and helen went home, let herself into her fine house, took off her things and sat down before the library fire.
she really had imported a maid, an ex-modiste of mature years, who would be of service to her in the choosing of her clothes and dressing herself properly. she could hear this woman now moving about in the next room getting out her things. she was practicing dressing for the evening, because now she had a purpose and a future in view which some years hence might involve toilettes and magnificence.
it certainly does change a woman to lose her husband. it buries her or brings her out. i suppose if helen’s husband had been properly and providentially parted from her by death, she might have retired sorrowfully into her widow’s state and effaced herself or devoted herself quite differently to good works. but the passing of george cutter left no such sanctities to dignify her. on the contrary she had been abandoned on account of her virtues and stupid devotion to[206] home. she was like job. she held on to her integrity and was sustained, as he was, by her conceit.
but unlike job, who suffered considerable financial losses during this period, she had come into a considerable estate. she had been paid off by this deflecting husband. money will sustain your pride and courage as an outraged woman when mere faith in god may leave you exalted in the ditch of every worldly misfortune. helen had remained the proper resurrection period flat on her back in bed, not from histrionic design; but she was actually able to rise on the third day. my belief is that everything in the scriptures is true, if you adjust yourself to the way it is true. thus, if you will not waste your vital forces in emotional dissipations of grief when overtaken by sorrow or humiliation, if you are really willing to live again normally, three days down will usually put you on your feet with sufficient courage and strength for the performance. it is no use to send for the doctor. in cases of this kind a physician is a sort of psychic drug you take, which requires a repetition of his soothing presence. thrice fortunate are they who dare to discover that the wings of adversity are the strongest wings upward in human affairs.
[207]helen, penguin bred, had acquired this serene flying power. she had been absolved from a depressing devotion to an ignoble man. she came out of her travail informed with pride, the cold fury which good women, scorned, feel, and with a determination to have what she had always wanted and could not have as a wife.
she leaned back in her chair before the library fire, clasped her hands over her head and looked anticipatingly at the ceiling, a queer expression on this formerly merely dutiful woman’s face, like a song in her eyes, like faith that smooths the brow, like a hope that lifted and sweetened the corners of her mouth; there were no shadows of fear to dim this gentle effulgence of eyes, lips and brow.
to be loved does make a woman happy, but it never endows her with her own peace, only protection. there is a difference, if you know how to read it, between love and hope in her face. the former is conferred and may be taken away: the latter is an act of faith and cannot be dimmed or destroyed. helen had this look of “anticipation,” as some physicians call it, a mark which nature confers upon women like a meek distinction.
helen finally went to her room to practice her[208] evening toilette. at five o’clock she was dressed and standing before the mirror studying this cream-colored frock of crêpe, that clung to her figure like long folded wings. it was not “trimmed.” she insisted upon a certain primness, as good women do who have no sense of style.
some women live and die so virginal that they never know why other women wear a rose, or display the sparkle of a jewel upon their breast. if they put on these invitations to love it is merely copying the universal feminine custom. they do not know how to mean the rose or catch the sparkle of the jewel in their manner.
helen wore no invitations. she was simply anxious to look the mistress of this establishment, never to be mistaken for a dutiful servant. the horror she had felt of this impending fate since shortly after her marriage, when she knew that she was not to have children, and the long sentence she had actually served in this capacity rankled.
a bell rang somewhere in the house. she paid no attention, since she had no visitors and the front door bell never rang except when something was delivered.
a moment later there was a tap on her door[209] and the maid entered. “some one to see you, mrs. cutter,” she announced.
“who is she?”
“a man.”
“not read?” referring to one of the workmen.
“no, mrs. cutter; this is a gentleman. i left him in the parlor.”
helen frowned.
“he is somebody. i am sure of that. and he said that you knew him,” the woman explained.
“that i knew him? then he—why, it must be mr. arnold,” helen said. arnold was the only man in shannon who might have any reason for calling on her.
the woman hesitated, gave her mistress a fluttering glance as if some sort of gibbering, peeping thought had suddenly popped up in her mind. “this is not mr. arnold,” she said. “i think he is a stranger. shall i tell him you are not at home?”
“i will see him; but hereafter, charlotte, i am not at home to any one who does not give his name.”
“yes, mrs. cutter,” charlotte answered meekly, closing the door behind her. then she glanced again at the crumpled bill she held in[210] her hand, thrust it into her pocket, wrinkled her nose, sniffed and discreetly disappeared.
helen stood for a moment with her back to the mirror, as we all do sometimes when we cannot bear to read in our own faces the fear we have in our hearts. since that night six months ago, when cutter had left her, she had received no word from him. she had sternly repressed every thought of him. but never for a day had she been free from the vague fear that he might return. she no longer loved him; she despised him. yet the old habit of submission—if he should return, how could she find the courage to send him away, if he asserted his claim upon her as his wife? she must do it. her plans were made for a different life altogether. but suppose now, when she was on the point of realizing her dearest hope, this man waiting for her in the parlor should be her husband?
she came slowly into the hall and advanced toward the open door of the parlor. reproaches, words inconceivable to her until this moment, trembled upon her lips. this was her house; she had built it for her own peace and happiness. she would not share it, not for the space of a breath, with a man so depraved that he could betray his own wife, abandon her—and so on and[211] so forth as she advanced, halted, and finally came steadily up the long hall, pale with fury, eyes blazing blue flames, convinced by her own fears that this man was cutter. she was ready to deal with him according to the natural vocabulary of an outraged woman.
for the gentlest woman, wronged, may suddenly change into a virago after you have made sure that she will endure anything. but if she ever breaks, it is like any other form of hysteria, incurable. she will be subject to verbal frenzies upon the slightest provocation so long as she lives.
for one instant helen stood upon the threshold of her parlor, speechless with amazement. shaded lights cast a soft glow from above over the room, where the faintest outline of castles showed between shadowy trees in the wall paper. and tufted, spindle-legged chairs, covered with blue-and-golden brocades, flashed like spots of sunlight in the pale gray gloom.
the visitor was undoubtedly enjoying these effects. he sat, the elegant figure of a man, on the sofa beyond the circle of light cast from the reading lamp behind him. his knees were crossed. he was working one foot musingly after the manner of a man pleased with his reflections.[212] and he was smiling—not a smile you could possibly understand, unless you are familiar with the outlaw mind of certain rich men. but, in case you are scandalously psychic, you might have inferred that he was smiling at these dim castles in helen’s wall paper as a prospective tourist in the romantic lands, where passing rivers sing to these castles and where scenes, centuries old, are laid for lovers.
he was so much absorbed in whatever he was trailing with his thoughts that he had not seen helen when she appeared in the doorway, but almost at once some sense warned him of her presence.
his startled glance caught her. he was on his feet at once. “oh, mrs. cutter! this is indeed good of you. i was afraid you would not see me,” he exclaimed, hurrying to meet her.
“mr. shippen!” she gasped, with no marks of pleasure in the look she gave him. it was strictly interrogative, unfeelingly so.
“yes,” he returned hastily, interpreting her manner. “i came down to look after the sale of that mining property. couldn’t resist dropping in on my way back to town this afternoon. wanted to see you.”
she moved past him, sat down some distance[213] beyond and fixed her wide blue gaze upon him.
he followed, not quite sure about sitting, feeling somehow that she might be going to keep him on his feet. still he risked it and chose a chair politely removed from her immediate neighborhood, which was chilly, he could not tell whether or not from design.
“you wish to see me?” she asked after a pause.
the question disconcerted him. he flushed, recovered himself and showed his teeth in a handsome smile. “yes, do you mind?” he retorted.
“but what do you want to see me about?” she insisted, as if this must be a matter of business, a painful business, since she knew that he was associated with her husband.
he snickered nervously, recovered his gravity at once, warned by the tightening of her lips. “when are you coming to new york?” he asked suddenly.
she drew back from this adder of a question. “is this why you came—you were sent?” she barely breathed the words, laying a hand like a confession upon her breast.
“i was not sent,” he returned quickly. “you understand?”
she signified that she did with a nod of her head. she released him for one moment from[214] her steady gaze; then she fixed her eyes on him again with the same interrogative suspense, as much as to say, “well, then, if you were not sent, why are you here?” she could not sense a meaning that would have been plain to another woman.
it was the stupidity of goodness, he decided, and was charmed by a certain experimental fear of her. he must proceed cautiously. that was the delightful part of it, to be obliged to watch his step in an affair of this kind. he had no doubt of his ultimate success—a married woman, abandoned by her husband. he knew all about that by inference from cutter. cutter was too brazen in the conducting of his “bachelor” apartments not to feel perfectly safe.
he supposed there had been some sort of financial adjustment between him and his wife. he knew very well that the situation in new york would not last. cutter was simply the profitable investment a certain beautiful and brilliant woman had chosen, who had the record of a sentimental rocket among the sporting financiers of the east. the first time he came a cropper in the markets, she would abandon him with the swiftness and insolence that would make the fellow’s[215] head swim. then cutter would return to his wife. they always did.
sometimes he had regretted not having a wife laid by himself as a sort of permanent stake, domestically speaking. if only he did not feel such revulsion toward the candor and monotonous details of actual married life. his decadent delicacy would be offended by the squalor of licensed intimacy with a woman. “squalor” was the word he invariably used in discussing the psychology of marriage.
still, he might marry helen cutter. she would never be in his way. she was not in her husband’s way now. and she was singularly refreshing to his jaded fancy. he had been so corrupt that, by revulsion rather than repentance, invincible virtue in a woman attracted him. besides, it would be a good joke on cutter to lose his wife—such a wife—while he was philandering in new york. he had always entertained a secret contempt for the fellow—a bounder who did not know how to bound; a gambler with the nerve of a financial adventurer. new york teemed with men of his type.
they had exchanged some commonplace remarks while he hit this line of reflection in the[216] high places, having gone over it many times before. that is to say, he offered the remarks—on the weather, on the growth of shannon, and more particularly upon the current aspects of the war. helen’s contributions to these topics had been brief. he comprehended perfectly that she was still in suspense as to the meaning of his visit.
he rose presently, took his chair, advanced with a friendly air and sat down near her, potentially within reach. and was amused to see that she still regarded him as from a great distance. “but you have not answered my question,” he said, going back to that. “when are you coming to new york to live? thought you would have been settled there long before this time.”
“i shall live here.”
“never in new york?”
“no.”
“but you are not planning to neglect us entirely! cutter would not stand for that. you will be coming up occasionally, of course,” he insisted, smiling.
“no; this is my home.”
gad, couldn’t she even squirm a bit? why didn’t she blaze forth at cutter or cover the situation with a few lies? he wondered how it would feel to live with a woman who hit the[217] truth on the head every time, as if the truth was a nail to be driven in, even if it pierced your vitals.
shippen swept a complimentary glance around the room as if in reply to her last remark. “well, you have certainly made it a beautiful home,” he said, feeling by the growing emergency of the question in her eyes that if he did not get off on another tack, she might force an explanation of his presence here which he was not ready to make until he had won more of her confidence. “this room is marvelous,” he went on, “sedate and feminine. it escapes the austerity of being a noble room by a miracle. what is it? piety with a flash of color, i should say. however did you think of such an effect? and how did you accomplish it?”
“i did not do it. i have learned something,” she said, off her guard for the first time, following his eyes about this room as if she accompanied his thoughts.
“what have you learned?” he asked, smiling.
“to buy what i want—not mere things, but taste in the choice of these things. it is for sale, like any other commodity.”
he laughed, with an appreciative glint of the eye.
[218]“for so long i did not know that taste is the one thing most people have not got. they only look as if they had it, when in fact they have purchased it. you buy it from your tailor. the woman whose clothes please you pays the modiste who makes them much more for her taste than for her work. you can buy any kind of taste, good, bad or indifferent; but nearly everybody buys it.”
what she said was not interesting; but he was interested that she could think it; it showed that she had a mind, which he had doubted. he hoped she would not develop too much along this line. the perfect woman, in his opinion, should have loveliness, health, and only a rudimentary intelligence. he was very tired, indeed, of the rhinestone sparkle of feminine wit.
“it is the same with the building and furnishing of a house,” helen showed up again. “they hire an architect and a decorator. and then they hire a landscape gardener. and when the whole scene inside and out is laid, they live in it as if they had planned it and achieved it. but they have bought every line, every shadow, and all the perspective—things that you feel and see, but cannot touch. it is not the house, but the idea it suggests for which you pay most. i had my own[219] ideas, but i employed professionals to produce them. this is what i have learned,” she concluded, “not to cobble my own ideas. i simply told those men what i wanted.”
“i should have liked to hear your instructions,” he said.
“they were short. i told the architect that i wanted an honorable looking house, not a grand one.”
he nodded, appreciatively, and waited. some subtle change had taken place in her mind toward him during this last moment. there was a compelling power in her expression, as if now she wished to hold his attention. she had a purpose. he became uneasy and curious.
“and i told the man who was to choose the furniture and do the inside decorations that i wanted a home, a mild kind of place with some sadness in it, like the heart of a mother; and rifts of brightness in it, like the face of a mother when she smiles; and everything very fine to honor her, the mother, you understand, in the eyes of her children.”
shippen’s agreeable attention changed for one instant to a blank stare; then he dropped his eyes as she went on with this intimate account of what she wanted her home to be. mother! and she[220] had no children. the term had for him a sort of embarrassing animal significance. it was not discussed this way in polite circles, even by women who were mothers. you were supposed not to know it or to forget that this sparkling being with whom you were conversing, or maybe flirting, had passed through the experiences of an accouchement. his feelings suffered a revulsion toward her. but she held him as if she meant that he should carry away with him the dimensions, the waist measure, the countenance and the germinating biography of this house.
“i told him,” she went on, still referring to the decorator, “that i wanted a home inside, where children would look as if they belonged in it, and not as if they had escaped from their own hidden quarters—soft places in it, you know, where a baby could just fall asleep, like the sofa over there,” indicating with a nod a wide, low, old-fashioned soda shrouded in shadows.
he cast an embarrassed glance at it. his feelings were that a babe should be kept concealed until it was a child of an age to be decently exposed and confessed. some men are like that, and a few women. their parent instincts have decayed.
“and when they become grown sons and daughters,”[221] she continued, taking no notice of his discomfiture, “there should be wide, happy spaces in here for their joys—a house for lovers and weddings.”
he waited. apparently she had finished. he raised his eyes and saw her flushed, animated. “but why should you want such a house?” he asked, not that it made any difference now what she wanted. so far as he was concerned the spell of her charm was broken. his one desire was to escape this disenchantment and to find out what was in the wind for cutter. he clung to that joke.
“because all the time i was a wife i wanted this house, and i longed for children. now i can have them.”
shippen stood up. she remained seated, eyes lifted with that rapt look fixed upon him.
“did you say—children, mrs. cutter?” he stammered.
“yes; now i shall have children,” she repeated.
“well, all right; but under the circumstances, it is a little unusual; don’t you think so?” he said, the compass of his mind already pointed toward the door.
“yes, it is,” she agreed, and was evidently about to launch into this feature of the case when[222] she saw that he was about to take his departure. this reminded her of something. “but what was it you wished to see me about, mr. shippen?” she asked, with a return of that vague anxiety in the tones of her voice.
“why, merely to resume a pleasant acquaintance, i suppose,” he answered politely.
“oh.”
“thank you for receiving me,” he said. “can i do anything for you in new york?”
“no,” she answered quickly, but with no shade of embarrassment to indicate that she knew he referred to her husband.
he took his departure politely and formally, but he had all the sensations of flight. “good heavens!” he exclaimed the moment he was out of the house. “to think i was on the point of letting myself in for her! what is a woman, anyhow? some confounded provision nature makes against her own defeat—a snare laid for us, nothing else. they have their own mind and purposes, contrary to our mind and purposes, whether they are good or bad. something infernally tricky about the bad ones: something infernally permanent about the good ones. they all want to set, like hens,” he snorted. “no wonder cutter kicked out. don’t blame him. she’s crazy, crazy[223] as a loon, if she is not worse, and of course she isn’t that. well, the joke is on me, not cutter. and mum’s the word when i get back to new york. children! gad, she must be planning an orphanage. wonder if he knows what she’s doing with his money. wonder if this town is on to the racket.”
he halted under the first street light and looked at his watch; barely time to meet arnold at the hotel. they were to dine together and discuss the sale of the mining property which was to be handled through the shannon national bank. he quickened his step. he must get off on the eight o’clock express for new york. he had received a shock, a revulsion of his romantic emotions. something distasteful had happened to him. he wanted to get away and recover from this nausea.
we all excite a certain amount of interest among our fellow men, not because we are interesting, perhaps, but because we live, and to that extent are in a degree mysterious. but when suddenly a man or woman becomes aware of a silent and persistent attention, it is disconcerting, because in secret, at least, he knows he has done enough to queer himself, if it should be known or even suspected. he has, however, the usual human[224] confidence in the deferred publication of these deeds until the day of all revelations, when the final courts sit to judge all men. at this end of time it will not matter, because of the leveling effects of knowing all men even as they know him.
in my opinion this will be a day of gasping astonishments among the dusty saints and sinners hurriedly summoned so long after they shall have forgotten even their virtues, much less their sins, which in the flesh we manage to bury beyond painful recollection as soon as possible. but now and then we get a whiff of what will happen, when a great and good man in the community defaults and absconds with the church funds. meanwhile the news that still travels fastest is the news of some one’s business which is nobody else’s business.
