Yet as if the whole two months in their strangeness their sad novelty, had been concentrating their loneliness for an accumulated spring at him, the last two hours had driven home to him that this secondary fact had not been inevitable, that what he was suffering to-night could have been avoided.
He had not wished to have children, and neither had the beautiful woman whose painted spirit smiled down so pitilessly now on his tragedy of jangled nerves and intolerable solitude. Deliberately and quite frankly, without even hiding behind the cowardly excuse of the tacit, they had outspokenly chosen not to.
After his desperate exclamation, he had laughed and thrown himself into his chair. He had forced the laugh, seeking to batter down with it a thrill that was akin to fright at an abrupt realization that in those two dreadful hours he had done three unprecedented things. He had spoken aloud there by himself, an action he had always ascribed exclusively to children and maniacs; he had harbored absurd temptations; and finally he had ejaculated "My God!" which he had thought appropriate to a man only in the distresses of fiction or after complete ruin on the Stock Exchange.
That exclamation had sprung from him when he had caught himself thinking how gladly he would give half his fortune if he could have a companion, even his butler, for the rest of the evening, his whole fortune, exactly as if he had died, if he could but have a son to give it to.
That freedom from care, which they had chosen to call freedom from responsibility, had been their mutual property, but to-night, in his hopeless solitude, it seemed that he was paying the whole price for it. She had met the unknown, but with the known—himself, her whole life—beside her, and her ordeal was over. His, he felt now, was worse, and already beginning. After all, he reflected, there was a certain rough justice in it; the one spared longer in the world of bodily people bore, in consequence, the reverting brunt of their double selfishness. But the remnant of life seemed a poor thing to-night. The further it stretched, in his suddenly stirred imagination, the poorer, the emptier, it seemed.
And having stirred, after a whole lifetime of healthy sleep, his imagination gripped him in a strong and merciless embrace. It seemed to twist him about and force him to look down the vista of the coming years and at all their possibilities, even the desecrational one of marrying again and calling into life the son that he had never wanted before. At the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant Medici Venus who smiled from the frame. He was seized by a desire to turn the gazing picture to the wall.
Half-way across the room, he checked the impulse with a gasp of self-disgust, but with hands raised involuntarily toward it he cried:
"Oh, why didn't we?"
As he stood trembling with his back to it, the second absurd temptation of the night assailed him—to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost pious prudery, she had refused to visit again. Nor had she ever allowed him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request of him, he knew that, if she had, that would have been it.
In his shaken state the thought of his one club, the Business Men's, was repugnant. Maurice's, expansive, insinuating and brilliant, called to his loneliness arbitrarily, persistently. But with a glance over his shoulder at the portrait, he put the thought away. Then, straightening up, he walked to his chair again, sat tensely down, and faced the long room and his childish terror at its emptiness.