“And you would not run away from him?”
“It is the same thing in the end.... It would hurt him. It might kill him.... He’s such a good man ... so kind, so helpless. He wants me to love him always.... He’s done everything he could for me ... everything and more than he is able to do. You see. I told you there was nothing to be done.”
“No,” said Mrs. Callendar slowly, “I’m afraid there is nothing to be done....” Again she rose from her chair and walked over to the window. “You had best think it over.” She turned and faced Ellen. “I will talk to Richard. I will not sail to-morrow. I will stay. It must be settled somehow, for the sake of all of us.... I have not forgotten Sabine. She must be considered.”
33
IT was long after midnight when Ellen, entering the cabriolet at last, was driven off by the impatient Wilkes to the Babylon Arms. When she arrived, she found Clarence in the lower hall pacing up and down with a pitiful air of anxiety.
“I should have telephoned,” she said, “but I forgot. I did not know how late it was. You see we talked for a long time afterward.”
And then she kissed him gently, swept again by the old sense of pity. During all the drive home, in the long moments when she had been alone in the dark cabriolet, she had struggled, bitterly, with the puzzle that confronted her, knowing always in the back of her mind that whatever happened she could never run away with Richard Callendar. She might fall ill, she might die, she might go mad, but there were some things which she could not do. Deep down in her heart there was a force that was quite beyond her, a power that was an instinct, as much a physical thing as her very arms and hands. It was the part of her that was Hattie Tolliver.
There had been the other way out, but when she kissed Clarence she knew that it too was impossible. When she saw him waiting, his eyes wild with anxiety, his whole face suddenly lighted up with joy and adoration at sight of her, she knew too that she could never divorce him. His very weakness destroyed her, for she knew that if she had asked him he would have freed her. There was nothing that he would deny her ... nothing that he was able to give; and what she wanted from him, he would never be able to give because he was, after all, only a poor thing.
But the hardest part of the ordeal lay before her. It was the meeting with Callendar when, for the first time, they would both be forced to recognize the truth and deny it, forever. She understood this well enough; she was in a way even eager to have it occur at once so that she might put the memory of it behind her, so that she might stamp out the incident forever and go on her triumphant way. It came at last when Callendar, in a brief note, asked if he might call upon her. The letter, in a headlong handwriting so unlike the mocking cynicism which he cultivated, gave no hint of what was in his mind. It asked merely that she set a time and place.
She bade him come to the apartment in the Babylon Arms and he came, strangely sobered and quiet, with a chastened look in his gray eyes. At sight of him he appeared to her, as it seemed long afterward, for the first time in any semblance of reality; he existed with a new clarity, a new distinctness of outline. It was as if she had never seen him rightly before, as if until now he had been to her some one whom she accepted vaguely without questioning. Only one quality carried over completely into the new Callendar; it was the old sense of conflict, of will against will, of a pleasurable, almost perverse sensation of struggle. The new Callendar was an older man in a fashion she could not altogether define, save that the impression was related to the effect which his mother had upon her, of weakening and diminishing all reliance in herself.