An Ambitious Woman Part 42

Mrs. Twining had been securely convalescent some time ago. She had pa.s.sed through a complicated and dangerous illness; she had given Death odds, yet won with him. She was still subject to those attacks of fatigue which are inevitable with one who has proved victor in so grim a wrestle. But she had once more gained a very firm foothold on that solidity which bounds one known side, at least, of the valley of the shadow. She intended, in a physical sense, to live a good many years longer; her freshening vitality was like that of a fire in a forest, which has stretched an arm of flame across a bare s.p.a.ce, at the risk of not reaching it, but in the end has caught a mighty supply of woodland fuel.

Claire found her stretched quite luxuriously on a lounge, with a little table beside her, which held the remains of a hearty repast. She had the traditional vast appet.i.te of the recovering invalid. She had devoured enough to have sunk a hearty person of average digestion into abysses of dyspepsia. She had enjoyed her meal very much. It had appeared to her as an earnest of many similar joys.

She promptly began a series of her old characteristic sarcasms and slurs as soon as Claire appeared. Mingled with them was an atmosphere of odious congratulation--a sort of verbal patting on the back--which her daughter found even more baneful than her half-latent sneers. She was thoroughly refreshed; her food (mixed with some admirable claret) had gone straight to the making of bodily repairs. She had never had anything so fine and wholesome in the hospital, though after the patronage of Mrs. Lee she had been supplied with not a few agreeable dainties. The temporary result was that she had become in a great measure her real self.

Claire said very little. She did a large amount of listening. She had never known her mother not to be without a grudge of some sort. It brought back the past with a piercing vividness, now, while she sat and heard. The vision of a pale, refined face, lit by soft, dark-blue eyes, rose before her, and the memory of many a wanton a.s.sault, many a surrept.i.tious wound, appealed to her as well. Her father had stood it all so bravely--he had been such a gentleman through it all! _She_ had stood it only with a st.u.r.dy, rebellious disapproval through many of the years that preceded his death.

She stood it, now, with a weary tranquillity. When she went away from her mother, these were her parting words:--

"I do not think I shall tell my husband, for some few days, that you are here. There are reasons why I should not. He has some very engrossing matters to occupy him. But you will be perfectly comfortable in the meanwhile. Order what you please. The servants will obey you in every particular. If you should need me, I will come immediately. You have only to send me word. I shall be at home for the rest of to-day, and all through the evening."

Claire went into her own private sitting-room, after that. When she had been there a little while, she had torn up her first letter to Goldwin.

When she had been there a little while longer, she had written the second letter. Having finished the last, she promptly dispatched it, by messenger, to Goldwin's private address.

Between the hours of ten and eleven that same evening, the following note from Goldwin was brought to Claire:--

_Friday Night._

In some unaccountable way I have lost the letter which you sent me to-day. I feel in honor bound to tell you of this loss, after a protracted search through my apartments and numerous inquiries and directions at my club. I cannot sufficiently blame myself for not having at once burned it to a crisp. But I thrust it into my pocket after many readings, with the wish to learn each word by heart before it was finally destroyed. Do not feel needlessly worried. I shall do my best to recover it, and even if it should be read by other eyes than yours and mine, the fact of your mere initials being signed to it is an immense safeguard.

S. G.

Claire had grown deathly pale as she finished the perusal of this note.

She had prepared herself for a night of wretched unrest, but here was a dagger to murder sleep with even surer poignance.

It was past midnight when she heard Hollister go to his apartments. She fancied that his step was a little unsteady. If this was true, no vinous exhilaration made it so. An excitement of most opposite cause would have explained the altered tread.

A saving hand had interposed between himself and ruin. The chance had been given him of starting again--of meeting all the fiercest of his creditors, and appeasing them. Instead of utter wreck, he had chiefly to think of retrenchment. Perhaps what Claire believed unsteadiness in his step was a brief pause near her own door. But even if an impulse to tell her the good news may for a moment have risen uppermost, there must have swept over him, promptly and sternly, the recollection of a dark and sundering discovery.

Meanwhile Claire, wondering if the lost letter had, through any baleful chance, drifted into his hands, lay pierced by that affrighted remorse which a monition of detected guilt will bring the most hardened criminal, and which of necessity strikes with acuter fang the soul of one yet a neophyte in sin.

XXIII.

Hollister pa.s.sed downstairs the next morning at a little after nine o'clock. He had obtained some sleep, of which he stood in sad need. The cheerful elasticity of his temperament would have placed him, by natural rebound, well in the sunlight of awakened hope and invigorated energy, and after hours of miserable disquiet he would now have felt relieved and peaceful, but for one leaden and insuperable fact. This had no relation whatever with financial turmoils and embarra.s.sments; it concerned Claire, and the desolate difference with which her image now rose before his spirit.

He had told her that they must henceforth be as strangers, but already the deeps of his unselfish love were stirred by a longing, no less illogical than pa.s.sionate, to make reality of what had once been illusion, and to verify Claire's indifference through some unknown spell of transformation into that warmth which had thus far proved only lifeless counterfeit. Already Hollister found within him a s.p.a.cious capacity of pardon toward his wife. Already he had begun to exonerate, to make allowances; and more than all, he had already told himself that to live on without her love would be a hundredfold better than to part with her companionship. Here cropped out the old vein of complaisance and conciliation which had run through his earlier collegiate life, and which later experiences amid all sorts of risk and rivalry had never wholly obscured. It had been his power to concede, his amiable pliancy, wed with a peculiar intellectual shrewdness, that had gone far toward the accomplishment of his phenomenal successes. The man who makes the best of things by instinct is very apt to have the best of things made for him by fortune.

His inalienable love for Claire caused him to regard her long hypocrisy with fondly lenient eyes. The wrong done himself rapidly took a secondary place; it was nearly always thus with Hollister, except in those grosser cases of wanton injury from his own s.e.x; and now, when it became a matter between his heart and the woman that heart devotedly loved, he was ready to forego a most liberal share of the usual human egotism.

He had a hard day before him. Exertion, diplomacy, astuteness, concentration, all were needed. He was still to fall, but no longer with a headlong plunge. He would now fall on his feet, as it were, but it required a certain agile flexibility to make the descent a graceful one.

At any other time he would promptly have left the house after breakfasting. As it was, he waited for Claire. She appeared sooner than he had expected her. She had drank her coffee upstairs. He saw her figure, clad in a morning robe of pale-tinted cachemire, enter the front drawing-room. He had lighted a cigarette, and was standing beside the hearth, where a riotous fire flung merry crimson challenge to the sharp weather outside. He at once threw away his cigarette, and went forward to meet her.

She perceived him when he had gained the centre of the second drawing-room. She stood perfectly still, awaiting his approach. There was more than a chill misgiving at her heart lest some inimical hand had sent him her own fatal letter. She did not know how she would act in case he immediately accused her. Hours of sleepless unrest had not supplied her with a single defensive plea.

The new serenity on Hollister's face struck her at a glance. It gave her a sudden relief; it was like a reprieve just before execution. When he said "good morning" she answered him with the same words. She wondered if he had already noticed her pallor, or that a dark line lay under either eye. Her dressing-mirror had told her of these changes.... Might he not guess at sight the guilty agony that she had been enduring?

Her altered looks were not lost upon him. They were a new intercession in her behalf. "I have good news for you," he said, almost tenderly. He went toward the richly-draped mantel just opposite where she stood, and leaned one arm along its edge. He purposely let his eye wander a little, so that she would suspect in him no intentness of scrutiny.

"Good news?" she repeated, softly.

"Yes. I thought it was all up with me, yesterday. But a friend of yours has placed funds at my disposal which will enable me, with wise management, to weather the worst of the storm. He dropped into my office at a very critical moment. He used the nicest delicacy and tact. Before I actually realized that he was offering me very substantial aid, he had done so. And yet, with all his graceful method, he didn't beat about the bush. He was frankly straightforward. He said just why he wished to see my affairs righted--or at least creditably mended. That reason was his deep respect and sincere admiration for you. He told me, with a winning mixture of humor and seriousness, that you represented for him the one great repentance of his bachelorhood. And when I looked at his world-worn sort of face and his decidedly gray locks, and began to wonder whether he meant his amazing proposition in any unpleasant sense, he a.s.sured me that he had always seen in you, the daughter whom he had possibly missed being the father of.... Of course you now recognize his portrait; or have I not drawn it clearly enough?"

"Do you mean Beverley Thurston?" asked Claire.

"Yes. You see, now, how generous an act of friendship he performed."

"Yes, I see," Claire murmured.

"The funds he proffered--and which I accepted--are by no means all his own. His influence is so great, his standing is so secure, that he has actually been able to a.s.sociate four well-known capitalists (one of whom, by the way, chanced to be my personal friend) in carrying out this wonderfully benevolent work." Here Hollister paused for a considerable s.p.a.ce. "Of course," he at length went on, "I shall not do more than just escape a positive deadlock. The next few years must be full of cautious living and thinking. I have accepted the burden of a huge debt; but I believe firmly in my power to pay it off. And I have learned a lesson that I shall always profit by. They shall never call me a Wall Street king again. I have seen my last of big ventures. I shall want, if I can manage hereafter when every penny of liabilities shall be settled, to drift slowly but safely into a steady banking channel. I shall have friends enough left on the Street; I shan't have lost caste; I shall still hold my own. At least twenty good men have gone clean down in this flurry, without a chance of ever picking themselves up again. But I am going to pick myself up--that is, thanks to the helping hand of your precious elderly friend; for I could never have done it alone."

Claire knew not what to answer. She was thinking of the sweet, deceitful kindliness that Thurston had employed. She was thinking how little she deserved his timely and inestimable support. She was asking herself whether he would not have shrunk in sorrowful contempt from all such splendid almsgiving if he had known the real truth concerning her recent mad and sinister act.

While she was trying to shape some sort of adequate reply, the entrance of a servant rendered this unnecessary. The man handed Hollister a letter, bowed, and departed.

Claire's heart instantly began to beat hard and fast. A mist obscured her gaze while she watched Hollister tear open the envelope and unfold its contents. There was a sofa quite near; she sank into it; she felt dizzy enough to close her eyes. But she did not. She looked straight at her husband, and saw him begin a perusal of the unfolded sheet. Was it her letter to Goldwin? Why should she even fancy this? Were there not hundreds of other sources whence a letter might come to Herbert?

In a very little while she saw her husband grow exceedingly pale. He left off reading; he looked at her, and said: "Did you write this?" He held the paper out toward her as he spoke.

Claire rose, crossed the room, and cast her eyes over the extended page.

"Yes, it is mine," she answered him.

The voice did not seem his own in which he presently said: "I must read it. I must read it with my full attention. If I leave you for a little while, will you remain here until I return?"

"Yes," she said.

"You promise this?"

"I promise--yes."

Without another word to her, he walked back into the dining-room.

Perhaps twenty good minutes pa.s.sed before he returned. Claire had meanwhile nerved herself to meet something terrible. She had no idea what her husband's wrath would be like, but she felt that there might almost be death in it.

Hollister had hardly begun to address her before she perceived that he did not reveal a single trace of wrath. His eyes were much brighter than usual; he had not a vestige of color; his voice was low and of an increased unfamiliarity, but it did not contain the slightest sign of indignation.

She had seated herself on the sofa again, and he now came very close to her, standing while he spoke. He held the letter in his hand, which trembled a little.

"You wrote this to Goldwin, and it has been lost by him. Some one else has found it, and sent it to me. The handwriting on the envelope is not his."

Claire looked at him in blank amazement. It did not seem to her that he could possibly be the man whom she had thus far known as Herbert Hollister. He appeared radically and utterly changed. She could not understand just where the change lay, or in what it consisted. She was too bewildered to a.n.a.lyze it or in any way draw conclusions from it. She was simply pierced with a pungent sense of its existence.

"He lost it," she said. "He wrote me that he had lost it. You are right in thinking that some one else has sent it to you."

She wondered what he would now say. She forgot even to feel shame in his presence. She was asking herself what had so completely altered him. Why was he neither angry nor reproachful? The very expression of his features looked strangely unusual. It was almost as if the spirit of some new man had entered into his body.