Chapter IV

“What made her do it?” I asked Ellice Valentine, when I made my call a few days later. “She was the last woman in the world to make a break like that.”

“I suppose the answer is that she loved him.”

“Burke? I don’t believe it.”

“No. Sidney. She adored him. She was rather pathetic about it. And I have an idea that she never loved him as much as the day she ran away with the other man. Women are like that, sometimes, Maurice.”

“It sounds like insanity.”

“Maybe it is,” she said calmly. “Personally, I don’t think any woman in love is entirely sane. The things they do!” She stared for a moment at her wedding ring. “I saw her that last day, you know.”

Well, it was a pitiful enough picture as she drew it; Anne standing crying in a jumble of little slippers and bright negligées and garments, with a swollen-eyed maid packing, and a photograph of Sidney on one end of the dressing table and one of the Cynara on the other.

Anne, she said, picked up the Cynara and flung it, frame and all, into a waste-basket. She hated it, she said.

“She didn’t know of Julie?”

“No. But she felt it had hurt her, somehow. She didn’t know just how. She said that that was the way Sidney seemed to think of her—in marble or something of the sort. He’d been away for two days then; she didn’t know where he was.”

“She meant, probably, that he loved his dream of her, rather than herself.”

“Maybe,” said Ellice, rather vaguely. “He didn’t love her. Didn’t even pretend to. And she had learned to be loved, you see. He had been adorable at first.”

She gave me one of her quick searching glances.

“You see, women need to _be_ loved,” she said. “They are not like some men, who just go on caring year after year, without any return whatever.”

“He must have cared; he shot himself.”

“Not for two years! Don’t lay that to Anne, Maurice. He shot himself because he couldn’t repeat Cynara, not because he couldn’t repeat—Anne.”

Yes. Sidney had reached the point of suicide, and had failed. I had been wandering about China when the word came, and I had had a very clear vision of that failure, and of Sidney recovering, lying there and stubbornly adding this to the list of his other failures.

Holy images about, and nuns, and probably Father Alexis, with his shameful old soutane and his faded, other world eyes, remonstrating against this crime against God-given life. And Sidney sneering and thinking perhaps of Julie and Anne, but mostly of how he had bared his soul to the world. That unbroken front of his broken; a confession made, not to his priest, but to the press!

He was a proud man, Sidney.

“I wrote him at once, when I heard,” said Ellice. “But he didn’t answer. I rather thought he wouldn’t.”

“What in the world did you say?”

“Oh, just a friendly letter. You know—about the children, and all that. He’d liked the children, in his—” she smiled, “—in his own fashion. But I _did_ say something else. I told him not to worry about repeating Cynara; that things like that came as the result of an emotion, and that when the emotion came again so would everything else.”

Somebody came just then, and I left. But Ellice followed me out into the hall, and laid a detaining hand on my arm.

“You don’t know anything about Anne, do you, Maurice?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve tried, haven’t you?”

“She left Burke after a year. In Vienna. That’s all I know.”

“You don’t think he ill-treated her?”

“No. I think she simply still cared for Sidney. That’s all. In spite of what you said a half hour ago, there are women like that, too, Ellice.”

She patted my arm and let me go.

Curiously enough, she wrote me a letter that very night, and I received it the next morning. “Somehow your face haunted me to-day, Maurice,” she said. “And you know my old habit of impulsively writing letters. But you see, my dear, I was once so very badly in love with you, and so I feel tenderly toward you, as we do to all old loves. Don’t worry! It’s all over ages ago, but it is true. The hours we all spent together, with me caring for you, and you in love with Anne, and Anne only living for Sidney! Luckily the chain stopped there, for Sidney only cared for himself, but if the Director of all has a sense of humour, how funny we must have seemed!

“But this is what I want to say. Aren’t you cherishing a dream at the expense of reality? And aren’t you exactly as bad as Sidney if you do? Think it over.

“And don’t stay away because of this letter. Come in and see the children have their tea, and you will know what I mean.”