Читать книгу A Modern Madonna - Caroline Abbot Stanley - Страница 7

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Months came and went—months in which they each tried intermittently to regain their old footing of love and faith. They could not do it. The wife at least knew that they were drifting apart. She wondered sometimes where it would all end.

Victor had told Margaret one morning that he had been called to Philadelphia on business and would not be at home for several days perhaps. A friend called for her that afternoon to drive. She did not go out often now, and, of course, Victor had no thought that she would take this time of all times.

She came upon him in Rock Creek Park. He too was driving, and beside him was a woman she had heard lightly spoken of. He did not see her, nor did the friend see him. It was but a moment, but in that brief space she had pressed to her lips the fruit plucked from the Tree of Knowledge. Margaret wondered, as she felt the world swim around her, what it was her friend was saying, and what made it sound so far off, and whether she would know enough to answer her.

They had a bitter time over that. He first denied, then attempted to explain, and finally fell back upon her foolish jealousy, forgetting that it is a poor bloodless type of woman that will not be jealous when occasion exists. From that time on she had been steering wildly, her rudder gone.

The storm fell on her with as little warning. The winter passed, spring came. It was almost Mayday and her anniversary. Victor had seemed more thoughtful of her of late—perhaps her weakness appealed even to him. Soon—soon—she told herself, they would be drawn closer together by their common joy and care.

In the afternoon she was called to the telephone. It was her brother-in-law, Mr. De Jarnette, who was speaking. He called her up to say that Victor would not be home to dinner and perhaps not until quite late. He had had to go to Baltimore upon a business matter that could not be postponed, and he had just had a message from him saying that he (Richard) would have to come over, too, in order to make the deal go through. There was a possibility—a bare possibility—that they might not be able to get through in time to get back that night, but in that case Victor would telegraph her along in the afternoon. He was telling her about it now so that if the telegram came she would not feel alarmed. Perhaps she had better telephone to Judge and Mrs. Kirtley to come over and stay with her until Victor got back. Oh, no, she replied, she would not be at all afraid. She sat down thinking with a sudden pang how strange it would seem to have somebody looking out for her comfort all the time. Victor often stayed out as late as that. Suddenly she felt appalled to perceive how certain she felt that this was the truth. She had not even questioned it.

Margaret did not know her brother-in-law very well. He had been to the house a few times, but always in a perfunctory way. She felt that he would have prevented the marriage if he could, and this had always stood between them. His considerate thoughtfulness of her was most unexpected.

Toward night the telegram came. Margaret opened it without looking at the address. She stared at it uncomprehendingly at first. It was signed by the woman she had seen in Rock Creek Park, and it should have gone to the office.

When Victor De Jarnette got home in the early evening his wife was waiting for him with the telegram in her hand. It is not the purpose of this narrative to give that interview. There were pointed questions and evasive answers. There were criminations and recriminations on one side, and shuffling, prevarication, and finally defiance on the other.

"Women expect too much," Victor said, harshly, at last. "If they demanded less they would get more."

"I am not speaking of women—nor of unreasonable demands," she said. "Perhaps they do—I don't know. But Victor!" Margaret spoke with impassioned pleading, "I ask only the same fidelity I give. Is that too much?"

She faced him squarely with the question, her eyes burning into his very soul. Only the clock's tick broke the silence. Upon his answer, in word and deed, hung the destiny of his life and hers; of his home and hers; of his child, his unborn child, and hers.

"Is that too much?" she repeated.

He temporized.

"It is more than most women get. I can tell you that."

"Don't put me off. Is it more than I will get?" Her breast was heaving and her breath coming hard.

"Oh, Margaret, don't go into heroics!" he cried. "Listen to reason! Men can't be bound down by a woman's code of morals. They never have been, and they never will be. And women might as well understand it."

"Then marriage is a lie and a cheat!" she cried with vehemence. "You take the same vows that we do, and you take them saying to yourselves that you will keep them only so long as you chose, and will break them at your will! … But we—poor fools! we speak those vows with bated breath and souls bared before God, and mean to keep them—strive to keep them even when—"

"Is it such a struggle?" he asked, sneeringly.

"—even when faith in you is dead or dying. Yes. It is a struggle then. 'Love, honor, and obey!' Bah!"

"Well," he said, stung by her scorn, but carrying it off insolently, "in the words of the illustrious Mr. Tweed, 'What are you going to do about it?'"

Had he been man enough—perhaps even had he been old enough—he would have thought of the danger to her in all this tumult of feeling and calmed her by a candid meeting of the question she had forced upon him. But he maddened her with his flippant manner and contemptuous words. And a change was going on in him too. Under his light demeanor his anger was rising. There was bad blood in Victor De Jarnette—false, cowardly blood—and it was beginning to assert itself.

"I am going to do this," she said, in a low, concentrated tone. "I demand to know what this woman is to you. I have a right to know."

"And know you shall," he answered, meeting her gaze with defiant eyes, in which every evil passion had burst into flame. "Since I am to be badgered and run to earth in my own home, know that she is a woman I love—and shall love. One that I shall go to when—and where—and as I please. The De Jarnettes are not ruled by their women!"

"Then choose between us," she said, with whitening lips, "for I swear to you by the living God I will be all or nothing to the man that calls me wife!"

They stood facing each other—her features white and drawn, his inflamed with passion. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, a frightened sense of her own helplessness, perhaps, or possibly a surging back of her old love—for women are strange beings—she came closer to him and stretched out her hands.

"Victor! Oh, Victor!"

He thrust her aside and went out. The door clanged behind him, waking echoes in the silent house, and Margaret, suddenly strengthless, dropped in a heap on the floor, her face buried in the couch. She sat there long with hopeless eyes staring into the blackness of the morrow, saying now and then brokenly, "Father! … Father!"

White now with anger, furious at Margaret's discovery of his falseness, and yet more furious at the necessity which her ultimatum laid upon him to amend his ways or lose his wife; unholy passion for her rival hot within him, and the vengeful blood of his race coursing tumultuously through his veins, Victor De Jarnette strode down Massachusetts Avenue almost a madman. Not for him was the soft beauty of the night—the breath of flowers, the light of stars, the play of summer breezes among the leaves. His heart was closed to the sweet influences of the Pleiades. That heart, alas! out of which are the issues of life had become a seething cauldron of fierce passions.

He did not go immediately to his office. In fact, it was hours before he did. When at last he reached the place he began tearing up letters and clearing up his desk with one eye on the clock as if in preparation for departure or a new incumbent. His blood was still at fever heat, and his thoughts did not tend to cool it. Besides, the law of heredity was against him. What he was doing, his mother before him had done. She, too, had felt this hot surging in the veins and had given it free course. A fearful heritage is ungoverned blood.

As he opened a drawer to put away some papers his eye fell on a folded document. He looked at it absently at first, hardly aware that he saw it. Then, as the innocent looking thing forced itself upon his consciousness, he took it up and read it. How well he remembered the day it was written. A sneer curved his lips at the thought of his ecstatic state of mind at that time. Fool! Then as he looked at the paper, there suddenly leaped into his mind a cruel thought, and into his face the quick reflection of its malevolence.

He stared at the thing he held.

"I'll do it!" he cried, bringing his clenched hand down upon the table with an oath. "I'll show her!"

"Don't do it, Victor!" pleaded John Jarvis, the lawyer, a half hour later, when his angry client had made his wishes known. "Don't do it! My God, man, it would be too cruel! too brutally cruel!"

"Brutal or not," swore Victor De Jarnette, "according to the laws of this District I can do it, and, by God! I will!"

"Wait till to-morrow," urged the lawyer. "You will think better of it in the morning."

"There may never be a to-morrow," Victor answered, recklessly. "I'll make sure of it now. If you won't do it I can get somebody that will."

Before he left the attorney's office it was done, and done, alas! in due and proper form.