan knew to be cold and ambitious had apparently ventured all. The extraordinary nature of a man who could on short acquaintance so deeply involve two such different women, gave Durgan so much room for astonished thought that some other things Miss Claxton had said for the time escaped his memory.