The young girl's dowry was of the slenderest. The marriage offered not only a secure and agreeable future for herself; but—and this influenced her decision at least equally—relief to her mother from straitened means and their attendant deprivations and anxieties. The subtle unrest, the haunting ambitions and curiosities of her awakening womanhood stirred in her, while the disparity of age between herself and her suitor seemed, to her inexperience, a matter of indifference. The marriage took place in due course, and ostensibly all went well. Yet, looking back upon it now, sitting here alone in her bedchamber while the wind cried along the house-roofs and Paris cowered in the grip of the bitter frost, Gabrielle St. Leger knew that she had learned life, the actualities both of human nature and civilized society, in a hard enough school.
For indisputably the thirty years' difference in age between herself and her husband, which, before marriage, had seemed so negligible a quantity, entailed consequences that intruded themselves at every turn. St. Leger's character and opinions were fixed, crystallized, insusceptible of change, while her own were still, if not in the actually fluid, yet in the distinctly malleable stage. This rendered any equality of intercourse impossible. Her husband treated her as a child, whose ignorance one finds exquisitely entertaining, and enlightens with high, if indulgent, amusement—his attitude toward her quasi-paternal in its serene assumption of omniscience. Yet, being quick-witted and observant, she soon perceived that assumption did not receive, by any means, universal indorsement. Among the younger generation of the artistic and literary brotherhood it became evident to her that, though the man was held in affection, the painter was regarded as a bit of a charlatan, destitute of illumination and sincerity of method—as one who had never possessed the courage or the capacity to attempt any lifting the veil of Isis and penetration of the mysteries it conceals. Nor was she slow to learn, hearing the witty talk and covert allusions of the dinner-table and studio—although her guests made honest and honorable effort to restrain their tongues in her presence—that the rule of faith and morals which had been so earnestly enjoined upon her in her childhood was very much of a dead letter to the average man and woman of the world. The general scheme of existence was a far more complicated affair than she had been taught to suppose. The dividing line between the sheep and the goats was by no means always easy of recognition. Delightful people did very shady, not to say very outrageous and abominable, things. She suffered moments of cruel perspicacity and consequent disgust, during which she was tempted to accuse even her dearly loved mother of having purposely misled and lied to her. For was it not idle to suppose that her husband differed from other men? Or that his passion for her was unique, without predecessors? Was it not very much more reasonable to see, in the perfection of tactful delicacy with which he treated her, proof positive of a large and varied emotional experience?
Then followed a further discovery. In this marriage she had looked confidently for a brilliant future. But, in plain truth, what future remained? St. Leger had reached the zenith of his career. He was well on in middle life. The only possible future for him lay in the direction of decline and decay. She recognized that her mission, therefore, was not to share a brightening glory, but to maintain a fondly cherished illusion, to soften the asperities of his declension and mask the approach of age and lessening powers by the stimulus of her own radiant youth.
One by one these revelations came upon her with the shock of detected and abiding deceptions. Her pride suffered. Her jealous respect for her own intelligence and personality was rudely shaken. But she kept her own counsel, making neither complaint nor outcry. Silently, after a struggle which left its impress in the irony of her smiling eyes and lips, she faced each discovery in turn and reckoned with it. Then she ranged herself, dismissing once and for all, as she believed, high-flown heroic conceptions of love between man and woman, accepting human nature and human relations as they actually are and forgiving—though it shrewdly taxed her longanimity—all those pious frauds which, from time immemorial, civilized parents and teachers have supposed it their duty to practise upon the children whom they at once adore and betray.
It remained to her credit, however, that, even in the most searching hours of disillusionment, Gabrielle did not lose her sense of justice or fail to discriminate, to the best of her ability, between that for which the society in which he moved and that for which her husband, personally, should be held responsible. So doing she admitted, and gladly, that any legitimate cause of quarrel with him was of the smallest. Taking all the circumstances of the case into account, he had behaved well, even admirably, by her. The way of the world, its habits and standards, the constitution of human nature, rather than Horace St. Leger, was in fault. And it was precisely on that finding, as she told herself now, having reasoned it out sitting here alone in her bedchamber, that she deprecated any change of estate, the contraction of any fresh and intimate relation. If she had not known it might have been different—and there she paused a little wistfully, sorrowfully. But she did know, and therefore she could not consent to part with her freedom, with the repose of mind and the large liberty of thought and action her freedom permitted her. Her body was her own. Her soul, her emotions were her own. Almost fiercely she protested they should remain so. Hence it was useless, useless, that Anastasia should warn, or that the image of Adrian Savage should solicit her, standing there handsome, devoted, and how maddeningly self-confident! She could not listen. She would not listen. No, no, simply she would not.
Having thus analyzed the position, summed up and delivered judgment upon it, clearly it was the part of common-sense to go to bed and to sleep. Gabrielle stretched out her hand for the crystal and silver rosary lying, along with her missal and certain books of devotion, on a whatnot beside her chair. She fingered it, making an effort to concentrate and compose her thoughts. But they refused to be composed, darting hither and thither like a flight of startled birds. Restlessness still possessed her, making recitation of the hallowed invocations which mark each separate bead trench perilously on profanity. She let the rosary drop and pressed her hands over her eyes. Certain words, over and above the disturbing ones spoken by Adrian Savage, haunted her. For the agitations of the afternoon had not ended with his declaration and exit. A subsequent episode had contributed, in no small degree, to produce her existing state of perturbation.
It had happened thus. A few minutes after Adrian left her, going out on to the gallery, which runs the length of the flat from the vestibule and studio at one end to the dining-room and offices at the other, she had been struck by the strangely cold, haggard light filling it. The ceiling stared, while details of pictures and china upon the walls, the graceful statuette of a slim, unclad boy carrying a hooded hawk on his wrist, and, farther on, a portrait bust of Horace St. Leger—each set on an antique porphyry column—started into peculiar and shadowless prominence. The windows of the gallery gave on to the courtyard. Gabrielle held aside one of the vitrine curtains and looked out.
Snow was falling. Countless thin, fine flakes circled and eddied, drifted earthward, and swept up again caught in some local draught. Through the lace work of black, quivering branches the backs of the houses across the courtyard showed pallid and gaunt. Far below, on the frost-bitten grass-plat, the lichen-stained nymph tilted her ice-bound pitcher above the frozen basin. The familiar scene in its present aspect was indescribably dreary, provocative of doubting, distrustful thoughts. With a movement of impatience, her expression hard, her charming lips compressed, the young woman turned away, conscious of being foolishly, unreasonably out of conceit with most things. Doing so, the bust of her husband confronted her, seeming to watch her from out the blank cavities in the eyeballs which so uncomfortably travesty sight. An expression of amused, slightly cynical inquiry rested upon the sculptured face. This, in her present somewhat irritable and over-sensitized condition, she resented, finding it singularly unpleasant. She moved rapidly away along the gallery. Then stopped dead.
From the dining-room came a joyful racket. But, to her astonishment, cutting through the rippling staccato of children's talk and laughter, came the grave tones of a man's voice. Hearing which, steady of nerve and strong though she was, Gabrielle turned faint. The blood left her heart. She made for the nearest window-seat and sank down on it.—Horace was there, in the dining-room, playing with Bette and her little friends as he so dearly loved to play. The fact of her widowhood, the past eighteen months of freedom, became as though they were not. In attitude and sentiment she found herself relegated to an earlier period, against which her whole nature rose in rebellion. She realized how quite horribly little she wanted to see Horace again, or renew his and her former relation. Realized her jealousy of him in respect of her child. Realized, indeed, that, notwithstanding his many attractive qualities and invariable kindness, his resurrection must represent to her something trenching upon despair.
Yet it was cruel, she knew, heartless, to feel thus. She glanced in positive mental torment at the marble bust. It still watched her, through the haggard clarity of the snow-glare, with the same effect of cynically questioning criticism and amusement, almost, so she thought, as one should say: "My dear, be consoled. Even had I the will, I am powerless to return and to claim you. Follow your own fancy. Make yourself perfectly easy. Have no fear but that I am very effectually wiped out of your life."