Chapter III

The other man came in the afternoon. She watched him make his way up through the fields, which were fields no longer, being laid out with neat cement streets and rows of young trees. The day was warm for so early in the year. He carried his hat. It was an old trick. How often she had watched him come through those very fields carrying his hat, the wind blowing his heavy hair back from his face. Even the gesture with which he attempted to restore its order was familiar.

How many things were coming back to her!

Their meeting was very quiet, just a minute eye to eye, hand to hand, and then she was sitting and he was standing looking down at her.

He approved of her. He had always liked her, even when the madness of young love had died. Many friendships are refined out of the crucible of passion.

“How little you have changed!” he said. “You are, if anything, even lovelier.”

“I am older, and just now I am very sad.”

“I know. I only heard about it yesterday. He was splendid.” There was a little pause. Both were thinking. “How decent he was to me, when—when I deserved almost any brutality.”

She nodded. He was making it easier for her. He was leading back.

“He was very understanding,” she said. “He knew life and people, and he knew youth. He was very young himself, always, although after—that, he aged, rather.”

She had thought she could tell him immediately, but it was harder than she had expected.

“Jove!” he said, looking around the room. “How changed it is and yet—how much the same! To think of you being married and having—is it one child or two?”

“Two.”

“And you are happy, of course.”

“I have been until recently.”

He was impatient at himself for forgetting her father’s death. They seemed to talk around in circles. If they touched that madness of ten years before it was to rebound quickly to something else.

And now, looking at him, she wondered why it had all been. She had never really cared—she knew that now. He touched nothing in her that was vital or real. He was not her man. This terrible thing had been spring madness—that was all.

He had been there for a half hour and they had touched many conversational surfaces. Was he afraid, or did he not know that she must have had some real need when she sent for him?

She moved uneasily about the room and, turning suddenly, caught him off guard.

Ah; he was afraid! She saw it in his eye.

That gave her courage. She turned and crossed the room to him, her slim black gown dropping about her.

“I sent for you,” she said, “not to talk about how the neighbourhood has changed or what we had done to the house. You know it. Why don’t you ask me what it is?”

“I have been trying to guess.”

During the long hours of the night before she had framed a dozen ways to tell him, roundabout ways leading him on so that he himself at last might frame it, but when the time came, so desperate was her situation that she blurted out the truth from mere madness of getting it over with.

“Do you know—have you never thought that there might have been a very tragic result to that—that excursion of ours?”

His eye sharpened, grew keen and watchful.

“I am not sure that I understand exactly—”

“I think you understand. It is quite true.”

For a moment they stood facing each other. In her face only shame and distress, in his a curious mixture of amazement and a growing exultation.

“There was a child—a boy. _He_ let me think it had died. I have always thought so. But a few days ago, in going over his papers—”

Quite without warning she turned white and caught at a chair. He made a quick step forward but she would not let him touch her.

“Poor little girl!” he said. He seemed to understand. He made no further attempt to approach her.

“I did not bring you here to talk about—what is past,” she said, speaking very fast. “That’s over and done with. I am not blaming you. I never have blamed you. But my problem is so terrible—I don’t know what to do—I can’t even think. Don’t you understand? Here I am with a husband and two little girls, and yet, off in a wretched little town in New Jersey, in a poor little house, I have another child. Don’t you see?”

He did not see exactly. That was the tragedy of it. The need of secrecy he could comprehend, the necessity of concealment, the physical problem. But this spiritual question of hers was beyond him—this new and crying responsibility. Still there _was_ a question at issue. He could see that. He fell to pacing up and down the room.

“It is awkward, isn’t it?” he said, at last. “A boy, you say. How—how old is he?”

“Almost ten. He looks like you.”

Again there was the gleam of exultation, very momentary, very undeniable.

It took her a long time to make him see what she felt, her responsibility to this child, her duty to be honest now for her own sake, and something that she had only begun to suspect herself—her longing for the boy. But they seemed to get nowhere at all.

“But what am I to do?” he said finally. “It’s—it’s damned awkward in every way. Of course you are not going to be foolish enough to take the child or—tell your husband about it?”

“Why not?”

“Because the time to have told him was before you married him. It’s too late now.”

“I know that. I was young and afraid. I am not afraid now. I am only afraid—not to. You are going to be married. Shall you tell her?”

“That’s different. Of course I shall not tell her. My dear girl, I have no intention of shirking my responsibility. The child is mine. I believe you absolutely. I will do my share, of course. He will have to be brought up, educated.”

She flung out her hands helplessly.

“That isn’t it. Am I to go on all the rest of my life living a lie? Am I to let my husband call me a good woman when I am not a good woman?”

“Well, as to that—if you insist on an argument, are you any worse woman because the child is living? Now, look here, don’t be silly and hysterical. The thing is true and we will have to face it, but don’t forget this: Don’t be selfish. You spiritual women with eyes of saints are very selfish with your souls. What is your conscience to the happiness of three other people? To sleep at night with the feeling that you have made a clean breast of it, that having done a wrong thing you have helped it by telling about it, and at the same time to destroy permanently the happiness of a good man—that’s got to be figured on. I am not afraid. It won’t be pleasant, but if you tell I will face it. But don’t forget one thing. To secure your spiritual ease and the further happiness of a boy who is already quite contented as he is, you are going to destroy your husband’s faith and happiness, you may break up your home. And there are the two little girls.”

He was right—she knew it all at once. She could never tell. Telling would be easy. The hard thing would be to live on year after year shoring up with ceaseless vigilance the walls of her secret house, fighting endlessly for the three she loved, against this child who was also hers and for whom every instinct of her was now crying out. No compromise with her conscience this, a pure sacrifice. And not the least of her burdens would be that even her husband would never understand. A moment of carelessness, a crumbling wall and she would stand before him as a woman who had deceived him and continued to deceive him, not to save him—but to save herself.

When she held out her hand he bent over it very low.

“I am afraid you think I am hard,” he said. “But it is life. Only don’t think I am not sorry—I am terribly sorry. I had never dreamed of it, and if at any time there is anything I can do—”

She was ghastly, but she tried to smile.

“Then I wish now and then you would go to see him. He is very lonely. He has—he has broken his leg.”

“Go? Of course I’ll go,” he replied heartily. “I am feeling like a yellow dog, but that sort of thing I can and will do. I—I like boys, you know.”

She wrote the address on the back of one of her cards and gave it to him.

“If you could go soon,” she said, “while he is still unable to get around, it would—it would be very kind.”

The children were coming in. As they stood there a door slammed and a shrill young voice called “Mother.”

He put his hand over hers.

“Remember,” he said. “It is three against one.”

* * * * *

There was a young moon that night. Wrapped in a steamer rug she lay in a deep chair at the end of the terrace.

Mam’selle opened the window above. From the nursery came a chorus of sleepy “Good-nights.”

Her husband sat on the balustrade. She could see only the deeper shadow. That was he, and the glowing end of his cigar.

“Trouble,” he was saying in his young voice, “trouble is a great thing, darling. I believe we are closer together to-night than we have ever been before. A little while ago I was thinking—”

“What were you thinking?”

“Well, I was hoping—rather hoping that sometime when you are quite strong again, that we might have a son. I—I am very fond of boys, you know.”

“A son!”

A son, a brown-eyed wistful small boy on a sofa-bed in a little clapboard house. If she could only have said: “I have a son, a little lonely boy! I have a son and my arms are aching for him!”

But she did not dare. How could she kill the happiness in her husband’s voice, the hope, the trust. He had asked her for a son. Could she offer him the child of another man? How much was honesty to count against his suffering? Her decision was made, but the question would always be hers, seeking answer.

Suddenly her hands went cold. She had given the boy’s father his address on one of her visiting cards! How careless, how madly careless! She must get it back, know that it was destroyed. And could her visit to the child have betrayed her? Had she been seen? How could she explain?

Her husband sat on the balustrade and smoked. The peace of the night was on his soul. And she, to whom he had confided his happiness, lay back in her deep chair and plotted and schemed, as she must plot and scheme all the rest of her life, to keep intact her secret house.

VI
A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy