Chapter 12: More Complications

Miriam had got rid of the senator gracefully, leaving him with a glow of satisfaction about his blasé old heart, and locked herself into the guest chamber with her grief. This room was as far from the other bedrooms as the house would allow. Here she could not be heard if a sob escaped her.

The house was still and dark when Claude after his long, breathless walk reached it. He had been too agitated to trust himself in any kind of public conveyance. He wanted to be alone and to have the physical exertion of walking to help him grow calm. Inaction was more than he could bear. He had had enough of that during the evening. Before he reached home he had gone over the miserable matter in every possible phase. He had excused all his own wrong-doing again and again, only to sec himself the next moment in a more miserable, despicable light than ever. He had blamed Miriam, and excused her. He had raged with both the senator and Mrs. Sylvester until he was weary of the thought of them, and still he did not come to any conclusion. He began to dread to meet his wife as he approached the house, for he knew that she could use scathing words if she chose, and his own heart told him she had reason. Still, the fact that he had left Mrs. Sylvester as he had, just now stood for a great deal in his favor in the summing up of himself by himself. He almost felt that it undid the past completely. He had been angry, of course, or he would not have had the courage to do it. But that he did not recognize now. He thought himself strong and noble to have dismissed her as he had done. It was the end of any relations with her, for she would consider that he had insulted her. He thought he knew Mrs. Sylvester well enough to be sure that her pride was the strongest thing about her. He had yet to learn that he did not know how little he knew about women—some women.

He was almost relieved to find the house dark when he reached home. Miriam had retired. Would she waken and speak to him? He struck a match and glanced about the hall and parlor. Miriam’s long wrap, a white glove and a programme of the evening’s concert lay on a chair near the door, proving that his wife had really reached home. She was not still out in the darkness with that awful man. In anguish of soul he went upstairs and found all dark there save a little light in the bedroom. Miriam, then, had gone to another room. She was angry or she did not care for him any longer. Which? The terrible thought that Miriam could possibly ever be weaned from him suddenly struck him with heavy force. It had not seemed strange to him that he should amuse himself with a beautiful and attractive woman for a little while when Miriam was busy at home with the children and could not give him all the attention he wanted, but to have her, whom he had always been wont to consider his devoted slave, relax in her great clinging devotion to him was another thing. A wife was meant for a life-long adoration of her husband. It was an indignity to him that she should have any desire for pleasure in the company of others than himself. His indignation waxed at the thought, as his vanity was hurt by the reflection that he might not be sufficient for all her earthly needs. He was not naturally a vain man but he had certainly always supposed that he was Miriam’s ideal of all the manly virtues. It was terrible to think that this might be otherwise. For once in his life the very depths of his nature were stirred to their utmost. He did not sleep well. He began to tremble over meeting his wife on the morrow. How could he say what he wished to say about Senator Bradenberg when she had seen him in the company of Mrs. Sylvester? How could he open such a subject? How could he justify himself?

With thoughts like these he tossed the long night through and only fell into an uneasy doze as morning was beginning to dawn. The long delayed home-coming kiss to his wife had not yet been given and it began to seem unlikely that it would come soon. He had even forgotten it in the graver questions that were arising.

Miriam forced herself into a sort of gayety in the morning. The long night watch had been a desperate one for her. She had been trying to find out what to do, but her final conclusion had been to bide her time and go on in the way she had set for herself.

There were letters on the breakfast table. She busied herself with them when Claude came in, and thus they met in a constrained calmness that neither felt.

There were invitations. Miriam read them and passed them over for her husband to sec. He frowned as he read them and wondered how they came to be sent to them. This belonged to the new order of things of which he did not wish for more until the trouble between himself and his wife was settled. He was puzzled too, at the kind of people that seemed suddenly to have become aware of their existence. They were people who did not often take up the quiet and obscure. He wondered vaguely if Mrs. Sylvester had a hand in it, or the senator, or who?

Then he tried to frame a sentence of warning to his wife, but words would not come. At last he asked lamely:

“Do you know anything about the man who was with you last evening?”

She looked up with cool dignity.

“Why he is a most delightful old gentleman, and he is a very warm friend of your Mrs. Sylvester, is he not?”

The children came trooping in just then and the maid opened the opposite door and brought in the coffee. - Claude’s face grew deeply red. There was no more to be said then. Miriam did not seem to notice that anything had happened. He ate the very few mouthfuls of breakfast that he took hurriedly, and left the house.

The day was spent in a round of worry. He dreaded to go home because he had not yet decided how to settle matters with Miriam and yet he confidently expected to bring the matter to some kind of a settlement at once.

But there were guests. Miriam explained in a low tone at the door that he had hurried away so in the morning she had forgotten to mention them, and then she slipped back to the parlor and left him scowling. Was it ever to be like this? Were outsiders to invade his world, even in his own house, forever?

During the days that followed the same state of things prevailed between husband and wife. There was always a cool distance, always someone else present, always some invitation or some guest or some excuse. Claude began to understand that it was of a purpose. Such things could not happen continually without a cause. Miriam was showing him that she wished to stay at a distance. She was pleasant, always attentive to his needs, but not with the loving, caressing touch, nor the joy of service for him in her face. He could sec that it was simply a part of her housewifely duties and she performed it gracefully as she had grown to perform all her duties of late.

The little afternoon teas that had begun so bravely the day of his arrival in accordance with the advice received from the magazine letter went on. They grew popular. There was a charming informality and simplicity about them that was not always to be found.

Contrary to Claude’s expectation the matter with Mrs. Sylvester was not yet ended. After some weeks’ silence he received a note from her at his place of business. It read:

He tore the note into shreds and then sent his office boy on a fool’s errand while he burned it scrap by scrap. He ground his teeth angrily and sat down to think what he should do. He did not wish to go near that woman again. His conscience told him that he ought not to do so. But what was he to do and what did she mean by her hint about his wife’s knowing? He wished she did know, he told himself, and then spent the remainder of the afternoon in trying to plan how he could prevent her from knowing. At the end he took his hat and hurried, as he had known from the first he would do, to Mrs. Sylvester’s. It was a trifle after five o’clock, the hour named, and he rang the bell hastily. He hoped no one was with her. He would get through with her in short order this time. He had planned just how he would do it. He meant to be sharp and to the point. If she threatened to reveal anything he would tell her to go ahead and do her worst, and then he would go home and have it out with Miriam. He wished he had done that long ago. That was what he ought to have done. It was his miserable hesitancy that had made all the trouble. He would be firm this time as he had been at the carriage door that night.

He had just reached this conclusion for the fiftieth time that afternoon when the door was opened—it was too soon for his ring to have been answered unless the footman was in close attendance on the door as during calling hours—he heard the soft rustle of a woman’s garments and his wife stood before him!

One instant they stood there face to face, she deathly white, he crimson to the hair and looking as if he had been caught in the greatest crime the world can know. He could not get his voice nor command his brain. He felt stunned. Before he could come to himself she had forced a smile—such a wan, wild smile—and flitted by him like a spectre.

He turned, coming to himself. A carriage had driven up to the curb. He had noticed it in the street before. Miriam was getting in.

“Miriam!” he called in anguish and ran down the steps at a bound, but she was in and had closed the door with a click, and the driver started up his horse. It was a hired carriage from the livery around the corner from them. Miriam had not looked up nor given any sign that she knew him since that glance in the doorway. It contained reproach and wounded pride and hurt love and sense of deep injury received, all in one. It seemed to him he could never forget that look.

He suddenly became aware that Mrs. Sylvester’s footman was standing with respectful curiosity in the door waiting for him to enter, and there he stood looking after that vanishing carriage and knowing not what to do.

For an instant his impulse led him to go in and tell that false woman exactly what he thought of her, and then the sight of the carriage as it turned the corner drove all else from his mind. He must not let Miriam get out of his sight. With a mad idea of overtaking her he started down the street. Afterward it seemed to him he had fled from the house which had stood for temptation to him.

He grew calmer soon and realized that he could never overtake that swift carriage. It had turned and turned again, and he had lost sight of it. To the best of his ideas it did not seem to be on the way home. But he must go there at once. He must be there when Miriam came home if possible. He would meet her and tell her all.

There should be no weak delay any more. This must end at once. He was being well punished for all the sins he had ever committed, he told himself.

He had passed through moods enough for a year of time before he reached his home. He felt more weary than he remembered to have felt for years when he applied his latch-key to the door and let himself in.

The light was turned low in parlor and hall as if awaiting the moment when it would be needed, and there was a reassuring whiff of something savory from the regions of the dining room. There was something substantial and sweet in the home atmosphere, all light and warmth, with a chatter of children’s voices above like the babbling of a merry little brook, that gave him confidence. Strange he had not noticed before how sweet and safe it all was. Strange he had ever cared for anything else than this that was all his! But was it his? The question brought a twinge of fear. Was is possible he was about to lose, nay, had already lost, the center and source of all this—his wife’s love?

He settled down in a large arm-chair and rested his head back against the cushiony top. How tired he was! He dropped his eyelids with a sense of relief and wished that he might also drop his burdens as easily. Oh, if Miriam would but come softly up behind as she used to do and kiss his eyelids—so! How sweet, how infinitely sweet, it had been! And he had scorned it for the touch of that other woman’s proud lips even for a few days! How impossible it seemed to him now to choose such a course.

He waited a few minutes with his overcoat still on thinking to hear the carriage drive up to the door, for he had been sure when he entered that Miriam was not yet in the house, by a hundred little signs and sounds. He could always tell when his wife was near without need ing to see or hear her. The children’s voices sounded weary and not glad as when with her. What a mother she had been! Why had he never taken time to be thankful for that? For he loved his children though he had paid very little attention to them lately.

But it occurred to him that he had been out of touch with Miriam for some time. Perhaps his senses for detecting her presence were not so keen as formerly. She might be in the house and he not know it, after all. He rang the bell to inquire, but when the maid appeared she said Mrs. Winthrop had not yet returned from calling.

He tramped up and down the pretty parlors, his watch in his hand, and looked first from one window and then the other. At last he took his hat and went out again. He could not stand this inaction another minute. A hundred frightful fancies were surging through his brain. He remembered Miriam’s intense, impulsive nature in her youthful days. There was no telling but she had been led to do something desperate. Of course that was all fancy, but he must set his mind at rest. He could not have her out in the dark alone with such thoughts of him in her heart as he knew she must have. Down deep in his innermost soul he began for the first time to have some twinges of shame and sorrow for the way he had brought her to this agony, began to despise himself just a little, as he would have despised another man who had done the same thing.

With troubled brows drawn together he paused on the street corner and looked this way and that, trying to stop even the beats of his heart that he might listen if a carriage was coming. But no such welcome sound greeted his ear. Then he formed his plan hastily. He must go back to where he had last seen the carriage and try to trace it. Perhaps she was in need of his help somewhere at that minute. He walked rapidly now, forgetting his weariness, not thinking to gain time by taking a car or calling a cab. It seemed to him he was more likely to accomplish something on his feet. It was a relief to his tense, strained nerves to be on the move.

When he arrived at the corner near the Sylvester mansion all was still and dark, with twinkling lights glimmering down among the shadowed streets. There was nothing to show where the carriage had passed a little over two hours before. Of course there was not. He might have known that. Why had he come here—of all places? He was losing his head.

He looked toward the wide windows of the beautiful house in the next block where the soft rose-shaded lights proclaimed a life of ease, and as he turned his head quickly away he breathed in his heart a great curse on the woman who had wrought this mischief, and immediately after upon himself for having been so weak as to have been led by her.

Back he took his weary way once more, following every turn which the carriage might have taken, as a dog follows a lost scent, and always back to the main way home again. And behind him followed on his trail those horrid wolves of fears and fancies—the thought of what might have happened to Miriam.