“Has a woman no gratitude?” he asked himself, in man’s eternal miscomprehension of feminine motives.
This was the one thing he could not comprehend. He could not forbid her loving another. This was something in the domain of the instincts which might conceivably happen. But he had a right to demand that she should not strike him in his private honor. At first, no other thought came to him than that his wife loved the man whose voice he had recognized. That she could have been actuated by any other emotion was too horrible to contemplate. Yet he could not comprehend the choice.
“She loves him—Reggie Bowden—Bowden, of all men! How is it possible?” he kept repeating to himself.
Of all the men who surrounded her and paid her court, the discovery that he had been betrayed for young Bowden wounded him most. For Bowden was of the type he particularly detested, a trifler in all things, drifting through life on a family name, a smiling face and a well-groomed body, social jester and leader of cotillions, a tyrant of the ballroom. That this man could be preferred to him curiously enough humiliated him more than if her choice had been one who was her intellectual equal. The more he analyzed the situation, the more a tormenting doubt returned. A hundred trivial incidents of the past thronged to his memory with a new significance until he felt he should go mad unless he knew the truth.
In three months, it lay before him in its multiplied, shameful detail—not only the present but the past, the record of her first marriage and even before. He went to the friends who, he remembered, had dropped vague hints and forced from them what they knew or suspected. Then, for the first time, it flashed over how his name had been bandied about, a thing of mockery and light contempt, even to the point that he might have been held cognizant, and he said to himself in dull rage: “I was wrong; I should have killed her—that would have been my justification.”
During these three months there were moments when he felt himself perilously close to the borders of his sanity. Added to the disillusion and melancholy of the artist, the blow to the man himself had been so crushing and so penetrating that every illusion had gone as completely from his mental outlook as though, at a stroke, all colors had been lifted from the visible world. Only one thought upheld him—the idea of vengeance and the cleansing of his name. When he was completely satisfied with his investigations, he left ostensibly on a hunting-trip, returned to New York secretly, and advised by his detectives, came to his apartment-building at night.
He tried the door with his latch-key and found it barred. He mounted to the mezzanine floor, tried the door, and found it locked. At that hour, the servants would have left the apartment. He descended, had himself taken up by the service elevator and entered by the kitchen. He knew where he would find them. On the second floor was a little salon which gave into his wife’s bedroom, from which it formed the only exit. They had just returned from the opera; the young man’s coat and hat were on a chair, the odor of a cigar in the corridors.
Bowden was alone, in an armchair by the little lamp, skimming a paper while waiting for Mrs. Garford to return from her bedroom. All at once a sense of something unusual in the air made him lower his paper and glance up. At his side, the husband was standing. He started to his feet with a smothered exclamation, but a hand restrained him.
“Not a sound; I want to give her a surprise.”
There was a smile on Garford’s lips as he laid his finger across them in warning, but this smile terrified the lover. He felt himself trapped, unable to warn the woman, forced helplessly to await the moment of her reëntry and the shock of her surprise. He did not make a sound because he still hoped and because he was a coward. The two men remained thus a full five minutes, without moving, awaiting her return. All at once, from the further room, a light voice began to hum an aria of the evening, broke off, and called out: