“My boy,” said De Gollyer, “I know you’ll understand my curiosity. You and I have gone shoulder and shoulder through too many things to beat about the bush. Tell me about your wife. I confess to you that I cannot make her out. As you know, I rather pride myself on reading human nature.”
Dangerfield was silent a moment, then he installed himself in the chair opposite his friend, drew out his pipe and began to smoke.
Between the two had been one of those rare intimacies only privileged to men of the world who have early reached that stage in their intellectual development when they have rejected shams and take a mutual delight in the recognition of life as it is in its profound varieties and inexplicable turns of fate. When they spoke to each other it was always in absolute confidence and without attempt at masking their thoughts.
“Bob,” said Dangerfield, “I will be quite frank with you. My wife is as great a mystery to me to-day as the first time she came into my life. I know nothing of her past or what she may do in the future. And I don’t want to know. She came into my life by chance, if you wish to call it so. She saw me as you remember me, down and out! That was enough for her. She had to attach herself to me, to cling to me, to fight for the spark that was still left flickering. She is of a different race, different instincts, than we are. There is something of the strange forbidding reticence of the north countries about her. I’ve tried in the moments when I loved her most to force myself beyond this barrier. I have never succeeded. Now I don’t want to. Sometimes I try to understand her and I think, in a way, that the time when I was wildest, the most helpless, I brought her the keenest happiness. It’s a curious thing to say, and you are perhaps the only man who will understand it, but sometimes I think she misses that. Now that the battle has been won, you may not believe it, but I think the rest will count for very little,—the success and the public and all that. When that comes she will be very lonely, poor child.”
He drew a long puff, gazed dreamily into the recesses of the studio and said:
“Did you ever, when you were a boy, catch a bird, imprison it in a cage, feed it and make a friend of it till it would sing whenever you came near and then feel an irresistible impulse to throw open the bars and give it liberty?” He stopped, looked down at the floor and added: “Understand?”
“Yes, by Jove, I do understand,” said De Gollyer. “The Slav women are like that. I’ve seen them. There is something imprisoned about her, something unfinished. I think that is what struck me, what puzzled me. Dan, she won’t like what’s ahead, the going back, the following you into your world. For of course you will go back now, you can’t help it.”
“I am very proud of her,” said Dangerfield loyally. “Will I go back? I don’t know. It depends on many things—on her happiness principally. I have loved her passionately and I have suffered, as I never thought I could suffer, out of the blindest jealousy, at the very thought that another man could have meant anything to her in her past. I suffered and that is perhaps what I needed the most.”
De Gollyer smiled and with a quick movement of his hand indicated the canvases arranged against the wall.
“I saw all that, I saw what you had been through. I shouldn’t have said what I did about your being too much in love, my boy, but I didn’t say what I saw afterward.”