He had come to a stand by her side and looked at her sympathetically. “Well, do it, and God help you when your heart lies cold,” he burst out, resuming his tramp.
“I don’t think He will help me,” Mrs. Wilbur had it on her lips to say. “If”—but the wistful words died unspoken. Her husband’s reproach came to her mind. “If you had cared very much!” She had not cared, that was the truth. Jennings had stripped her subterfuges away,—her nausea over the business methods of a few men among the multitude of honest hearts who were building the new world; her irritation over her husband’s conduct in the Erard matter; her discontent with Chicago. The reason for her act did not lie ultimately in any of these causes; it lay in her own soul. Now she knew the unlovely truth.
Could she care? A wayward instinct prompted her to tell this acquaintance who had happened to search her heart deeply, that she could care, if—. But she was afraid. Let him think her merely a craving ego! His truth-telling had made her hard. She would offer no more excuses. She would accept her poverty of soul and take her freedom.
“Well,” she said at last, “it is very chill. I am going to my room. Good-by, Mr. Jennings.”
She gave him her hand and let him keep it for an instant while she wondered at him, and “at the other kind that accepts.” He opened his lips as if to speak, then squared himself stiffly and dropped her hand.
“Good-by,” he muttered, and strode down the steps to the edge of the bluff where the moonlight was peeping through the thickets. In old days at college, some had called him the Saint, and some the Blasphemer.
CHAPTER XI
John Wilbur unwittingly brought about the crisis he wished to avoid. Monday morning, on his way to the city, he called at the house of his clergyman,—Dr. Driver, a divine celebrated locally for his eloquence, for the prosperity of his parish, and for his influence over successful business men and their fashionable wives. It seemed to John Wilbur that his wife’s condition was one that demanded the services of a spiritual physician, and he explained the case briefly to his minister.
Consequently Mrs. Wilbur had scarcely reached her home after the visit in Lake Forest before Dr. Driver’s card was brought to her. Thinking that he had come probably for some assistance in church-work, she went down to the drawing-room at once without laying aside her wraps or hat. Dr. Driver was a tall, sallow-faced, black-moustached man, who wore his thick black hair brushed away from his forehead a little affectedly. His bony figure, protruding under the correct black coat, made many awkward lines. Dr. Driver, after the experience of years in ministering to fashionable parishes in Minneapolis and Chicago, could not be called uncouth, yet Mrs. Wilbur always saw in him the earnest, raw young man from the seminary, his white eyelids glued in the fervour of extempore prayer, his white linen cravat creeping up over the large collar button in his wrestling with his thought. He had been successful—that appealed to his congregation; they liked a man to be successful in whatever “line” of “work” he had chosen. Dr. Driver’s success had been marked by such tangible evidences as the two “handsome edifices” erected during his pastorates in Minneapolis and Chicago. His florid style did not appeal to Mrs. Wilbur, but her husband’s admiration of him and the fact that many of their friends were prominent in his church had overcome her aversion to the minister’s rhetorical flights and mixed metaphors. Dr. Driver was also a poet, and one or both of his little volumes, “Little Lyrics of Grace,” or “Growing Leaves,” might be found on the tables of his parishioners; and in the columns of the Thunderer, cheek by jowl with Capitalist Dick’s American editorials, appeared Dr. Driver’s patriotic songs.
The pastor gathered his coat-tails about his thin thighs, seated himself on the edge of a divan, and opened a general conversation upon the new house and Mrs. Wilbur’s gratification in her husband’s wonderful success. Mrs. Wilbur listened, perplexed by this general harangue, for the regular pastoral call had occurred scarcely a month before.