The attaché, to whom this man's deliberate cold manner was becoming a friendly enough matter of course, waited.
“Thanks,” Brachey finally said. “Be glad to have it.”
But the particular card, scribbled by the attaché, there across the table, was never presented. For late that night, in a bitter revulsion of feeling, Brachey tore it up.
4
In the morning, however, when he stopped at the desk, the Belgian clerk handed him a thick letter from his attorney in New York, forwarded from his bank in Shanghai. He read and reread it, while his breakfast turned cold; studied it with an unresponsive brain.
It seemed that his wife's attorney had approached his with a fresh proposal. Her plan had been to divorce him on grounds of desertion and non-support; this after his refusal to supply what is euphemistically termed “statutory evidence.” But the fact that she had from month to month through the years accepted money from him, and not infrequently had demanded extra sums by letter and telegram, made it necessary that he enter into collusion with her to the extent of keeping silent and permitting her suit to go through unopposed. His own instructions to his lawyer stood flatly to the contrary.
But a new element had entered the situation. She wished to marry again. The man of her new choice had means enough to care for her comfortably. And in her eagerness to be free she proposed to release him from payment of alimony beyond an adjustment to cover the bare cost of her suit, on condition that he withdraw his opposition.
It was the old maneuvering and bargaining. At first thought it disgusted and hurt him. The woman's life had never come into contact with his, since the first few days of their married life, without hurting him. He had been harsh, bitter, unforgiving. He had believed himself throughout in the right. She had shown (in his view) no willingness to take marriage seriously, give him and herself a fair trial, make a job of it. She had exhibited no trait that he could accept as character. It had seemed to him just that she should suffer as well as he.
But now, as the meaning of the letter penetrated his mind, his spirits began to rise. It was a tendency he resisted; but he was helpless. From moment to moment his heart, swelled. Not once before in four years had the thought of freedom occurred to him as a desirable possibility. But now he knew that he would accept it, even at the cost of collusion and subterfuge. He saw nothing of the humor in the situation; that he, who had judged the woman so harshly, should find his code of ethics, his very philosophy, dashed to the ground by a look from a pair of brown eyes, meant little. It was simply that up to the present time an ethical attitude had been the important thing, whereas now the important thing was Betty. That was all there seemed to be to it. But then there had been almost as little of humor as of love in the queerly solitary life of Jonathan Brachey.
He cabled his attorney, directly after breakfast, to agree to the divorce. Before noon he had engaged a guide and arranged with him to take the morning train southward to the junction whence that narrow-gauge Hansi Line was pushing westward toward the ancient provincial capital.