Chapter X: Part 10

Elizabeth was trembling from head to foot. Her resolution never to marry Clavering was not shaken in the least, or even touched, but like a child who has heedlessly set the torch to a powder magazine, she was appalled at her own work. She remained silent—what was there for her to say? And then she saw a figure pass the bowed shutters, making a shadow flit across the floor; and it was the shadow of Hugh Pelham. She sprang to her feet, a new light in her eyes which Clavering had never seen before. Clavering was for an instant as completely forgotten as if he had never been. He saw his fate in that look, that action. He rose, too, and the next moment Hugh Pelham walked into the room. He was visibly older, more weather–beaten, than he had been two years before, and, although ten years Clavering’s junior, he looked quite the same age. Evil–doing is very often good for the physical man and well–doing bad for the physical man. The two men instinctively recognized each other at the first glance, and hated each other instantly with a mortal hatred. Elizabeth stood next Pelham. She had given him her hand without a word, and he held it firmly.

Clavering turned to Elizabeth and said: “When can I see you again? Pray make it as soon as possible. That much I can ask, after what has passed between us.”

“Excuse me,” said Pelham, politely, “but I don’t think Mrs. Darrell can see you again.”

A dull red showed under Clavering’s skin, and a slight tremor shook his massive figure. It was a situation hard for any man to bear, and almost intolerable to James Clavering. He said the only thing possible under the circumstances. “I must decline to accept your decision. It rests with Mrs. Darrell.”

Elizabeth turned to Major Pelham. “Will you kindly leave me with Mr. Clavering for a moment? It is his right, and later I will explain all to you.”

Pelham, with a bow, walked out of the drawing–room, and, opening the street door, gazed upon the great pile of stone which the Claverings had lately inhabited. Clavering, when he and Elizabeth were alone, said at once:—

“I know how it is; I saw it in your face and eyes when the other man came. I am not one likely to ask for quarter or give quarter. I accept my fate as I accepted my expulsion from the Senate and the loss of many millions of dollars. There are in the world compensations to me for the other things. For the loss of you there is no compensation. It is my first and my last chance of leading a better life, for I swear to you, Elizabeth, I meant to lead a better life if you had married me. But now—it doesn’t matter in the least. I was born a hundred years too late; then I should have married you by force. I would have given my seat in the Senate to have seen such a look in your eyes when I came in as I saw when the other man came. Good–by, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth gave him her hand. In all their acquaintance this was the first glimpse, the first suspicion, she had had that anything like a noble and uplifting love existed in Clavering; but he, this man, smirched all over, a bad husband, a bad father, who knew no truth nor honesty in his dealings with men or other women, loved once, truly, and at the moment of losing everything else he lost the only thing worthy the name of love which he had ever known in his whole life. He held Elizabeth’s hand in his; he had never so much as kissed it. He raised it to his lips, but Elizabeth drawing back with a violent and undisguised repulsion, he at once dropped it again. He looked at her for a full minute, compelling her against her will to meet his gaze, and then, turning, walked out of the house. On the steps outside he passed Pelham. Neither man spoke.

Pelham went into the drawing–room, where Elizabeth stood, pale and trembling. As he closed the door after him she said in an indescribable voice, “He never kissed me—he never so much as kissed my hand.”

“I don’t think you would ever have married him in any event, Elizabeth,” replied Pelham, gently. “But let us not speak of him. I came home as soon as I could—I had not had any news from England after I was well in the interior of Africa. I knew nothing of what had been done until I got your letter. I was coming to you, anyway—your year of widowhood was over. Oh, Elizabeth, how could you misjudge me as you did?”

* * * * *

Clavering found himself in the largest room of the large suite of rooms he occupied at the most expensive hotel in Washington. The April sun was just setting, and it flamed upon a huge mirror directly opposite the luxurious chair in which he sat. He looked at his own image reflected full length in the glass. It seemed to be moving, to be surrounded by other figures. He saw them well—painted and bedizened women, some of them loaded with jewels and with coronets on their heads. Their faces were beautiful and engaging and made his pulses leap, and then suddenly these faces changed into those of vultures with bloody beaks and hungry eyes. Then there were men, some in court dress and with orders sparkling on their breasts. All of them had a foreign look, they spoke a language he only half understood; and they too changed into hungry, distorted figures which he knew were the shapes of vampires and harpies. They smiled upon him and fawned upon him, and he saw himself smiling back, rather pleased, it appeared. Sometimes he and this crowd were moving through splendid rooms; there were balls and dinners going on, and he could hear the clash and rhythm of orchestras. Again, they were in dismal business offices, or in raging crowds upon Continental bourses. At first he was always surrounded, and it seemed as if he were losing something all the time.

Gradually the men and women about him no longer fawned upon him. They were familiar with him; then they jeered him; and presently they menaced him. They tried to strangle him, to rob him, and he had lost something—money or power or capacity, or perhaps all three, and he could not defend himself. And they grew more and more foreign to him, he could not understand their language at all. They talked among themselves, and he did not know what they were saying. And after a while he grew helpless, and did not know where he was; and then he saw himself standing on a bridge at night, in a foreign city. There were many lights upon the bridge, which were reflected in the black and rushing river. He was about to throw himself into the river, when it suddenly came to him that it was cold and he was thinly clad and hungry. And then he knew that he was in a strange country, and it came to him that he would return to his own land, to a place where there was warmth and comfort and the strange thing he had lost would be awaiting him. But then he heard wolfish voices shrieking at him out of the darkness that he had no home, no country—that he would never again be warmed and fed, and invisible hands like lions’ claws were clutching him and thrusting him into the dark waters, and he could only feebly resist them. There was a great mocking, reddish moon in the wild night sky and it reeled about and fell into an abyss of black clouds and then dropped into the blacker river. And the stars were going out one by one, so that the heavens and the earth had a blackness of the blackest night.

This produced a kind of horror in him, which made him cry out—a loud cry, he thought it. But it was really low and half smothered. And to his amazement he was not in his room at the hotel, but standing in the doorway of his own house. It was night, and he heard a great clock inside his own house strike the hour—nine o’clock. He could not remember how or why he had got from his hotel to his deserted house. He saw the caretaker, an old hobgoblin of a negro, peer at him from a basement window, and he shrank behind the great stone pillars of the doorway. It was a warm, soft spring night, without a moon, but the purple floor of heaven glittered with palpitating stars. The street was always a quiet one; to–night it was so strangely still that he feared to move lest his footfall should sound too loud. And while he stood, dazed and hesitating within his doorway, he saw two figures come together down the street and stop at Elizabeth’s house. One was Elizabeth, the other was the man she loved. The night was so warm that the house door was left open. Clavering watched the two figures mount the steps and go into the house. The man touched Elizabeth’s arm in helping her up the steps. It was a simple, conventional thing, but Clavering saw revealed in it a love so deep, so constant, so passionately tender, that he thought he had never seen real love before. He turned away, to enter upon the fate that had been laid bare to him.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—A Table of Contents was not in the original work; one has been produced and added by Transcriber.