“And if—if the other thing should happen,” she said, pretending to make a jest of it. “If I did deceive you, what would you do?”
“Don’t joke about such things,” he said, frowning; “I am serious, Louise.”
Several times, as though to tease him, she came back to this question, but each time peremptorily he refused to discuss it.
He was not jealous, or, rather, he held jealousy unworthy of him. He would have scorned to exercise the slightest supervision over his wife’s actions. On one occasion, when he had taken up a branch telephone, he had cut in on a conversation which would have aroused any one but a man as blind or as loyal as he was. He had replaced the receiver. He would have been ashamed to listen, and even referred to it jestingly, without notice of the alarm which showed in her eyes. One afternoon, coming home contrary to his habit, he let himself into his apartment and stopped at the sound of voices from his wife’s salon. He listened and discovered, without shadow of a doubt, that the man with whom she was arguing was her lover.
XXII
The discovery of his wife’s infidelity was so swift, so convincing, so utterly unexpected that every mental function seemed to stop. Garford stood still, a long moment, doing absolutely nothing. Then his whole body was seized with a confusing fever; his heart seemed to swell within him and to leap against its walls. In a flash, his head cleared as though swept by a gust of wind. He felt a tingling, throbbing sensation throughout his body, accompanying this abrupt mental clarity; all other sounds without him ceased. It was as though only one thing existed, something which echoed through his brain—one question: “What am I going to do?”
If he had gone in, he would have killed them, then and there, under his hands, one after the other, blindly, unreasoningly, in brute instinct, without knowing just what he was doing. Only a door stood between him and a crime. At this moment, the bell rang. On such trivialities destinies turn. The shrill, piercing sound recalled him to the outer world. He was able to add to the obsessing question in the hollow of his consciousness one other thought: “Some one is coming.” Registering two perceptions, he became again a reasoning man. He withdrew softly, mounted to the mezzanine floor of the apartment, and went out.
When he had, in some measure, recovered control over his reason, the first emotion was one of complete stupefaction. Why had she done this? He had given her everything. He had given her even the sacrifice of his deepest ambitions without ever reproaching her. And he had been rewarded by the lowest deceit.