In his heart, he may have thought, “It was you who ruined him, you, who came here into this very flat, a nobody, to use him for what he was worth ... to turn me out into the streets.” But he kept silent, perhaps because she had always terrified him, filling him with a sense of one standing upon the rim of a volcano. He was afraid of scenes, Mr. Wyck, and so his hate found its way into the open through devious, hidden channels. He had not the courage, it seemed, even to look at her now.
They stood for a time in silence by the divan, symbols of that queer, distorted figure of which the dead Clarence formed the third angle—a figure all awry, perverted out of all drawing—Clarence, so white and still, gone now beyond the reach of either of them.
Mr. Wyck muttered oily and incoherent consolations.... “It is a bitter blow.... One must be brave.... He was a good man....” All the old banalities which somehow took on a bitter, ironical ring. And presently he snuffled and wiped his eyes, as much in pity for himself who had lost the one thing for which he had gambled, as for the man who lay quiet and still upon the divan.
Ellen, watching him, was filled with a slow, burning anger. She wanted suddenly to crush him as she had once wanted to crush poor May Seton, because he was sentimental, and silly and without strength. And suddenly it occurred to her to say abruptly, “It was not a case of suicide. It was not Clarence who killed himself.... It was others who killed him.”
She had spoken in a sudden moment of humility, acknowledging her own guilt, and the speech, so abrupt, so unexpected, produced upon Mr. Wyck the strangest effect. He looked at her sharply, for the first time, and then averted his eyes; but in the brief glance she discovered the answer to the mystery. It was Mr. Wyck who had betrayed her secret. It was Mr. Wyck who had told the story of Callendar, distended no doubt, and perverted by his malice. She knew it by the look of terror in the shifty eyes. He had used this secret as his last stake.... And he had lost, forever, beyond all hope.
Almost at once he turned away from the morbid fascination of the divan, bade her good-by and hurried out of the door; and Ellen, watching his narrow back with the weak, sloping shoulders, knew that she would never see him again. She was sure now that it was this poor, furtive creature, with his strange, perverted love, who had given the dead man his final push over the abyss into eternity. For even the theft would not have driven Clarence from her; it could have been only the knowledge that she was lost to him forever.
So it was a man whom she had scorned, a creature whom she ignored and who hated her, who in his poor fumbling way had set her free.
36
SHE went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano), a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities, speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was this—“If he’d been an old man it would have been different, but he was so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well in the city. He’d have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him here in Ogdensburg.”
And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval. She kept silent. Perhaps to these crow-like women, Clarence had been a brilliant and powerful figure.