Chapter XXI: The Man and His God 333 (8)

When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing, although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company. She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:

"Why are you going away to-morrow?"

Jim was surprised.

"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"

"Then I think you might have told me when _he_ wasn't here."

"My dear, you gave me no chance."

"And you booked passage back, Jim?"

"Passage home, yes."

Muriel's mouth drooped.

"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.

He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked searchingly into hers.

"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"

"I know, Jim, but I never promised----"

"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."

He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that, within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in France or America.

"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want to leave early. We had better go to bed."

She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent, and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and watched him climb aboard his train.

She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none. As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more afraid. When nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown into her drawing-room.

"You shouldn't," she said--"you shouldn't have come!"

Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young and handsome.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because of Jim."

"He invited me."

"Yes, I know, but----" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted her fingers.

"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."

"He was queer. His manner--I don't know. Only I had not promised to go home in three weeks."

"No?"

"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"

Von Klausen smiled.

"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"

"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."

"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of business. I know that; surely you should know it better."

"That business wasn't like him."

"It was very--shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself. Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once more!'"

She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa, the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.

The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say good-bye forever.

Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether. This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.

They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.

"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now think of as so right might end by being very wrong."

"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be right."

"Not the ruin of our lives?"

"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your husband's----"

"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow--I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him."

"Nevertheless, you are married to him."

"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when----"

"A divorce is always wrong."

"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the marriage a real one?"

"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of any faith is binding."

"But marriage is a contract."

"Marriage is a sacrament."

They would get so far--always darting down this byway and that of casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom--and then she would come back to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile, and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one in a passion of abnegation.

But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung, with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding interview.

In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.

Muriel started.

"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling bell.

"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.

They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of man.

Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.

"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"

With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to chastity.

To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving how much stronger was her hold on him.

"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her hand.

They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment more and they would go on, forever, apart.

He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer, fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high, curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars. He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled her in his arms.

It was then that Stainton entered the room.

XIX

HUSBAND AND WIFE

They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one glance. Each turned toward the husband.

Stainton smiled heartily.

"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you. But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."

"When----" began Muriel.

"I got as far as Montelimart when they caught me with one of their blue telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles and landed at Lyons before I heard that--I wasn't wanted."

Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Muriel had been on the verge of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian, nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to court it quite another.

"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored your good wife."

"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"

Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last distinctly to say:

"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."

"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.

"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.

"You have said, sir, that it is late."

"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."

The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.

Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left her.

"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an explanation."

She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.

"Don't touch me!" she cried.

She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely, what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual role of fond protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.

Jim stopped short.

"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well, you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to me!"

Tradition always shows us the wronged husband in a towering rage, in the throes of consuming indignation. Truth, however, with no respect for either man or his traditions, occasionally assigns to the deceiving wife the part of condemner. Constant though truth is, men are the slaves of their traditions, and when they meet truth, and tradition is contradicted, they are confused. In spite of the evidences of his senses, it did not for that moment so much as occur to Stainton to pursue the part of judge. Instead, he pulled a chair a little nearer to her.

"Won't you sit down?" he asked.

Muriel sat down.

"Well," she demanded, "what have you to say for yourself?"

"About my trip to Lyons?"

"About this spying on me, about this surprising me in my own house."

"I have some right, I think, to come home."

"You meant to trap me. You would never have dared to talk about an 'explanation' while the Captain was here to defend me!"

"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has been in my mind for some time."

"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at the first?"

"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"

"Love affair? There has been no love affair."

Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.

"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"

Muriel was silent.

"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the Spanish dancer----"

Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved, with an upward motion, slowly around her.

"You saw that!"

"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and, naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe what it was."

The wife fought for her self-control and won it.

"Deceit! Deceit even then!"

"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris--and I understood later why you wanted to go back."

He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.

"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy, too, there came the night of the fete. I could tell when von Klausen and you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the boulevards: I separated myself from you."

He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.

"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to give me a fair chance? You threw me into his arms--or tried to--and you call that a fair chance?"

Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he smiled quietly.

"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger; your love for me--or failing your love, your moral strength--need not assert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."

"You coward!"

"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full opportunity. Otherwise the fear--a very small one then--would have continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives, his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."

"You dare to say that!"

He was returning to the attitude of mind in which he had entered the room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing its point.

"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went on, "a woman compromises herself with X, at least after she has become a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only exterior circumstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."

Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a lightning-flash on a darkened sea.

"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she declared.

He raised a steady hand.

"Only a moment more, please," he said.

Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:

"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I took you away from Paris again--the next day, wasn't it?--because you wanted to go, but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian turned up here in Marseilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I decided to make an end of it. Now"--he spoke as if he were concluding an affair of business--"I have made that end."

"How have you made that end?"

Stainton smiled wanly.

"My dear----" he said.

"Don't call me that."

"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."

"How have you made an end?"

"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."

"You mean that you think--that you dare to think that I--that the Captain and--that we----"

"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know. Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the preliminary circumstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this house----"

"At your invitation!"

"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained alone with you in this room until after midnight--I say, given all these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I wanted--the evidence of seeing you in his arms--no man in his senses would for one moment doubt----"

"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.

"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say----"

"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You unclean-minded old man!"

He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.

At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been so long festering in her mind--at first unguessed, then vehemently denied, but always there and always becoming more and more poisonous--the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had achieved maturity.

"Now you listen to me," she commanded.

Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.

Stainton moved to the chair, but did not seat himself. He gripped its back and leaned across the back toward her.

So they stood, facing each other.

"This has been a 'good match' for me," she said. "It was a 'sensible alliance.' I 'did well for myself.' And to think that hundreds and hundreds of young girls are being carefully educated and brought up and trained in schools or in their own homes to be fitted for and to hope--actually to hope!--for this. 'A good match!' I was poor and young, and I married a rich man older than myself; but I was never for one minute your wife."

Stainton made a sally to recapture the situation.

"You were a good imitation," he said.

"Never," said she. "Not even that. What you wanted wasn't a wife, anyhow. You loved your crooked theories so well that you were blind and couldn't see that life was straight. You couldn't change what was real, so you tried to bend what was ideal to make it meet the real, and what was ideal snapped, and you didn't even know it snapped. Oh, I know what you wanted. Not a wife. You wanted someone that was all at once an admirer and a servant and a mistress. You didn't know it, but that was it: somebody who'd be the three things for the wages of the third. And me: I was something that my aunt's husband didn't want about the house, and so I was shuffled off on you. Is that being your wife?"

"For a time you were a good imitation."

"I tried to be what you wanted me to be, if that is what you mean. I tried. I took your word for what a wife was and what love was. But I soon found out, and then all the time I was saying to myself that things would change, that they were so bad they must change--and they wouldn't."

"So you bluffed?" he asked with the hint of a sneer on his long upper lip.

"I wanted to be honest." Her voice softened for the phrase. "Oh, don't you remember, at the very start, how I _said_ I wanted to be honest? But somehow all life, all the world, every littlest thing that happened, seemed to join against being honest. If God wants you to be honest, why does He make it so hard? The truth was that our being married was a lie, and so all we did was lies and lies."

"You told me that I gave you all you wanted, Muriel."

"All that you could give, but not the one thing you had promised to give--not what I gave you--not youth." Her tone hardened again. "What was the rest to that? If I told you that you gave me all I wanted, you always _knew_ that _you_ had all _you_ wanted. Well, you had. But did you ever think that a girl begins life with plans and dreams as much as a man does? You sinned against me and against Nature. Oh, yes, and I sinned too. I sinned ignorantly, but I sinned against Nature. I let myself be married to a man three times my age--and this is Nature's punishment. You taught me, you elaborately taught me, to be hungry, and then you were scared and angry because you couldn't satisfy my hunger, and because I _was_ hungry. We had only one thing in common, and that was the thing that couldn't last. Well, then, I'll tell you now"--she flashed it out at him--"what happened to me while you were selling the mine was not an accident!"

This, even in his most suspicious moments, he had not foreseen. Anger and horror struggled for him.

"Muriel," he cried, "you don't mean----"

"Yes, I do, I do! For some reason, I don't know why, I had got that girl's address, that girl in the box at the Bal Tabarin that night, and I went to her, and she sent me to someone. I knew once and for all that I didn't love you. I knew you were too old for it to be right for you to have a child. I knew it was wrong for me to have a child when I didn't want one and didn't know anything about taking care of one. Don't think I didn't suffer. It wasn't all physical, either. Do you remember the time you took me to buy baby-clothes? I thought I would go crazy--_crazy_! But I knew I had the right to refuse to be a mother against my will!"

He did not try to show her what all his training cried out against her deed. He could not try to indicate the injury that she had most likely done her health. He was too nearly stunned. He only asked:

"You loved him--then?"

"I didn't love you."

"Did you love him?"

"No. I thought I hated him. Later, when I knew I loved him, I even lied to him and told him I didn't love him. I can't forgive myself that. But then, when I did _that_ thing, I only knew what I've told you."

Stainton turned away. She saw him make an effort to straighten himself, but his shoulders bent and his head drooped. He was shuffling toward the door.

Nevertheless, Muriel was now ruthlessly honest.

"But I love him now," she said.

"Yes," said Stainton. His voice was dull.

"When you married me," said Muriel, "I knew nothing--nothing. I was no more fit to be your wife than you, because you knew so much and so little, were fit to be my husband."

Stainton half turned.

"And he?" Jim asked.

"He loves me: you only liked having me."

He turned slowly away again.

She thought that she heard him whisper:

"No child!"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I have lost everything else; but I have lost everything but a child. I only wish I could lose that, but I have a baby, a little dead baby. It will never leave me: it's the little ghost-baby of the woman I never had a chance to be."

He said nothing. He went down to the dining-room, merely for want of going somewhere away from her. He sat there in the darkness until, an hour later, he heard her shut and bolt the bedroom door. He took a candle in his shaking hand and studied in a mirror his gaunt grey face. One of the twin fears that had dominated his earlier life was still with him. She was right; he was growing old.

XX

HUSBAND AND LOVER

At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.

"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me, I----"

"But, monsieur----"

"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."

"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."

"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."

"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"

"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."

Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed to him and, as the maid left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth time when the domestic reappeared.

"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.

"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his question.

The maid presented a card.

"Show Captain von Klausen up here," said Jim.

A moment later, husband and lover stood alone together.

"Good-morning," said Stainton.

He held out his hand, and von Klausen, after a swift hesitation, took it.

The Austrian's expression was disturbed. He was unshaven. It was obvious that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. The sight seemed, somehow, to restore his host's self-confidence.

"You will please to pardon for this early intrusion----" von Klausen began.

Stainton smiled.

"You are always so pleasant, Captain," he said, "that you never intrude. Besides, the earlier the better. As it happens, I was just this moment thinking of you."

Von Klausen bowed. There was a brief pause, the Austrian's blue eyes wandering about the room in an endeavour to escape Stainton's glance, and Stainton's eyes fastened thoughtfully upon the Austrian.

"Well?" asked the husband.

Von Klausen coughed.

"Madame is--is----" he started, but stopped short.

"You asked for me. Did you expect to find her up at this time of day?"

"Oh, no--no: certainly not. Pardon me. I forgot the hour."

"Ah, you often forget the hour, don't you, Captain?"

The Austrian braced himself. He raised his chin defiantly. He met the issue directly.

"You refer," he asked, "to my late call of last evening--yes?"

"More or less. I am rather curious about that call."

"Sir, there is nothing about it to excite your curiosity. You asked me to call. There is nothing of my call that you may not learn from your wife."

"No doubt. Of course not; but it may be that I prefer to ask you."

Von Klausen was in a corner. Anger he could have met with anger, but here was something that he did not comprehend.

"I can answer no question," he said, stiffly, "that you have not asked of Mrs. Stainton."

"How do you know that I haven't asked her?"

"I do not know that you have."

"You are sure of that?"

"What do you wish to say, Mr. Stainton?"

"I mean: are you sure that you haven't seen her since you left here last night?"

The Austrian's face expressed a bewilderment that Stainton could not mistrust.

"How is that possible?" inquired von Klausen.

"Oh, of course!" Stainton, convinced, shrugged his shoulders. "However, I do want to make a few inquiries of you."

"Then I prefer to wait until your wife descends, so that you may make them in her presence."

Stainton still held in his left hand the letter that Muriel had addressed to him. He tapped it upon the knuckles of his right hand.

"I am afraid," he said, "that I can't conveniently wait so long. Captain von Klausen, are you in love with my wife?"

The Austrian rose precipitately. His blond moustache bristled.

"Sir!" said he.

"I merely wanted to know."

"At your question I am amazed, sir."

"Oh, I really had a good reason for asking."

"In my country no reason suffices for such a question."

"Hum. Well, you see, neither my wife nor I belong to your country, and you are not in your country now. However, there is no need for you to get excited, Captain. I am sorry if I seem to have intruded on your confidence with a lady; but, to tell you the truth, as my wife has admitted that she is in love with you, I was not unnaturally somewhat curious to discover whether you reciprocated her affection."

Von Klausen's eyes protruded. This husband was, obviously, mad. He might have been driven mad by his discovery. The discovery seemed a thing accomplished. With a great in-taking of breath, the Austrian made answer:

"You have loved your wife. Why should _I_ be ashamed to say that I love her?"

If von Klausen expected an explosion, he was disappointed.

"Well," said Stainton, calmly, "that is one way of looking at it."

"Please?"

"Never mind. You say you love her?"

"Yes."

Stainton looked at him narrowly, from under heavy brows. He regularly tapped his knuckles with the envelope.

"For a day?" he asked.

"Sir?"

"I mean: is this a world-without-end business so far as you are concerned, or is it one of your little amusements by the way?"

The Austrian clenched his teeth.

"Do you mean to insult me, sir?"

"I assure you that I mean nothing of the sort."

"Then you insult your wife!"

"Not at all. I am sorry that you should suppose I could think ill of her."

"If you do not think ill of her, you have no right to ask such a question as this which you have asked."

"It's not impossible that I should be a trifle interested, you know."

"I cannot understand, sir, how you can have the calmness----"

"Why not? She is my wife, you see. What I want to know is whether you are genuinely, sincerely in love with her. You know what I mean. As between man and man now: is this a for-ever-and-ever affair with you?"

The Austrian's bewilderment found vent in a long sigh.

"It is," said he.

"Good," said Stainton. He thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets and bent forward. "If I let her get a divorce from me, will you marry her?" he asked.

"Do you make a joke?"

"I don't consider this a joking matter, Captain. I ask you a frank question and I want a frank answer."

Von Klausen doubted his ears, but he replied:

"I would desire nothing better, but my faith forbids."

"You're sincere in that?"

"Absolutely."

"I mean about your faith, you know."

"Whatever else may be charged against me, sir, heresy or infidelity may not be charged."

"Have a cigar," said Stainton.

He produced his cigar-case, gave the Austrian a cigar, held a steady match while his guest secured a light, and then, with a cigar between his teeth, began to walk rapidly up and down the room, puffing quietly, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Look here," he said. "I am the kind of man that lives to look ahead and prepare for all contingencies. I do not always succeed, but I see no harm in trying. Well. When I first began to think about this thing, I said I would be prepared for the worst, if the worst came. I remembered your prejudices, and I had a fellow do some research work for me at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and yesterday I spent some time in the seminary library at Avignon. My dear fellow, you haven't got a leg to stand on."

"No leg?"

"Not in your objections to divorce and remarriage."

"The Church----"

"Was founded by, or at any rate pretends allegiance to, Jesus of Nazareth. Now, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said--it's not certain--something that may seem to bear out your theories; but that something which may be twisted to your way was said just about two thousand years ago to a small, outlying, semi-barbarous province. Are you going to try to apply it to civilisation to-day?"

The Austrian had philosophically seated himself in the chair against which Jim had leaned the night before.

"I apply the Sermon on the Mount," said von Klausen.

"Do you? I didn't think you did. But we'll pass that. Your faith bases its argument on the interpretation of that text made by the Early Church, and the Christian Fathers interpreted it in just about two dozen different ways."

"So?" said von Klausen: he would humour this lunatic.

"In the first place, at the beginning of the Christian Era marriage in Rome was a private partnership that the parties could dissolve by mutual consent, or by one notifying the other, as in any other partnership; that was part of Roman law, and for centuries neither the Church nor its Fathers disputed that law. In all the history of the first phase of Christianity in Rome you can't find one time when the whole Church accepted the idea that marriage was indissoluble. Once or twice the Church tried to get the law to require the Church's sanction before decree of divorce would be legally valid, but that was not a denial of divorce; it was a recognition and an endeavour to capture the control and exploitation of divorces."

"That matters nothing," said von Klausen. "These things were determined otherwise. With all my heart I wish not, but they were."

"How? The Church began by having nothing to do with marriages. Weddings were not held in the churches and so of course marriage was not considered a sacrament. I can give you chapter and verse for everything I say. About the only early council that tried to interfere with the law was the Council of 416, or some time near that. It tried to make Rome abolish divorce, but no emperor listened to it till early in the ninth century--Charlemagne, and he practised divorce himself. Only a little earlier--I think it was in 870--the Church officially allowed dissolution of marriage. In the Middle Ages the episcopal courts allowed divorce and were supported by the popes."

"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage indissoluble?"

"I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble, _anathema sit_. The Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do," he said.

"You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said.

"I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so afraid of women that he--he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming."

"St. Augustine is the authority in this matter."

"And no one other person ever said so many contradictory things about it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery; in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake."

Stainton paused to relight his cigar.

"But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage."

"Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the other."

Von Klausen shrugged.

"Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation. Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it."

The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only intellectual.

"It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted; "it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a sacrament."

"Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an act of the flesh?"

"Yes."

"Then how can what is done by the flesh be a sacrament?"

"I do not know. I know that it is. The Church, whether early or late, has spoken and it has said that marriage is a sacrament indissoluble save by the death of the husband or the wife."

Stainton put down his cigar.

"Captain," he said, "you are in earnest, aren't you?"

The Austrian flushed, but did not flinch.

"I am," said he.

"You love her?"

"I do."

"Truly?"

"With heart and soul, both."

"And there is no changing your faith?"

"No way."

"There isn't any short-cut, any quick trail over the mountain, any bridle-path? A fellow cannot get an Indulgence--nothing of that sort?"

"I wish--I wish deeply that one might; but--no."

"No," said Jim with a little sigh, "I suppose not nowadays. I looked that up, too. Public opinion is pretty strong, and as wrong as usual." He seemed to shake the subject from him. "And," he ended, "now that I have bored you with my cheap pedantry, I remember that I have been a bad host: I have not asked you your errand."

What change was coming over the madman now?

"My errand?" asked von Klausen.

"Exactly. You come here at about 9 A.M., and I take up your valuable time with a discussion of ecclesiastical polity. What was it that you wanted to see me about?"

What the Austrian had wanted he had long since learned. He had no sooner left the villa on the night previous than he began to doubt whether his supposition that Stainton was unsuspicious was quite so well founded as he had at first imagined. He recalled a certain constraint in the husband's deportment, and then he imagined other tokens that had not been displayed. In the end, he decided to return to Muriel's home at the earliest possible moment, discover whether there were any real danger and, if there was, face its consequences. Now, however he learned that Muriel had made some sort of confession to Stainton and that Stainton had received that confession in a manner inexplicable to von Klausen. Confronted with Jim's abrupt question, he did not know what to say, and so he found himself saying:

"I should like to see Mrs. Stainton."

Stainton whistled.

"I wish you could," he answered. "Indeed, indeed, I wish you could, my boy; but I am sorry to say that it is out of the question."

"You forbid it?" Von Klausen wished that these confounded Americans could be brought to see the simplicity of settling complex difficulties by the code of honour.

"I didn't say that I forbade it; I said it was out of the question. I meant that it was out of the question."

The Austrian bent forward, hot anger in his eyes.

"Do you dare to deprive her of her liberty?" he asked.

"On the contrary, my dear sir, she has taken her liberty. She has gone away."

The thing seemed incredible to von Klausen:

"Away from Marseilles?"

Stainton nodded.

"That's it," he agreed.

There shot through von Klausen's mind the thought that this lunatic had killed her. If so, he would surely kill the lunatic or be killed in the attempt.

"I don't believe it," he said. "I believe that you are----"

"Captain von Klausen, I have learned all that I want to know about your religious faith, and I am not in the slightest degree interested in the question of your other beliefs. I say to you that my wife has gone away, and I am afraid that, whether you like it or not, you are obliged, for the present, to accept my word."

"I will not accept your word!"

"Pardon me, but I don't see what else you can very well do. Of course, you might watch the house, but the Corniche gets very hot by midday."

"You joke. You can joke about such a thing!"

"I have never been so serious as I am now."

Stainton emphasised his words with a gesture of his left hand, in which he held the now crumpled letter.

"That letter!" said von Klausen with sudden inspiration. "It is from her!"

"It is."

"Ah, you have intercepted a letter from her to me!"

"I am not in the habit of reading my wife's personal letters to other people--when she writes any. This note is addressed to me, and it is this note that tells me of her departure."

"It tells you where she is going?"

"It tells me that and more. It tells me that she is sorry for a wound she thinks she has inflicted on my feelings, and she proposed to look for rest in a certain secluded place."

The Austrian's blue eyes brightened.

"A secluded place?" he repeated, excitedly.

"Exactly; but I shall not tell you its name. I shall keep that to myself until I have had another interview with my wife."

The Captain looked closely at Stainton.

"You mean to follow and chastise her?" he asked.

"There," said Stainton, quietly, "I think we reach a point where the matter becomes entirely my own affair."

XXI

THE MAN AND HIS GOD

If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:

"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus (5 fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) Gemenos to the (4 hrs.) Hotellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the (51/2 M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the Hotellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, 3/4 hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees--The Ste. Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the mountains among which it lies."

So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen's last residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it might quite as well be across the celestial border.

Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.

The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.

She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before, assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised herself to him in that long ago and far away New York--how tall and strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master, of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed her to his breast--how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of such short life?

In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement, as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of any physical contact with him made her shiver.

Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?

Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her primal impulses she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding, wanted to hide and suffer alone.

She had some money in her purse--a thousand francs. She wrote the note to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.

It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas, they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes, looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view, only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that showed even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came, among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hotellerie that had for many years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of its builders.

They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.

A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon her knees and prayed.

She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.