PAGE 27
Touchstone
by
Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
“Aren’t you a little early for church?” he asked.
She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at her mother’s; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
“Well, good-by,” she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she added: “By the way, I’ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table.” She went downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
She had sorted the papers–she knew, then–she MUST know–and she had made no sign!
Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller–she had evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number. He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his desk. The publisher’s notice was among them.
X
His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port- hole framing the same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of confession had acted as a drug to self- reproach. He had tried to shift a portion of his burden to his wife’s shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.
A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally–for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection–he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.
He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash appeal to his wife’s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice where another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had profited by Mrs. Aubyn’s tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his wife.
When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl, little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the gardener’s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the wife’s social arts, a husband necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.