Part 72 (1/2)

He gave him one level and deadly stare; then his pallid features relaxed, he slowly walked past Ruthven, grave, preoccupied; unlocked the door, and pa.s.sed out.

His lodgings were not imposing in their furnis.h.i.+ngs or dimensions--a very small bedroom in the neighbourhood of Sixth Avenue and Was.h.i.+ngton Square--but the heavy and increasing drain on his resources permitted nothing better now; and what with settling Gerald's complications and providing two nurses and a private suite at Clifton for Alixe Ruthven, he had been obliged to sell a number of securities, which reduced his income to a figure too absurd to worry over.

However, the Government had at last signified its intention of testing his invention--Chaosite--and there was that chance for better things in prospect. Also, in time, Gerald would probably be able to return something of the loans made. But these things did not alleviate present stringent conditions, nor were they likely to for a long while; and Selwyn, tired and perplexed, mounted the stairs of his lodging-house and laid his overcoat on the iron bed, and, divesting himself of the garments of ceremony as a matter of economy, pulled on an old tweed shooting-jacket and trousers.

Then, lighting his pipe--cigars being now on the expensive and forbidden list--he drew a chair to his table and sat down, resting his worn face between both hands. Truly the world was not going very well with him in these days.

For some time, now, it had been his custom to face his difficulties here in the silence of his little bedroom, seated alone at his table, pipe gripped between his firm teeth, his strong hands framing his face. Here he would sit for hours, the long day ended, staring steadily at the blank wall, the gas-jet flickering overhead; and here, slowly, painfully, with doubt and hesitation, out of the moral confusion in his weary mind he evolved the theory of personal responsibility.

With narrowing eyes, from which slowly doubt faded, he gazed at duty with all the calm courage of his race, not at first recognising it as duty in its new and dreadful guise.

But night after night, patiently perplexed, he retraced his errant pathway through life, back to the source of doubt and pain; and, once arrived there, he remained, gazing with impartial eyes upon the ruin two young souls had wrought of their twin lives; and always, always somehow, confronting him among the debris, rose the spectre of their deathless responsibility to one another; and the inexorable life-sentence sounded ceaselessly in his ears: ”For better or for worse--for better or for worse--till death do us part--till death--till death!”

Dreadful his duty--for man already had dared to sunder them, and he had acquiesced to save her in the eyes of the world! Dreadful, indeed--because he knew that he had never loved her, never could love her! Dreadful--doubly dreadful--for he now knew what love might be; and it was not what he had believed it when he executed the contract which must bind him while life endured.

Once, and not long since, he thought that, freed from the sad disgrace of the shadowy past, he had begun life anew. They told him--and he told himself--that a man had that right; that a man was no man who stood stunned and hopeless, confronting the future in fetters of conscience.

And by that token he had accepted the argument as truth--because he desired to believe it--and he had risen erect and shaken himself free of the past--as he supposed; as though the past, which becomes part of us, can be shaken from tired shoulders with the first shudder of revolt!

No; he understood now that the past was part of him--as his limbs and head and body and mind were part of him. It had to be reckoned with--what he had done to himself, to the young girl united to him in bonds indissoluble except in death.

That she had strayed--under man-made laws held guiltless--could not shatter the tie. That he, blinded by hope, had hoped to remake a life already made, and had dared to masquerade before his own soul as a man free to come, to go, and free to love, could not alter what had been done. Back, far back of it all lay the deathless pact--for better or for worse. And nothing man might wish or say or do could change it. Always, always he must remain bound by that, no matter what others did or thought; always, always he was under obligations to the end.

And now, alone, abandoned, helplessly sick, utterly dependent upon the decency, the charity, the mercy of her legal paramour, the young girl who had once been his wife had not turned to him in vain.

Before the light of her shaken mind had gone out she had written him, incoherently, practically _in extremis_; and if he had hitherto doubted where his duty lay, from that moment he had no longer any doubt. And very quietly, hopelessly, and irrevocably he had crushed out of his soul the hope and promise of the new life dawning for him above the dead ashes of the past.

It was not easy to do; he had not ended it yet. He did not know how.

There were ties to be severed, friends.h.i.+ps to be gently broken, old scenes to be forgotten, memories to kill. There was also love--to be disposed of. And he did not know how.

First of all, paramount in his hopeless trouble, the desire to save others from pain persisted.

For that reason he had been careful that Gerald should not know where and how he was now obliged to live--lest the boy suspect and understand how much of Selwyn's little fortune it had taken to settle his debts of ”honour” and free him from the sinister pressure of Neergard's importunities.

For that reason, too, he dreaded to have Austin know, because, if the truth were exposed, nothing in the world could prevent a violent and final separation between him and the foolish boy who now, at last, was beginning to show the first glimmering traces of character and common sense.

So he let it be understood that his address was his club for the present; for he also desired no scene with Boots, whom he knew would attempt to force him to live with him in his cherished and brand-new house. And even if he cared to accept and permit Boots to place him under such obligations, it would only hamper him in his duties.

Because now, what remained of his income must be devoted to Alixe.

Even before her case had taken the more hopeless turn, he had understood that she could not remain at Clifton. Such cases were neither desired nor treated there; he understood that. And so he had taken, for her, a pretty little villa at Edgewater, with two trained nurses to care for her, and a phaeton for her to drive.

And now she was installed there, properly cared for, surrounded by every comfort, contented--except in the black and violent crises which still swept her in recurrent storms--indeed, tranquil and happy; for through the troubled glimmer of departing reason, her eyes were already opening in the calm, unearthly dawn of second childhood.

Pain, sadness, the desolate awakening to dishonour had been forgotten; to her, the dead now lived; to her, the living who had been children with her were children again, and she a child among them. Outside of that dead garden of the past, peopled by laughing phantoms of her youth, but one single extraneous memory persisted--the memory of Selwyn--curiously twisted and readjusted to the comprehension of a child's mind--vague at times, at times wistfully elusive and incoherent--but it remained always a memory, and always a happy one.

He was obliged to go to her every three or four days. In the interim she seemed quite satisfied and happy, busy with the simple and pretty things she now cared for; but toward the third day of his absence she usually became restless, asking for him, and why he did not come. And then they telegraphed him, and he left everything and went, white-faced, stern of lip, to endure the most dreadful ordeal a man may face--to force the smile to his lips and gaiety into the shrinking soul of him, and sit with her in the pretty, sunny room, listening to her prattle, answering the childish questions, watching her, seated in her rocking-chair, singing contentedly to herself, and playing with her dolls and ribbons--dressing them, undressing, mending, arranging--until the heart within him quivered under the misery of it, and he turned to the curtained window, hands clinching convulsively, and teeth set to force back the strangling agony in his throat.