He stood there another minute and then timidly held out his hand.

"Good-by, Mrs. Williams," he said gently.

She took his hand with a queer, choking little laugh and held it very tight for a minute, as if to steady herself.

His own eyes had dimmed. Then he smiled--a smile that seemed to want to go ahead and take any offence or hurt from what he was about to say.

"Maybe, Mrs. Williams, that you will come to feel like being fairer to Ruth than Ruth was to you." His smile widened and he looked very boyish as he finished, "And that would be _one_ way of getting back, you know!"

CHAPTER THIRTY

Freeport had a revival of interest in Mrs. Stuart Williams that fall.

They talked so much of her in the first years that discussion had pretty well spent itself, and latterly it had only been rarely--to a stranger, or when something came up to bring it to them freshly--that they did more than occasionally repeat the expressions which that first feeling had created. There was no new thing to say of their feeling about her.

No one had become intimate with her in those years, and that itself somehow kept the picture. She was unique, and fascinated them in the way she was one of them and yet apart. The mystery enveloping her made it mean more than it could have meant through disclosures from her. It kept it more poignant to speculate about a concealed suffering than it could have continued to be through discussing confidences. But even speculation as to what was beneath that unperturbed surface had rather talked itself out, certainly had lost its keen edge of interest with the pa.s.sing of the years.

That fall, however, they began to speak of a change in her. They said first that she did not look well; then they began to talk about her manner being different. She had always kept so calm, and now there were times when she appeared nervous. She had had throughout a certain cold serenity. Now she was sometimes irritable, disclosing a fretfulness close under the untroubled surface. She looked older, they said; her brows knit and there were lines about mouth and eyes. She seemed less sure of herself. It made interest in her a fresh thing. They wondered if she were not at last breaking, spoke with a careful show of regret, concern, but whetted antic.i.p.ations gave eagerness to voices of sympathy.

They wondered if Ruth Holland's having come home in the Spring, the feeling of her being in the town, could have been too much of a strain, preying upon the deserted wife and causing her later to break. There were greedy wonderings as to whether she could possibly have seen Ruth Holland, whether anything had happened that they did not know about.

Late one December afternoon Mrs. Williams came home from a church bazaar and curtly telephoned that she would not be back for the evening. She spoke of a headache. And her head did ache. It ached, she bitterly reflected, from being looked at, from knowing they were taking observations for subsequent speculation. She had been in charge of a table at the bazaar; a number of little things had gone wrong and she got out of patience with one of her a.s.sistants. Other people got irritated upon occasions of that sort--and that was all there was to it.

But she was not at liberty to show annoyance. She knew at the time that they were whispering around about it, connecting it with the thing about her that it seemed never really went out of their minds. The sense of that had made her really angry and she had said sharp things she knew she would be sorry for because they would just be turned over as part of the thing that was everlastingly being turned over. She was not free; they were always watching her; even after all these years always thinking that everything had something to do with _that_.

Mrs. Hughes, her housekeeper and cook, had followed her upstairs. At the door of her room she turned impatiently. She had known by the way the woman hung around downstairs that she wanted to say something to her and she had petulantly not given her the chance. She did not want anything said to her. She wanted to be let alone.

"Well?" she inquired ungraciously.

Mrs. Hughes was a small trim woman who had a look of modestly trying not to be obtrusive about her many virtues. She had now that manner of one who could be depended upon to a.s.sume responsibilities a less worthy person would pa.s.s by.

"I thought perhaps you should know, Mrs. Williams," she said with faintly rebuking patience, "that Lily has gone to bed."

"Oh, she's really sick then, is she?" asked Mrs. Williams, unbending a little.

"She says so," replied Mrs. Hughes.

The tone caused her to look at the woman in surprise. "Well, I presume she is then," she answered sharply.

Lily was the second girl. Two servants were not needed for the actual work as the household consisted only of Mrs. Williams and an aged aunt who had lived with her since she had been alone, but the house itself did not seem adapted to a one servant menage. There had been two before, and in that, as in other things, she had gone right on in the same way.

Mrs. Hughes had been with her for several years but Lily had been there only three or four months. She had been a strange addition to the household; she laughed a good deal and tripped about at her work and sang. But she had not sung so much of late and in the last few days had plainly not been well.

"If she's really sick, we'll have to have a doctor for her," Mrs.

Williams said, her hand on the k.n.o.b she was about to turn.

"She says she doesn't want a doctor," answered Mrs. Hughes, and again her tone made Mrs. Williams look at her in impatient inquiry.

"Well, I'll go up after while and see her myself," she said, opening the door of her room. "Meanwhile you look after her, please. And oh, Mrs.

Hughes," she called back, "I shan't want any dinner. I had a heavy tea at the bazaar," she added hurriedly, and as if resentful of having to make any explanation.

Alone, she took off her hat, pushed back her hair as if it oppressed her, then sank into a low, luxurious chair and, eyes closed, pressed her fingers over her temples as if to command quiet within. But after a moment she impatiently got up and went over to her dressing-table and sat looking into the mirror.

The thing that had started her afternoon wrong was that a friend of her girlhood, whom she had not seen for about thirteen years, had appeared unexpectedly at her table, startling her and then laughing at her confusion. She had not known that Stella Cutting was in town; to be confronted that way with some one out of the past had been unnerving, and then she had been furious with herself for not being able more easily to regain composure. People around her had seen; later she saw them looking at her strangely, covertly interested when she spoke in that sharp way to Mildred Woodbury because she had tossed things about.

She had been disturbed, for one thing, at finding Mildred Woodbury at her table.

She was looking in the gla.s.s now because Stella Cutting had been one of her bridesmaids. She was not able to put down a miserable desire to try to see just what changes Stella had found.

The dissatisfaction in her face deepened with her scrutiny of it.

Doubtless Stella was that very minute talking of how pitifully Marion Averley had changed; how her color used to be clear and even, features firmly molded, eyes bright. She herself remembered how she had looked the night Stella Cutting was her bridesmaid. And now her color was muddy and there were crow's feet about her eyes and deep lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

Stella Cutting looked older herself, very considerably older. But it was a different way of looking older. She had grown stout and her face was too full. But she did not look _pulled_ at like this. As she talked of her children hers was the face of a woman normally, contentedly growing older. The woman sitting before the mirror bitterly turned away now from that reflection of dissatisfaction with emptiness.

It was that boy had done it! she thought with a new rise of resentment.

She had been able to go along very evenly until he impertinently came into her house and rudely and stupidly broke through the things she had carefully builded up around herself. Ever since he had plunged into things even she herself had been careful not to break into, there had been this inner turmoil that was giving her the look of an old woman. If Stella Cutting had come just a few months earlier she could not have had so much to say about how terribly Marion Averley had changed.

Why was she so absurd as to let herself be upset? she angrily asked of herself, beginning to unfasten the dress she was wearing that she might get into something loose and try to relax. A hook caught in some lace and in her vexation at not being able at once to unfasten it she gave it a jerk that tore the lace. She bit her lips and could have cried. Those were the things she did these days!--since that boy came and blunderingly broke into guarded places.

She sat in a low, deep chair before the open fire that burned in the sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. It was the room that had been her husband's. After he went away she took it for an upstairs sitting-room--a part of her program of unconcern. As she sank down into the gracious chair she told herself that she would rest for that evening, not think about things. But not to think about things was impossible that night. Stella Cutting had brought old things near and made them newly real: her girlhood, her falling in love with Stuart Williams, her wedding. Those reminiscences caught her and swept her on to other things. She thought of her marriage; thought of things that, ever since that boy came and made her know how insecure she really was in the defences she had put up for herself, it had been a struggle to keep away from.

She had not done much thinking--probing--as to why it was her marriage had failed. That was another one of the things her pride shut her out from. When it failed she turned from it, clothed in pride, never naked before the truth. There was something relaxing in just letting down the barriers, barriers which had recently been so shaken that she was fretted with trying to hold them up.

She wondered why Stella Cutting's marriage had succeeded and hers had failed. The old answer that her marriage had failed because her husband was unfaithful to her--answer that used always to leave her newly fortified, did not satisfy tonight. She pushed on through that. There was a curious emotional satisfaction in thus disobeying herself by rushing into the denied places of self-examination. She was stirred by what she was doing.

Her long holding back from this very thing was part of that same instinct for restraint, what she had been pleased to think of as fastidiousness, that had always held her back in love. It was alien to her to let herself go; she had an instinct that held her away from certain things--from the things themselves and from free thinking about them. What she was doing now charged her with excitement.

She was wondering about herself and the man who was still legally her husband. She was thinking of how different they were in the things of love; how he gave and wanted giving, while her instinct had always been to hold herself a little apart. There was something that displeased her in abandonment to feeling. She did not like herself when she fully gave.

There had been something in her, some holding back, that pa.s.sionate love outraged. Intense demonstration was indelicate to her; she was that way, she had not been able to help it. She loved in what she thought of as her own fastidious way. Pa.s.sion violated something in her. Falling in love had made her happy, but with her love had never been able to sweep down the reserves, and so things which love should have made beautiful had remained for her ugly facts of life that she had an instinct to hold herself away from. What she felt she did not like herself for feeling.

And so their marriage had been less union than man[oe]uvering.

She supposed she had, to be very blunt, starved Stuart's love. For he wanted much love, a full and intense love life. He was pa.s.sionate and demonstrative. He gave and wanted, perhaps needed, much giving. He did not understand that constant holding back. For him the beauty of love was in the expression of it. She supposed, in this curious self-indulgence of facing things tonight, that it had been he who was normal; she had memories of many times when she had puzzled and disappointed and hurt him.

And so when Gertrude Freemont--an old school friend of hers, a warm-natured Southern girl--came to visit her, Stuart turned away from things grudging and often chill to Gertrude's playfulness and sunniness and warmth. There was a curious shock to her tonight when she found herself actually thinking that perhaps it was not much to be wondered at. He was like that. She had not made him over to be like her.

At first he had found Gertrude enlivening, and from a flirtation it went to one of those pa.s.sages of pa.s.sion between a man and a woman, a thing that flames up and then dies away, in a measure a matter of circ.u.mstance. That was the way he tried to explain it to her when, just as Gertrude was leaving, she came to know--even in this present abandonment to thinking she went hurriedly past the shock of that terrible sordid night of "finding out." Stuart had weakly and appealingly said that he hadn't been able to help it, that he was sorry--that it was all over.

But with it their marriage was all over. She told him so then--told him quite calmly, it would seem serenely; went on telling him so through those first days of his unhappiness and persistence. She was always quite unperturbed in telling him so. Politely, almost pleasantly, she would tell him that she would never be his wife again.

She never was. She had known very certainly from the first that she never would be. Tonight she probed into that too--why she had been so sure, why she had never wavered. It was a more inner thing than just jealousy, resentment, hurt, revenge--though all those things were there too. But those were things that might have broken down, and this was not a thing that would break down. It was more particularly temperamental than any of those things. It was that thing in her which had always held her back from giving. She _had_ given--and then her giving had been outraged! Even now she burned in the thought of that. He had called out a thing in her that she had all along--just because she was as she was--resented having had called out. And then he had flouted it. Even after all those years there was tonight that old p.r.i.c.kling of her scalp in thinking of it. The things she might have said--of its being her own friend, in her own house--she did not much dwell upon, even to herself.

It was a more inner injury than that. Something in her that was curiously against her had been called to life by him--and then he had outraged what she had all along resented his finding in her. To give at all had been so tremendous a thing--then to have it lightly held! It outraged something that was simply outside the sphere of things forgivable.

And that outraged thing had its own satisfaction. What he had called to life in her and then, as it seemed, left there unwanted, what he had made in her that was not herself--then left her with, became something else, something that made her life. From the first until now--or at any rate until two months ago when that boy came and forced her to look at herself--the thing in her that had been outraged became something that took the place of love, that was as the other pole of love, something that yielded a satisfaction of its own, a satisfaction intense as the things of love are intense, but cold, ordered, certain. It was the power to hurt; the power to bring pain by simply doing nothing. It was not tempestuously done; it had none of the uncertainty of pa.s.sionate feeling; it had the satisfaction of power without effort, of disturbing and remaining undisturbed, of hurting and giving no sign. It was the revenge of what was deeply herself for calling her out from herself, for not wanting what was found in her that was not herself.

Stuart wanted her again; terribly wanted her, more than ever wanted her.

He loved and so could be hurt. He needed love and so could be given pain. He thought she would give in; she knew that she would not. There was power in that knowledge. And so she watched him suffer and herself gained new poise. She did not consider how it was a sorry thing to fill her life with. When, that night that was like being struck by lightning, she came to know that the man to whom she had given--_she_--had turned from her to another woman it was as if she was then and there sealed in.

She would never let herself leave again. Outraged pride blocked every path out from self. She was shut in with her power to inflict pain. That was all she had. And then that boy came and made her look at herself and know that she was poor! That was why Stella Cutting could be talking of how Marion Averley had "broken."

They were talking about it, of course; about her and Ruth Holland and her husband. _Her_ husband, she thought insistently, but without getting the accustomed satisfaction from the thought. Miserably she wondered just what they were saying; she flinched in the thought of their talk about her hurt, her loneliness. And then she felt a little as if she could cry. She had wondered if she had anybody's real pity.

That thought of their talking of it opened it to her, drew her to it.

She thought of Ruth Holland, gave up the worn pretense of disinterest and let herself go in thinking of her.