“It isn’t enough, unless you promise to send him away the next time he calls here. I don’t want you receiving his visits, now there’s talk.”
“No,” his wife replied, growing colder, her words falling like little flakes of ice. “I cannot do that; I see no reason for it. You can instruct the footman to keep him out of the house if you like. But I shall never refuse to see him; and,”—she turned to her writing-table and prepared to answer a note,—“I shouldn’t take that course, if I were you.”
She had not intended this last remark as a threat: it had been prompted by a desire to make the situation endurable. It would precipitate a crisis, if he should become aggressive and humiliate her before her servants. Wilbur, however, had had the uncomfortable feeling of living in reproof ever since the call at the Remsens; now he intended to exercise his moral sense.
When a few minutes later Mrs. Wilbur ascended the stairs, which swept in a gentle curve around the north side of the hall, she could hear her husband below her, giving orders to the butler. He was concluding in loud tones, “Smith, if Mr. Erard calls after this, we shall not be at home. Remember and tell the footman that we shall always be out to Mr. Erard.”
“Yes, sir,” she heard Smith’s galvanic voice reply. It was the first order of the kind ever given in that house.
Some acquaintances came in during the evening, and the conversation grew warm over one of the innumerable strikes in the city. Wilbur was emphatic, as usual, in behalf of the capitalists, “the right of a man to do what he wanted with his own.” His wife remembered that this illiberal attitude had grown steadily since his first success. He had become more and more convinced that the poor man’s poverty was his own crime. She leaned her white face against the soft cushion in her chair, and closed her eyes to shut out thought.
Yet she could not help thinking of the procession, of the loathsome figure on horseback, and the absent Mephisto—and of her husband, in some way united to this crew. She had not triumphed; she had not held him to the finer courses of conduct. And she had not even kept her home unspotted: this house was really Mephisto’s; he had merely tossed it to a hanger-on.
She looked again at that husband, regarding him for the first time objectively, as if he were an outsider—with a dangerous perception of the doubleness of their personalities. To perceive that, marks the end of marriage. She had no harsh feelings, no great resentment at his clownish reproof; he was not her mind and thought and heart. He was simply a man whom she knew uncommonly well, and on whose points good and bad she was an authority. She could be very fair to the good points,—that was a fatal sign! He had not deteriorated in the years of marriage, had developed no vices or brutality. He was the same confident, shrewd, adaptable American she had married three years ago. A little more eager then and impulsive; more fluid, perhaps, at the age when nothing is impossible of accomplishment, at least in the belief of an admiring woman. The fire of the struggle in Chicago had left him less fluid, but more powerful. Alas! it had burned out all minor alloys, leaving him a steel weapon, fashioned by modern society, for use in converting the earth into the hands of plutocracy.
The wealth that had come to them early in life, and her own social powers, had suddenly placed him in a world for which he had no traditions ready to assist him. He was the American peasant. He did not eat with his knife, nor break any commonplace amenity. He was educated, too, even if merely in a varnishing way, much more than hosts of his comrades. But he was, nevertheless, the peasant. Anywhere else there would have been intermediate stages in the social evolution where he would have stuck, his descendants to go on as they proved ready and had imbibed the ideas of service and honour that befitted the possessors of great power. But Wilbur with one powerful effort had gained the heights, and he had no humbleness, no distrust,—nothing was too good for a clever man who had made his money.
Why could she see all this so clearly? Had she ever loved him? For, had she loved him, her eyes would have shrunk from the sore. When did she begin to fail in loving him? Her grave face still rested upon her husband in this searching wonder, until she noticed that he was uncomfortable. Once she heard the footman cross the hall to answer a ring; after an interval he returned with a card which he left on the hall table. Erard had called and been dismissed. She had little personal interest in the fact: Erard, indeed, was quite an unimportant person.