Yet he had come home, driven by an invigorating impulse which had come to him inexplicably, perhaps born of pity and sudden insight into Helen’s mind, come home to ask her forgiveness, explain what Freda Thorstad had told him and ask her to go away with him for a little while until their minds both cleared. The impulse had risen in his throat—it had choked him with delight and fear lest she should not be home. And then through the sunroom doors he saw them, two calm women, talking together, making and receiving confidences, uncovering him, dissecting him, and as he stood still and let the blackness of rage sweep over him again he had heard Helen tell this stranger, this inimical stranger, of his financial condition. The sense of outrage overmastered him.
After a little it was quiet downstairs and he decided to go to the city again, going downstairs, looking straight ahead of him. He wanted to see the children, to have their reception of him ease this last sharp hurt. They were in the garden of course, and they greeted him with their usual shouts of delight.
“Well,” he thought, as he bent down to caress them, “I can’t stop now. I can’t stop now.”
He sat down on the garden bench and took the children on his knees, the boy and girl, so sturdy and happy, with fat brown knees and thick soft hair. They were full of comments and questions. Peggy was three and Bennett just eighteen months older. It was going to hurt terribly to break away from them. Sable had said, “You can’t act as though you didn’t have a family dependent on you.” He had shown Sable that he could act that way, that the family dependent on him was not going to force him to knuckle under. He stroked Peggy’s hair. How restful it was—if he could only stay here in this sheltered little garden with the children who had no tangles in their minds—if Helen would come out as she used to come out last summer and sit with him while they talked and planned of the beautiful things ahead for the children and their initiations into living.
Helen had deserted. She had gone off notoriety seeking. She preferred to sit in that room talking disloyalty to that woman to whose hard influence she had subjected herself—Helen was driving him out.
He kissed the children sternly and went back through the house. In the hall Helen met him. Her face was ravaged by hysterics, red hollows under her eyes, mouth pulled out of shape. It hurt to regard it.
“Where are you going, Gage?”
For a moment he was gentle.
“Downtown. I’ll not be back till late. There’s no use trying to talk. We are killing each other.” Then he thought of Margaret Duffield, listening perhaps and loosening his wife’s hands from his shoulders, where she had placed them, he went out.
But that was not the only crisis Margaret had to meet that day. She was eager to go back to New York. There was no possible work left for her to do and she wanted to get away from St. Pierre. She did not tell Helen that she was planning to go in a few days as she had told her landlady that morning. When she left the Flandon house Helen was quite calm. With her fine power of organization she had already decided that the best temporary thing to do was to accept Gage’s actions and see how far he would go, allowing her action to be modified by that later. Margaret looked rather pale. The reasonableness of her own mind was bound to be affected somehow by this drama through which she had passed and in which she had been forced to play so disagreeable a part. Perhaps it showed chiefly in the slight hardness of her attitude toward Walter Carpenter that night.