“Perhaps,” she mused, “happiness is ended for my husband and me; at all events, I will not seek its destruction. Perhaps he wants to leave me and be free. He must prove it to me. He has not proved it yet. Perhaps I can learn to be to him more than any other woman can ever be—can charm him to me again as I did when I was a girl. I can try with all my heart.”
She let down the glass of the little window and leaned out. The air was sweet with the smell of the damp winter woods—the trees clustered like phantoms close to the road—there had been an ice storm, and the glistening tops of the pines shone in the night like fairy trees in crystal urns. A few stars were out, big and bright in a sky faintly blue; as Mrs. Evremond lifted her face to them they seemed to shine on her as never before. She looked up into the heavens with a childlike sweetness, and perhaps, in her hope and her goodness, with as pure a faith as prayer ever carried. She was possibly deserted definitely by the man she loved. She had been betrayed by him. She had never suffered in her life as to-day. She could never so suffer again.
We all possess the power to make those who love us suffer just so far. Evremond had come all at once to the high-tide mark of his limit. He could never cause her such keen pain again, and he paid the penalty. She loved him not less but differently, with a tenderness that comes only when we have ceased to lean—to repose; with a protection that only comes when we are conscious of weakness; with renunciation that only comes when we see and accept the destruction of the ideal, the death of illusion, and take up with courage the reality and embrace it instead.
“He shall never know that I know,” she murmured, “unless he wishes to. He has a right to his life; he has a right to love where he likes, not by law, but because of his nature. If he loves me still, if he wants to go on as we are, he will make me feel it to-night. I shall know to-night, and for all our future he shall decide.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Evremond was a methodical woman of reasonable habits, and not given to tardy wanderings about shops or prolonged absences from her home. She was on this night very late indeed. The long time Evremond waited for her confirmed his most unpleasant fears. He had come in about six and gone to the salon to wait her probably speedy entrance. Then, with the nervous impatience of a person who had every reason to dread, and every reason to hope for, the arrival of the expected, he watched the clock mercilessly mark hour after hour. At eight—never had she been out so late before—he said, definitely:
“She has left me—there is no doubt about it. She knows everything, and she never wants to see me again.”
Such a fact as the termination of their married relations, in the most extreme moments of his interest in another, he had never thought of—he had never wished for. He had always considered his wife suited to him, understanding his idiosyncrasies, patient and a pleasant background, but never had he supposed that the naked truth of the loss of her—or the risk of the loss of her—would fill him with dismay.
Not caring to suggest significance in her absence by questioning the servants, he waited in the salon without giving orders to retard the dinner. Every passing cab that showed evidence of drawing up to the curbstone made him go to the window, only to see the vehicle roll unconcernedly past. His wife had left the house at five o’clock in her carriage, which had been sent back from the Champs Elysées; this was all he knew save that she had been to his studio half an hour before his rendezvous, and had there dropped her glove with the compromising letter. The end, then, of his conventional commonplace married life was to be a kind of tragedy; the public were to have their taste offended by his delinquencies—or to remain indifferent to the subject.
At all events, the poignancy of the affair was reserved for himself alone. Consistent with his self-absorbed nature, he pictured but one sufferer. He allotted to his wife righteous anger, disgust and a jealous pride—which, nevertheless, he justified—and nothing else. With surprise and vexation he discovered that he was suffering, and, unused to pain of any kind, annoyed and ill at ease with his conscience and his fate, he could have snapped at his irritation like an animal at a tantalizing wound.