"And I go away for a few days," he cries, "and come back and everything is changed. I who had a sweetheart, haven't even a wife. Why have you changed so? There must be a reason? What is it? Are you sick? Have you eaten something that has made you forget? Have you been bewitched?

That's no fool question. Have you? Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Have you been bewitched? Tell me, dear, who has done this thing to you?"

Again he has her by the shoulders.

"Lucy, is there someone? Never mind the other things, just tell me that? You've gotten to like someone else? Is that it?"

And Lucy must have answered that there was no one else. And there is no question but that to the best of her belief and knowledge she was telling the truth.

But the mere thought that there might be someone else had moved Fulton as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some d.a.m.ned insidious tropical malaria, the pa.s.sion has taken root in his system, so that only death can wholly cure him.

Like some vile reptile it had found within him some cave from which it might emerge to brandish its hideous envenomed horned head, and into which betimes it might withdraw.

I can imagine no one so stupid as to question any serious statement of fact that Lucy might make. Her eyes were wells of truth; her voice fearless and sure, like that of some kingly boy.

So when she said there was _no one_, Fulton, who knew her far better than anyone else, believed her without any question. And a great weight must have been lifted from his heart. With the truth that he had wrung from her, I think he must have rested almost content for a few hours.

But contentment is far off from a man who hears the great edifice of love and happiness which he has reared, crashing about his ears.

He could not make up his mind to any definite course of action. Now, calm and judicial, I hear him discussing matters with coolness, and self-forgetfulness.

"If there is any chance for me, ever," he would say, "it would be silly of us to take any action which would be final. And, besides, I don't see how I could reconcile my conscience to giving you a divorce. Or you yours to getting one. It would be hard enough for you to lie about the most trifling thing. You couldn't, you simply couldn't face the court and tell them that I had been cruel and unfaithful. You couldn't accuse me of anything so gross, and so unlike me, as the other woman who would have to be hired for the occasion. There's another side to it. I think the children are better off with you than with me. You're the best mother that ever was, the most sensible and the most careful.

But I don't think I could give them up. If you and the babies were all three to drop out of my life, I'd have nothing left but the duty of finding money to support you. There's a certain pleasure in doing your duty, of course, but in this case hardly enough. Honestly, dear, with never a sight or touch of you, I simply couldn't keep things going long."

Then perhaps Lucy asked some such question as this: "Don't people often, when they've stopped caring about each other, go on living together just the same, as far as other people know? And really just be good friends and live their own lives?"

"This is very different. We haven't stopped caring about each other.

You've stopped caring about me. I care about you, just as I did in the beginning, and always shall. We _couldn't_ lead separate lives under the same roof. G.o.d knows I feel old enough, but I'm still a young man, and like it or not, you are still my wife. It is something to own the sh.e.l.l that once contained the pearl."

Another time he goes hurrying through the house, prayer-book in hand, a thumb marking the marriage ceremony. He has been brooding and brooding and s.n.a.t.c.hing at straws.

"Read this, Lucy. Just look it over. It's what you and I stood up and promised before a lot of people. I'm glad I looked it up. You'll see right away that it's a contract which n.o.body could have the face to break. I want you to read it over to yourself."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'It's what you and I stood up and promised before a lot of people.'"]

Finally she does, just to please him, in the sad knowledge that no good will come of it.

"You'd forgotten, hadn't you? But just see what you promised. Didn't you mean to keep these promises when you made them?"

"Oh, of course I did. Why ask that?"

"But now you want to back out."

Then the old argument that a promise which one is powerless to keep isn't a bona fide promise and cannot be so regarded. Fulton sees that for himself presently.

"No, of course," he says. "If you don't love me, you can't make yourself by an effort of will. And if you don't honor me . . ."

"You _know_ I do."

"How about the other thing, the promise to obey? That is surely in your power to keep."

She admits that she can keep that promise; but she leaves herself a loophole. She does not say that she _will_ keep it.

And so the words of the prayer book shed no light on the situation, and I shouldn't wonder if Fulton raged against the book, and flung it into a far corner, and was immediately sorry.

For a man situated as Fulton was, some definite plan of action is necessary; and to my mind the one that would be best would be one in which the least possible consideration for the woman should be shown.

When Lucy began to play clench-dummy with her own life, with her husband's love, and with the inst.i.tution of marriage, Fulton, I think, would have made no mistake if he had stripped her to the skin and taken a great whip to her.

Her whole life had been one of self-indulgence. She had indulged herself with Fulton's love till she was glutted with it; that she was the mother of two children may, perhaps, be traced to self-indulgence, and surely it must be laid down to self-indulgence that she was not the mother of more than two. Her self-indulgence kept Fulton poor and in debt, and it had come to this: that her impulse to self-indulgence would now stop at nothing unless circ.u.mstances should prove too strong for it.

It is not the gentle, faithful, self-sacrificing man who keeps his wife's love; it never was. It was always the man who had in him a good deal of the brute.

But, except in a moment of insanity, a man does not go against his nature. Fulton has too good a brain not to think that if Lucy were locked up for a week or so, and fed on bread and water, good might come of it. But his was not the hand to turn the key in the lock. He could no more have done it than he could have struck her. This sudden failure of her love for him was only another evidence of that wastefulness and extravagance which had so often hurt him financially.

Surely it must have occurred to him more than once to publish notices in the newspapers to the effect that he would only be responsible for his own debts. He must, I think, have threatened the thing from time to time, knowing in his heart that he could never bring himself to put it into execution.

I wonder how Fulton felt when hard upon the knowledge that she no longer loved him, he received the bill for the dance which she had given against his wishes, and in full knowledge of his present financial predicament?

She had treated him so badly that it is a wonder of wonders that he kept on loving her.

For one thing they deserve great credit. Even Evelyn Gray, a guest in the house, did not know that there was any trouble between them. All she thought was that owing to financial and other worries, which time would right, Fulton seemed a little graver and less enthusiastic than usual.

Nor was I any wiser. I had not, of course, so many chances of seeing the two together, but I saw as much of Lucy as ever, for we rode together nearly every day.

XII

If nothing more definite had come of all this, I should now see but little significance in those long afternoons of riding with Lucy. She could leave the substance of her trouble behind, as easily as she could have left a pair of gloves, and she took into the saddle with her only a shadow of the tragedy that was glowering upon her house.

I see now, that, at this time, we must have begun to talk more seriously and upon more intimate topics; that we laughed less and that there were longer silences between us. We began to take an interest in the trees and flowers among which we rode, to learn their names, and to linger longer over those which did not at once strike the eye.

And I see now that Lucy talked more than usually about her husband. It was as if by doing constant justice to his character she hoped to make up to him for her failure of affection. In his domestic relations he was a real hero by all accounts. Didn't I _think_ they lived nicely?

She thought so, too, but it wasn't her fault. She was so extravagant, and such a bad manager, it was a wonder they could live at all. She admitted so much with shame. But if I could understand how it is with some men about drink, then it must be easy for me to understand how it is with some women about money. Oh, she'd spent John into some dreadful holes; but he had always managed to creep out of them. How he hated an unpaid bill! It wasn't his fault that there were so many of them. For her part (wasn't it awful!) they filled her neither with shame nor compunction. And he'd been so fine about people. His instinct was to be a scholar and a hermit. But she loved people, she simply couldn't be happy without them, and (wasn't it fun?) she had had her way, and now John liked people almost as much as she did. And he had a knack of putting life and laughter into the simplest parties.

Sometimes when we had finished riding, we had tea in the garden. It would be turning cool, and she would slip a heavy c.o.o.n-skin coat over her riding things; and there was a long voluminous polo-coat of John's that I used to borrow. Evelyn nearly always joined us, John not so often. Sometimes Dawson Cooper came. He was getting over his shyness.

Sometimes he was quite brazen and facetious. It looked almost as if he was being encouraged by someone.

Of the sorrow that was gnawing at John Fulton's heart I saw no sign.

He was alert, hospitable, humorous often, and toward Lucy his manner was wonderfully considerate and gentle. If I had guessed at anything, it would have been that the wife was in trouble and not the husband.

He could not sit still for long at a time, but he did not in the least suggest a man who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His activity and sudden shiftings from place to place and from topic to topic were rather those of a man who superabounds in physical and mental energy.

At this time he did not know whether he and Lucy were going to separate or not. If they should, he was already preparing dust to throw in the world's eyes. He let it be known that at any moment he might have to go to Messina in the interests of his cartridge company (this was a polite fiction) and that he might have to be gone a long time.

Business was a hard master. He had always tried to keep it out of his home life, but in times like these a man must be ready to catch at straws.