The Letter of the Contract.

by Basil King.

I

TRANSGRESSION

It was strange to think that if, on finishing her coffee in her room, she had looked in on the children, as she generally did, instead of going down to the drawing-room to write a note, her whole life might have been different. "Why didn't I?" was the question she often asked herself in the succeeding years, only to follow it with the reflection: "But perhaps it would have happened in any case. Since the fact was there, I must have come to know it--in the long run."

The note was an unimportant one. She could have sent it by a servant at any minute of the day. The very needlessness of writing it at once, so that her husband could post it as he went to his office, gave to the act something of the force of fate.

Everything that morning, when she came to think of it, had something of the force of fate. Why, on entering the drawing-room, hadn't she gone straight to her desk, according to her intention, if it wasn't that fate intervened? As a matter of fact, she went to the oriel window looking down into Fifth Avenue, with vague thoughts of the weather. It was one of those small Scotch corner windows that show you both sides of the street at once. It was so much the favorite conning-spot of the family that she advanced to it from habit.

And yet, if she had gone to her desk, that girl might have disappeared before the lines of the note were penned. As it was, the girl was there, standing as she had stood on other occasions--three or four, at least--between the two little iron posts that s.p.a.ced off the opening for foot-pa.s.sengers into the Park. She was looking up at the house in the way Edith had noticed before--not with the scrutiny of one who wishes to see, but with the forlorn patience of the un.o.btrusive creature hoping to be seen.

In a neat gray suit of the fashion of 1904 and squirrel furs she was the more un.o.btrusive because of a background of light snow. She was pathetically un.o.btrusive. Not that she seemed poor; she suggested, rather, some one lost or dazed or partially blotted out. People glanced at her as they hurried by. There were some who turned and glanced a second time. She might have been a person with a sorrow--a love-sorrow.

At that thought Edith's heart went out to her in sympathy. She herself was so happy, with a happiness that had grown more intense each month, each week, each day, of her six years of married life, that it filled her imagination with a blissful, pitying pain to think that other women suffered.

The pity was sincere, and the bliss came from the knowledge of her security. She felt it wonderful to have such a sense of safety as that she experienced in gazing across the street at the girl's wistful face.

It was like the overpowering thankfulness with which a man on a rock looks on while others drown. It wasn't callousness; it was only an appreciation of mercies. She was genuinely sorry for the girl, if the girl needed sorrow; but she didn't see what she could do to help her.

It was well known that out in that life of New York--and of the world at large--there were tempests of pa.s.sion in which lives were wrecked; but from them she herself was as surely protected by her husband's love as, in her warm and well-stored house, she was shielded from hunger and the storm. She accepted this good fortune meekly and as a special blessedness; but she couldn't help rejoicing all the more in the knowledge of her security.

The knowledge of her security gave luxury to the sigh with which she turned in the course of a few minutes to write her note. The desk stood under the mirror between the two windows at the end of the small back drawing-room. The small back drawing-room projected as an ell from the larger one that crossed the front of the house. She had just reached the words, "shall have great pleasure in accepting your kind invitation to--" when she heard her husband's step on the stairs. He was coming up from his solitary breakfast. She could hear, too, the rustle of the newspaper in his hand as he ascended, softly and tunelessly whistling.

The sound of that whistling, which generally accompanied his presence in the house, was more entrancing to her than the trill of nightingales.

The loneliness her fancy ascribed to the girl over by the Park emphasized her sense of possession. She raised her head and looked into the mirror. The miracle of it struck her afresh, that the great, strong man she saw entering the room, with his brown velvet house-jacket and broad shoulders and splendid head, should be hers. She herself was a little woman, of soft curves and dimpling smiles and no particular beauty; and he had stooped, in his strength and tenderness, to make her bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, as she had become. And he had become bone of _her_ bone and flesh of _her_ flesh. She was no more his than he was hers. That was the great fact. She was no longer content with the limited formula, "They twain shall be one flesh"; they twain had become one spirit and one life.

It was while a.s.serting this to herself, not for the first time, that she saw him start. He started back from the window--the large central window--to which he had gone, probably with vague thoughts of the weather, like herself. It was the manner of his start that chiefly attracted her attention. After drawing back he peered forward. It was an absurd thing to think of him; she knew that--of him of all people!--but one would almost have said that, in his own house, he shrank from being seen. But there was the fact. There was his att.i.tude--his tiptoeing--his way of leaning toward the mantelpiece at an angle from which he could see what was going on in the Park and yet be protected by the curtain.

Then it came to her, with a flush that made her tingle all over, that she was spying on him. He thought her in the children's room up-stairs, when all the while she was watching him in a mirror. Never in her life had she known such a rush of shame. Bending her head, she scribbled blindly, "dinner on Tuesday evening the twenty-fourth at--" She was compelled by an inner force she didn't understand to glance up at the mirror again, but, to her relief, he had gone.

Later she heard him at the telephone. To avoid all appearance of listening she went to the kitchen to give her orders for the day. On her return he was in the hall, dressed for going out. Scanning his face, she thought he looked suddenly care-worn.

"I've ordered a motor to take me downtown," he explained, as he pulled on his gloves. He generally took the street-car in Madison Avenue.

"Aren't you well?" she thought it permissible to ask.

"Oh yes; I'm all right."

"Then why--?"

He made an effort to be casual: "Well, I just thought I would."

She had decided not to question him--it was a matter of honor or pride with her, she was not sure which--but while giving him the note to post she ventured to say, "You're not worried about anything, are you?"

"Not in the least." He seemed to smother the words by stooping to kiss her good-by.

She followed him to the door. "You'd tell me, wouldn't you, if you were worried?"

For the second time he stooped and kissed her, again smothering the words, "Yes, dear; but I'm not."

She stood staring at the gla.s.s door after he had closed it behind him.

"Oh, what is it?" she questioned. Within less than an hour the world had become peopled with fears, and all she could do was to stare at the door through which she could still see him dimly.

She could see him dimly, but plainly, for the curtain of patterned filet-work hanging flat against the gla.s.s was almost transparent from within the house, though impenetrable from outside. Was it her imagination that saw him look cautiously round before leaving the protection of the doorway? Was it her imagination that watched while he crossed the pavement hurriedly, to spring into the automobile before he could be observed? Was it only the needless alarm of a foolish woman that thought him anxious to reach the shelter of the motor lest he should be approached or accosted? She tried to think so. It was easier to question her own sanity than to doubt him. She would not doubt him.

She a.s.sured herself of that as she returned to her post in the oriel window.

The girl in gray was gone, and down the long street, over which there was a thin glaze of ice, the motor was creeping carefully. She watched it because he was inside. It was all she should see of him till nightfall. The whole of the long day must be pa.s.sed with this strange new something in her heart--this something that wasn't anything. If he would only come back for a minute and put his arms about her and let her look up into his face she would _know_ it wasn't anything. She did know it; she said so again and again. But if he would only discover that he had forgotten something--a handkerchief or his cigar-case; that did happen occasionally....

And then it was as if her prayer was to be answered while still on her lips. Before the vehicle had got so far away as to be indistinguishable from other vehicles she saw it stop. It stopped and turned. She held her breath. Slowly, very slowly, it began to creep up the gentle slope again. She supposed it must be the treacherous ground that made it move at such a snail's pace. It moved as if the chauffeur or his client were looking for some one. Gradually it drew up at the curb. It was the curb toward the Park--and from another of the little openings with iron posts to s.p.a.ce them off appeared the girl in gray.

She advanced promptly, as if she had been called. At the door of the car she stood for a few minutes in conversation with the occupant. For one of the parties at least that method of communication was apparently not satisfactory, for he stepped out, dismissed the cab, and accompanied the girl through the little opening into the Park. In a second or two they were out of sight, down one of the sloping pathways.

During the next two months Edith had no explanation of this mystery, nor did she seek one. After the first days of amazement and questioning she fell back on what she took to be her paramount duty--to trust. She argued that if he had seen her in some a.n.a.logous situation, however astounding, he would have trusted her to the uttermost; and she must do the same by him. There were ever so many reasons, she said to herself, that would not only account for the incident, but do him credit. The girl might be a stenographer dismissed from his office, asking to be reinstated; she might be a poor relation making an appeal; she might be a wretched woman toward whom he was acting on behalf of a friend. Such cases, and similar cases, arose frequently.

The wonder was, however, that he never spoke of it. There was that side to it, too. It induced another order of reflection. He was so much in the habit of relating to her, partly for her amus.e.m.e.nt, partly for his own, all the happenings, both trivial and important, of each day, that his silence with regard to this one, which surely must be considered strange--strange, if no more--was noticeable. A wretched woman toward whom he was acting on behalf of a friend! It surely couldn't, _couldn't_ be a wretched woman toward whom he was acting, not on behalf of a friend, but....

That it might be all over and done with would make no difference. Of course it was all over and done with--if it was that. No man could love a woman as he had loved his wife during the past six or seven years, and still--But it _wasn't_ that. It never _had_ been that. _If_ it had been--even before they were married, even before he knew her--But she would choke that thought back. She would choke everything back that told against him. She developed the will to trust. She developed a trust that acted on her doubts like a narcotic--not solving them, but dulling their poignancy into stupor.

So March went out, and April pa.s.sed, and May came in, with leaves on the trees and tulips in the Park, and children playing on the bits of greensward. She had walked as far as the Zoo with the two little boys, and, having left them with their French governess, was on her way home.

People were in the habit of dropping in between four and six, and of late she had become somewhat dependent on their company. They kept her from thinking. Their sc.r.a.ps of gossip provided her, when she talked to her husband, with topics that steered her away from dangerous ground. He himself had given her a hint that a certain ground was dangerous; and, though he had done it laughingly, she had grown so sensitive as to see in his words more perhaps than they meant. She had asked him a question on some subject--she had forgotten what--quite remote from the mystery of the girl in gray. Leaning across the table, with amus.e.m.e.nt on his lips and in his eyes, he had replied:

"Don't you remember the warning?

'Where the apple reddens Never pry, Lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.'"

Inwardly she had staggered from the words as if he had struck her, though he had no reason to suspect that. In response she merely said, pensively: "_En sommes nous la?_"

"_En sommes nous_--where?"

"Where the apple reddens."

"Oh, but everybody's there."

"You mean all married people."

"Married and single."

"But married people _more_ than single."

"I mean that we all have our illusions, and we'd better keep them as long as possible. When we don't--"

"We lose our Edens."

"Exactly."