The Letter of the Contract

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"Well, then, aren't there ways in which it would be hard for me?"

"Not any harder than it is now. It's pretty hard, isn't it?"

The tears sprang into her eyes, but she knew she must control herself.
"Yes; but it's in the way of the ills I know. The ills I know not of
might be worse."

"Oh, well, they wouldn't be that, you know."

"What about your people?" She sprang the question on him suddenly.

"They'd be all right--in time."

The qualification was like a stab. She spoke proudly. "I'm afraid I
couldn't wait for that."

"You wouldn't have to wait for anything. They'd jolly well have to put
up with what I decided to do. I've got all the say, you know. I'm the
head of the family."

"Yes, _you_ might look at it in that way; but you can easily see what it
would be to me to enter a family where I wasn't wanted."

"That's a bit strong," he corrected. "They'd want you right enough, once
they knew you. It would only be the--the fact of--the--"

She helped him out. "The divorce."

He nodded and finished. "That they'd jib at. Even then--"

"Oh, please don't think I'm blaming them. I should do exactly the same,
in their case."

"They're really not half bad, you know," he tried to explain. "Mother's
an awfully decent sort, and so is Di. Aggie's a bit cattish. But then
she'll soon be married. Fellow named Jenkins, in the Guards. And then,"
he added, irrelevantly, "you're an American."

"Which is another disadvantage."

"No," he said, with emphasis. "The other way round when it comes to
a--a--" He stumbled at the word, but faced it eventually: "When it comes
to a divorce, you know."

She looked at him mistily. "No, I don't know. Aren't a divorced
Englishwoman and a divorced American in very much the same position?"

He hastened to reassure her. "Oh, Lord, no. Not in England they wouldn't
be. A divorced Englishwoman--well, she's in rather a hole, you know;
whereas a divorced American woman--that's natural."

"I see," she responded, slowly. "It's not considered quite so bad."

"Oh, not half so bad. One expects an American woman to be divorced--or
something."

She couldn't be annoyed with him because he was so honest and ingenuous.
She merely said, "So they'd think me the rule rather than the
exception."

"They'd just think you were American, and let it go at that. Besides,"
he continued, earnestly, "when a woman's only been married in
America--"

"She's been hardly married at all. Is that what they'd think in
England?"

"Well, if they'd ever seen the chap around--But when they haven't, you
know--"

"They can't believe in him."

"Oh, I don't say that. But--well, they wouldn't think anything about
him."

She shifted her ground slightly. "But you'd think about him, wouldn't
you?"

"Me? Why should _I_?"

"Because I'd married him before I'd married you--for one thing."

"Oh, but I shouldn't go into that, you know. That would be over and done
with."

"Would it?"

"Well, wouldn't it?"

She mused silently, while the little girl with the bare legs continued
to croon to her doll with a kind of chant:

"Dors, mon enfant, dors.... Ta mere ne reviendra plus ce soir.... Elle
dine avec le beau monsieur que tu as vu.... Elle te dira bonne nuit
demain.... Dors; sois sage--et dors"

"Even if it were over and done with," Edith said at last, "the fact
would remain--supposing I married you--that your wife had had a life in
which you possessed no share--a very living life, I assure you--and that
her memories of that life were perhaps the most vital thing about her."

"Oh, but I say!" he protested. "That's the very reason I'm so fond of
you. I can see all that already. I shouldn't interfere with it, you
know. It's what makes the difference between you and other women. It's
like the difference between--" He sought for a simile. "It's like the
difference between a book that's been written and printed, and has
something in it, and a silly blank book."

Her eyes filled with tears. "I wonder if you have the least idea of what
you're saying?"

He sought for a more effective figure of speech. "If you were walking
about your place, and found something wounded, you'd want to take it
home and tend it, wouldn't you, till you'd put it to rights again? And
the more you tended it the fonder of it you'd be. But you wouldn't stop
to ask whether a boy had thrown a stone at it or whether it had been
attacked by its mate. You'd let all that alone--and just tend it."

Her tears were coursing freely now beneath her veil. "Is that really the
way you feel about me?"

He grew apologetic. "Oh, I don't mean any Good Samaritan business, don't
you know? If I could look after you a bit you'd do the same by me. I'm
thinking of that, too. Look here," he pursued, confidentially, but
coloring; "I'll tell you something, if you won't think me an ass. I
could have married two or three girls--oh, more than that!--if I'd
wanted to. But I could see what they were after. It wasn't me--not by a
long shot. It was the place--Foljambe--it's really quite a decent place,
you know--right in the shires--and the hunting. They'd have thought it
awful luck to have to clear out of England every year, just when the
hunting begins--and stick in this bally hole--or go to Egypt. But you
wouldn't." As she said nothing for the minute, he insisted, "Would you,
now?"

She shook her head musingly. "No, I shouldn't."

He looked relieved. "Well, that's just it. That's just what I thought."
He colored more deeply, with a hectic spot in each cheek. "Life isn't
all beer and skittles to me, don't you know--and you'd be the kind of
thing I haven't got, don't you know?" He leaned toward her beseechingly.
"Do you see now?"

"I think I do. You mean that we'd mutually take care of each other."

"Well, that's what it would amount to--not to say any more about my
being so awfully fond of you. You won't forget that."

She smiled through her tears. "Oh no; I'm not likely to forget it. I
wish I could tell you--"

But she broke off because she could say no more, struggling to her feet.
He agreed to her request that she should have time to think his proposal
over, and also that he should let her return alone to the hotel,
remaining in the shelter with the crooning child long after she had gone
away.

But once she was out in the wind again she found it difficult to give
the matter concentrated thought. Much as she had been moved while he
talked to her, the emotion seemed to be blown away by the strong air of
reality. It was like the crying in which she had sometimes indulged
herself at a play, and which left no aftermath of sadness. She could
hardly tell what aftermath had been left by Noel Ordway's words; but as
far as she could judge it had everything in it to touch her and appeal
to her, except the possible. And yet so much that was impossible had
happened to her already, who knew but that the next incredible thing
would be that she should become mistress of Foljambe Park? Why not?
Since the haven was open to her, and Chip had left the poor little craft
of her life to toss in a sea too strong for it, why not creep into any
refuge that would receive her? She would certainly be driven sooner or
later into some such port--then why not into this?

She hurried homeward between the thundering breakers on the one hand and
the tossing palms on the other, her mind in a state of storm. In the
garden, as she passed toward the hotel, she saw Miss Chesley with the
children, but she couldn't stop and speak to them. She hurried. She
wanted the protection of her room, of quiet, of the accessories to
mental peace. Perhaps when she got these she should be able to
think--and decide; so she hurried on.

To avoid the main hall, where people might speak to her, she took the
short cut through the sun-pavilion, which would bring her nearer to the
stairs. But on throwing open the door she stood still on the threshold
with a little soundless gasp. "Oh!"

He came toward her sedately, the glimmer of a smile on the stamped
gravity of his face. "I took the liberty of waiting for you. I couldn't
bring myself to go back to Cap d'Ail without knowing how you were."

As he held her hand he seemed to bend over her with what she had already
described to herself as a brooding concern. She knew she was blushing
foolishly and that her knees were trembling under her; and yet,
curiously enough, the little craft of her life seemed suddenly to find
itself in quiet waters, ranged round by protecting hills. She was
confused and sorry and glad and afraid all in one instant. Nothing but
the habit of the hostess, which was so strong in her, enabled her to
capture a conventional tone and say the obvious thing:

"I'm so glad you waited. Won't you sit down, and let me ring for tea?"

III

REPROACH

Chip had never really noticed her until on that Sunday morning in June
it suddenly struck him that she was trying to get a word with him alone.
He had seen her, of course. She had been at Mountain Brook--which was
the name of Emery Bland's place in New Hampshire--every time he had gone
there; but, her quality being unobtrusive, he had paid her no attention.
Furthermore, both Bland and Mrs. Bland, being emphatic in personality
and talkative, he had been the more easily led to ignore this reticent
girl, whose function was apparently limited to seeing her aunt provided
with a shawl, or her uncle with a cigar, at the right opportunities. If
he thought of her at all, it was as of the living spirit of the
furniture. The tables and chairs became animate in her, and articulate;
but her claim to recognition had never gone beyond the necessity for a
hand-shake or a smile. When he did take her hand--on arriving, or on
coming down-stairs in the morning--he received an impression of
something soft and slim and tender; but the moment of pleasure was
always too fleeting for conscious registration. Similarly, when, from a
polite instinct to include her in the conversation, he smiled vaguely in
her direction, he received a look gentle and beaming and almost
apologetic in return; but it was never more to him than if the dimly
lustrous surfaces of Mrs. Bland's nice Sheraton had suddenly become
responsive. She made no demand; and he offered no more than she asked.

Perhaps the fact that the girl was not really the niece of either Mr. or
Mrs. Bland had something to do with his tendency to treat her as a
negligible quantity. Mrs. Bland had explained the situation to him
during his first visit to Mountain Brook.

"Lily isn't our niece at all," she had said, in a tone which seemed to
reproach Lily with an inadvertance. "She's no relation to us whatever.
We don't know who she is. She doesn't even know herself. Since you
insist," she continued, as though Chip had been pressing for
information, "we got her out of an orphanage, the year we built this
house. Mr. Bland seemed to think the house ought to have something young
in it; and so--"

"You might have had a dog," Chip said, dryly.

"You needn't laugh. It wasn't _my_ desire to adopt a child. I simply
yielded to Mr. Bland, as I do in everything. The only stipulation I made
was that she should call us uncle and aunt. I couldn't bear to be called
mother by a child who wasn't my own; but Mr. Bland is so odd that he
wouldn't have cared. I dare say you've noticed how odd he is."

Chip could see that Bland might be odd from his wife's point of view. He
was the self-made man who had shed the traces of self-making. Mrs. Bland
was fond of describing herself as a self-made woman; but the stages of
the process by which she had "turned herself out" were visible. She
would have been disappointed had it not been so. Having confessed from
youth upward that her ambition was "to make the most of herself," there
had never, in her case, been any question of the _ars celare artem_. She
belonged to a number of women's clubs of which the avowed object was
"self-improvement," and attended such classes on "current events" as
would keep her posted on the problems of the day without the bore of
reading the papers. As a self-made woman she also looked the part,
dressing for breakfast as she would like to be found in the afternoon,
with but slight variation for dinner. In her full panoply of plum or
dove color she suggested one of those knights eternally in armor who
decorate baronial halls. Chip considered it probable that Emery Bland
would never have chosen her as the life-long complement to himself had
he not taken that step while he was still an obscure "up-state" country
lawyer, and she the dignified young school-teacher who stood for
"cultivation" in their little town. Cultivation had always been to Mrs.
Bland what hunting is to the rider to hounds--the zest was in the chase.
The zest was in the chase, and the quarry but an excuse for the run.
Over hedges of lectures, and ditches of "talks," and through
turnip-fields of serious, ponderous women like herself, green even in
winter, and after being touched by frost, Mrs. Bland kept on in full
career, with "cultivation" scudding ahead like a fox she never caught a
glimpse of, and which her hounds tracked only by the scent. It was
splendid exercise, and helped her to feel in the movement. If she failed
to notice that her husband had long ago run the fleet animal to earth,
and affixed the mask as an adornment to his home, it was only because
their views of life were different.

No one would now suppose that there had been a time in Emery Bland's
life when it had been his aim also to "cultivate himself," and when he
had actually used the phrase. Between the debonair, experienced New York
lawyer, so much in demand for cases requiring discretion and so capable
of dealing with them--between him and the farmer's boy he had been there
was no more resemblance than between a living word and the dead root out
of which it has been coined. In Emery Bland's case the word was not only
living, but pliant, eloquent, and arresting to ear and eye. He was one
of those men who overlook nothing that can be counted as
self-expression, from their dress to the sound of their syllables.
Superficially genial, but essentially astute, he had made everything
grist that came to his mill, flourishing on it not only in the
financial sense, but also in that of character. It was said that he knew
as many life histories as a doctor or a priest, and generally the more
dramatic ones. The experience had clearly made him cynical, but tolerant
also, and human, with a tendency, as far as he was personally concerned,
to being morally strait-laced. He had seen so much of the picturesque
side of life that he could appreciate the prosaic, which, in Chip's
explanation, was why he could stand by Mrs. Bland. Other people's
surfeits of champagne and ortolans had assured his own taste for plain
roast beef. But he himself ordered the porcelain on which his simple
fare was served, and the wines by which it was accompanied, drunk from
fine old Irish or Bohemian glass.

Chip took this in by degrees. His first acquaintance with a man who was
to exercise some influence on his future was purely professional. He had
gone to him as an offset to Aunt Emily. If the results of this move were
indirect--since Aunt Emily had won the victory--they became apparent in
time. They became apparent when in Chip's bruised heart, where
everything healthy seemed to have been stunned, a slight curiosity began
to awaken concerning his new friend's personality.

He came to consider him a friend by accident--the accident of a club,
where, finding themselves sitting down to dine at the same moment, they
had taken the same table. Primarily, it was an opportunity to adjust
some loose ends of Chip's domestic affairs; incidentally, they stumbled
on a common hobby in Victorian English politics. There was no subject on
which Emery Bland was better informed, with a learning that covered the
whole long stretch from Lord Melbourne to Lord Salisbury, and which he
could garnish with anecdote _ad libitum_. It was a kind of conversation
of which Chip, who had been brought up partly in England, rarely got a
taste in New York, and for which Bland, on his side, didn't often find
an interested listener. Something like an intimacy thus sprang up, but
an intimacy of the kind common among men who have little or no point of
contact out of office hours or away from the neutral ground of the club.
Within these limits the meetings had already been numerous before it
occurred to Chip--more or less idly--that while Bland knew too much of
his sad background, he knew nothing of Bland's. An occasional reference
revealed the lawyer as a married man, but beyond that basic fact their
acquaintance had no more attachment to the main social structure of life
than a floating island of moss and flowers has to the system of
geological strata. It was Bland himself who took the first step in the
direction of closer association.

"Well, how are you getting on?"

He asked the question while slipping into the seat opposite Chip as the
latter lunched at the club, where they met most frequently.

"Oh, so so."

"H'm. So so. _That's_ what you call it."

The tone implied reproach or reproof or expostulation. Chip kept his
eyes on his knife and fork.

"Well, what do _you_ call it?"

"Oh, I'm not obliged to give it a name. I hear other people do that."

"And what do other people say--since you seem to want me to ask the
question?"

"I do. I think you ought to know. They say it's a pity."

Chip took on the defiant air of a bad boy. "They can say it--and go to
blazes."

"They'll say it, all right. Don't you worry about that. But I rather
think that you'll do the going to blazes--at this rate."

Chip raised his haggard eyes. "Well, why not? What is there any better
than blazes for me to go to? Besides, it isn't so awful--when you've got
nothing else."

"Oh, rot, Walker! I'm ashamed of you. I can imagine a man of your type
doing almost anything else but taking to drink."

Chip shrugged his shoulders with the habit acquired in French schools.
"On fait ce que l'on peut. I had three resources left to me--wine,
woman, and song. For song I've no ear; for woman--well, that's all over;
so it came down to Hobson's choice."

"Hobson's choice be blowed! Walker's choice! And you've just time enough
left to cast about for a set of alternatives. Why, I've seen scores of
men in your fix; and of some of them it was the salvation."

"And what was it of the others?"

"Hell. But it was a hell of their own making."

"All right. I'm willing to accept the word. It's a hell of _my_ own
making--but it's hell, just the same."

"But, good Lord! man, even if it is hell, you don't want to wallow in
it."

Chip smiled ruefully. "Oh, I like it. Kind of penance. I like it as
medieval sinners used to like a hair shirt."

"Yes; but the hair shirt was kept out of sight. You're parading your
penance, as you call it, before the world. See here, Walker, why don't
you come up and spend the weekend with me in New Hampshire? My wife
would like to have you. To-day is Friday, and I go up to-morrow morning.
A Sunday in the country would do you good."

Chip refused, but he long remembered why he retracted his refusal. It
was the look of his apartment when he returned to it that night. It was
an apartment in a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and a street in
the Thirties, dedicated to the use of well-to-do bachelors. It had been
a slight mitigation in the collapse of life as he had built it up, that
rooms in so comfortable a refuge should have been free for him. He had
furnished them with some care; and after his first distress had worn
off a little had found a measure of lawless satisfaction in a return to
the old unmarried ways.

But on this particular evening the aspect of the place appalled him from
the minute he turned his latch-key in the lock. Under the stimulus of
Bland's counsels he had come home early, which was in itself a mistake.
It was scarcely nine o'clock. There was an hour or an hour and a half to
pass before he could think of going to bed. Any such interval as that
was always the hardest feature in the day for him. But what smote him
specially now was the air of emptiness and loneliness. It met him as an
odor in the stale smell of the cigar he had smoked on coming up-town
from the office, and which still lingered in the rooms. He had forgotten
to open a window, and the house valet, whose duty it was to "tidy up,"
had evidently gone out.

In the small hall into which Chip entered there was a bookcase with but
two or three odds and ends of books in it, for his habits of reading had
dropped away from him with everything else. In the sitting-room one
brown shoe stood on the hearth-rug before the empty fireplace; the
other on the center-table, a collar and necktie beside it. The soiled
shirt he had thrown off lay on the couch, a sleeve dragging on the
floor. On the mantelpiece, which he had at first consecrated as a shrine
for the photographs of Edith and the children, and flanked by two silver
candlesticks like an altar, there had intruded an open box of perfectos,
an ash-tray that still held the butt-end of a cigar, and an empty
tumbler smelling of whisky. There were traces of cigar ashes
everywhere--on the arms of the easy-chairs, on the rugs, and on the
terra-cotta tiles of the hearth. For the rest the room was a litter of
newspapers, as the bedroom which opened off it was a litter of clothes.

He was not disorderly; he was only careless, and incapable of creating
order for himself. Disorder shocked him profoundly. He always sat down
in the midst of it, helpless, but with a sense of inner misery. And so
he sat down in it now. "My God!" he said to himself, summing up in the
ejaculation all the wretchedness he had wrought, or that had been
wrought, about him.

It was at such minutes that his mind reverted to Edith, with renewed
stupefaction over what she had done. Stupefaction was the word.
Reflection on the subject only left him the more hopelessly bewildered.
If she hadn't loved him her course might have been explicable. As it
was, he found himself driven to a choice between mental aberration on
her part and a witch's spell, inclining to the latter--with the witch in
the guise of Aunt Emily.

Not that he absolved himself. He made no attempt to do that. But he
looked upon his offense as of the kind that naturally calls for mercy
rather than severity. What was the letter of the contract in comparison
with the spirit?--and he had kept the spirit sacredly. Of course he had
done wrong. Who in thunder, he asked, impatiently, ever denied that? But
how many men had not done wrong in the same way? Very few, was his
answer. The answer was the essence of his defense--a defense which,
according to all the laws of human nature and common sense, Edith should
have accepted. That she shouldn't accept it, or couldn't, or wouldn't,
passed his comprehension.

As a rule, he tried not to think of it. He tried not to think of it by
filling up the time with something else. When there had been nothing
else to fill up the time he had stupefied himself with drink. He drank
at first, not because he liked drinking, but because it dulled his
brain, his heart. It didn't excite him; on the contrary, it brought him
to a state of lethargy which, if he was at the club, made him willing to
go home, or, if he was at home, made it possible for him to go to bed
and sleep. It was only within a month or so that he had begun to suspect
that other people noticed it; and even then he hadn't been sure until
Bland had told him so that day.

He had, consequently, come back to his room in the possession of his
faculties, but with a feeling of something unfulfilled that emphasized
his desolation. He perceived then that a habit was beginning to form in
him with a tenacity which it might be difficult to counteract. After
all, would anything be gained by counteracting it? He had known fellows
who drank themselves to death; and except in the last dreadful stages it
hadn't been so bad. They had certainly got their fun out of it, even if
in the end they paid high. He was paying high--and perhaps getting
nothing at all. Wouldn't it be better if he went off this minute
somewhere, and made a night of it?--made a night which would be but the
beginning of a long succession of nights of the same kind? Then when he
was ruined beyond recovery, or in his grave, Edith would know what she
had done to him. He had tried every other way of bringing it home to her
but that. That might succeed where argument had failed. She couldn't
have a mind so much astray as not to be sorry when she saw, or heard of,
the wreck she would have made of him.

It was worth thinking of, and he sat and thought of it. He tried to
conjure up the picture of himself as really besotted--he was not
besotted as yet, even when the worst was said!--degraded, revolting. He
rose to take a cigar, to help his imagination in the task to which he
had set it, but he remembered that the cigar suggested a whisky-and-soda
to go with it, and there was a bottle of Old Piper in the cupboard. He
fell back into his seat again with the longing unsatisfied, but he
continued his dream. It was so pleasant a dream--that is, there were so
many advantages to the course he thought of taking, that he ended by
springing to his feet and saying, almost aloud, "By God, I'll do it."

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