Eden

"No," she answered; "I have forgotten."

"Surely----"

"Yes, I have forgotten. It is good to forget. This is the last act, is it not?"

"No, it is the prologue."

The speech was as significant as her own. For a second he was silent, and bit his under lip. Then, as Jones had done before, he stood up.

"I will come," he muttered in her ear, "but not on Sat.u.r.day."

"Good-night, Mr. Maule."

"Good-night, Mrs. Usselex."

With a circular salute to the other occupants, Maule left the box.

Presently it was invaded by other visitors of whom no particular mention is necessary. At last there was a wail and final crash in the orchestra. The opera was done.

On the way home Usselex questioned his wife. "Who is that man Maule?" he asked.

"Miss Bolten is interested in him, I believe."

"I hope not," Usselex returned; "he has a bad face."

V.

The next morning Eden awoke in her great room that overlooked Fifth Avenue. The night had been constellated with dreams, and now as they faded from her there was one that lingered behind. Through a rift of consciousness she had seen herself talking with feverish animation to Arnswald, on some subject of vital importance, the which, however, she was unable to recall; it had gone with the night, leaving on the camera of memory only the tableau behind. For a little s.p.a.ce she groped after it unavailingly, and then dismissed it from her. But still the tableau lingered until it became obscured by her own vexation. She felt annoyed as at an impertinence. What right had Arnswald to trespa.s.s in her dreams?

She rang the bell, and when in answer to the summons her maid appeared, she gave herself up to the woman"s ministrations. The annoyance faded as the dream had done, and she fell to thinking of the day and of her husband. At one there was a luncheon at which she was expected, and in the evening there was a dinner at Mrs. Manhattan"s. Her husband, she knew, had gone to his office hours ago and would not return until late.

It had occurred to her before that he worked harder than his clerks; even Arnswald seemed to have more leisure than he. But on this particular forenoon, when her equipment was completed, but one idea channeled her ruminations, and that was that if her husband worked harder than his clerks, it was because of her.

She smiled a little at the thought, and then at herself in the mirror.

Truly the guests at the luncheon might have been recruited from the four quarters of the globe, and few could be fairer than she. She was contented with her appearance, not in any sense because it might eclipse that of other women, but because he was proud of it, and because his pride and laborious days were all in all for her. She gave to her gown and to the arrangement of her hair that _coup de maitre_ which no maid, however expert, is able to administer, and presently had herself driven up the avenue to the house at which she was to be entertained.

The luncheon, as the phrase is, went off very well. Made up of fresh gossip and new dishes, it was stupid yet agreeable, as women"s luncheons are apt to be. But on leaving it Eden felt depressed. It was the first of the kind which in her quality of married woman she had attended, and as her carriage rolled down the avenue again, she wondered were it possible that such things as she heard could be true, the story that had been told about Viola Raritan, for instance, and the general agreement following it that married men were the worst[1]. Surely, she told herself, they might be, all of them indeed save one, who was above reproach. As for her recent companions, they discredited virtue in seeming to possess it. At the memory of things they had implied, the color mounted to her cheeks.

[Footnote 1: The reader is referred to _The truth about Tristrem Varick_.]

On the opposite sidewalk a girl was loitering. For a second, Eden, through the open window, eyed her gown. She raised some flowers to her face, and when she put them down again her face was white. Through the window she had seen a cab pa.s.s, and in the cab her husband and a woman.

In a conflict of emotions such as visit those who learn the dishonor and the death of one they cherished most, Eden reached her door. She left the carriage before the groom had descended from the box, and hurried into the house. There she entered the drawing-room and sought for a moment to collect her thoughts. It was impossible, she kept telling herself, that such a thing could be. She had been mistaken; it was not her husband that she had seen, and if it were her husband then was he on some errand as innocent as her own. But it was her husband. The effort she was making to deceive herself was useless as broken gla.s.s. And as for the woman with whom he was driving, what had he to do with her or she with him? She was certain she had seen her face before.

In her nervousness she rose from her seat and paced the room, tearing her gloves off and tossing them from her as she walked.

In the lives of most of us there are hours of such distress that in search of a palliative we strive as best we may to cheat ourselves into thinking that the distress is but a phase of our own individual imagination, close-locked therein, barred out of real existence, and unimportant and delusive as the creations of dream. And as Eden paced the room she tried to feel that her distress was but a figment of fancy, an illusory representation evoked out of nothing. She had been enervated by the gossip of the lunch-table; a child startled by the possible horrors of a dark closet was never more absurd than she. It was nonsense to suppose that a man such as her husband could be capable of a vulgar intrigue.

On the mantel a clock ticked dolently, as though in sympathy with her woe, and presently to her inattentive ears, it rang out four times. In an hour, she reflected, in two hours at most, he would return. She would ask him where he had been, and everything would be explained. It was nonsense for her to torment herself. Of course it would be explained, and meanwhile----

And as she determined that meanwhile she would give the matter no further thought the butler entered the room, bearing a note on a salver, which he gave to her and withdrew. The superscription was in her husband"s handwriting and she pulled the envelope apart, confident that the explanation for which she sought was contained therein. But in it no explanation was visible. It was dated from Wall Street. "Dearest Eden,"

it ran, "I am detained on business. Send excuses to Mrs. Manhattan. In haste, as ever, J. U."

"Detained on business," she repeated aloud very firmly and pressed her hand to her head. She was calm, less agitated than she had been before.

It behooved her to determine what she should do. Seemingly, but one course was open to her, and suddenly she perceived that she had stopped thinking. Night had seized and surrounded her; it was of this, perhaps, that she had spoken to Arnswald in her dream.

In the morning her faith had been un.o.bscured, confident as a flower at dawn. Then doubt had come, and now, as the afternoon departed, so did all belief as well. It was no more hers to recall than the promise of an earlier day. She had done her best to detain it, she had clutched it; but she had questioned, and faith is impatient of coercion and restless if examined. Save its own fair face it brings no letter of introduction; welcome it for that, and it is at once at home; but look askance, and it dissolves into a memory and a reproach. Eden had startled it, unwittingly perhaps; but she had startled it none the less. It had watched its opportunity as a guest illy treated may watch for his; and when suspicion, like the lackey that it is, had held the door ajar, it had eluded her and gone.

Automatically, as though others than herself guided her movement, Eden touched a bell. "Harris," she said, when the man appeared, "go to Mrs.

Manhattan"s and say that Mr. Usselex and myself are unavoidably prevented from dining with her to-night. That will do." And this order delivered, she resumed her former seat. Down the street she marked advancing dusk. The sun had sunk in cataracts of champagne. Westward the sky was like the apotheosis in Faust, green-barred and crimson, with background of oscillant yellow. The east was already grey. Overhead was a shade of salmon which presently disappeared. Then dusk came, and with it a colorless vapor through which Night, cautious at first as misers are, displayed one sequin, then another, till taking heart it unbarred all its treasury to the world.

For some time after the man had gone Eden remained in the drawing-room.

She found her gloves and drew one on again, but the other she tormented abstractedly in her hand. In her enforced inaction she fell to consoling herself as children do, arguing with discomfiture as though its shadow was ineffectual, as though trouble and she were face to face, and yet too far removed one from another to ever really meet. An hour pa.s.sed, and still she sat una.s.sured, restless of thought and conscious only that an encroaching darkness had obscured a vista on which her eyes had loved to dwell.

Truly the heart has logic that logic does not know, and as Eden let the incidents of the afternoon and of the previous evening parade in dumb show before her, something there was that kept whispering that she was taking appearances for facts. She strove to listen to the whisper, but the fantoches were froward and insistent; the st.u.r.dier her effort to dispel them the closer they swarmed. Sometimes of their own accord they would leave her, she would think herself done with them, her eyes filled in testimony to her deliverance, and abruptly back they came. But still the whisper persisted, it was growing potent, and its voice was clear.

It kept exhorting to patience, it exorcised appearances, and advanced little pleas of its own.

Eden was only too willing to be guided. "I am impatient," she mused, "but I will wait."

Another hour limped away, and though an hour limps it may leave a balm behind. The lamps in the drawing-room had been lighted, but the servant had come and gone un.o.bserved. Eden was still closeted in herself.

"Surely, by eleven at the latest he will return," she reflected, "and then all will be explained. It is a thankless task this of building imaginary dungeons. There are hours in which I let fancies resolve themselves into facts and the facts fossilize into skeletons." An episode of her girlhood came back to her and she smiled. "Perhaps father was right; I may have hemiopia, after all."

She stood up from her seat and was about to leave the room when she heard the front door open, and in a second her husband"s step.

Eden drew the portiere aside and looked out in the hall. Usselex had his back to her. He was taking off his overcoat. She spoke to him and he turned at once, one arm still unreleased. At last he freed himself and came to her.

"You got my note, did you not?" he began. "I am sorry about this evening. Could you not go to Mrs. Manhattan"s without me? Something always seems to turn up at the last moment."

"I hardly expected you so early," Eden answered. "I sent word to Laura."

She was looking at her husband, but her husband was not looking at her.

He seemed preoccupied and nodded his head abstractedly.

"Yes, yes," he muttered, with singular inappositeness. "Yes, of course.

But there," he added and turned again to the door, "I must hurry."

"Whom were you with this afternoon?" Eden asked.

It was as though she had checked him with a rein. He stopped at once and glanced at her.

"Did you see me?" he inquired; and accepting her silence for answer he continued at once: "It"s a long story; I have hardly time to tell it now."

Eden put her hand on his sleeve. "Tell it me," she pleaded.

For the moment he stood irresolute. "Tell me," she repeated, and moved back, motioning him to a chair.

Usselex took out his watch. "I must hurry," he said again. "But there,"

he added tenderly, "since you wish it, a moment lost is small matter, after all."