Instruments of Darkness (collection)/In the Name of Duty
IN THE NAME OF DUTY
John Saunders and his maiden aunt were sitting quietly in the corner of the Will-o'-the-Wisp—the fashionable cabaret of the moment. His aunt lived in Paris, and during a short stay in New York wished to be shown the sights—not so much that she might enjoy them as that she might point out how inferior they were to those of Paris.
It would never have amused John particularly to take his aunt out for an evening, although she was a clever, alert-minded woman, with a nice, long, thin, bony face, a slim figure and a good string of pearls; but it never amused him to be scolded—as every one is so apt to be nowadays—about his native land. He was not exaggeratedly patriotic, but he felt that he could do nothing to change American trends even if he thought them undesirable. So he was sitting slumped down in his chair, smoking, while his aunt explained that the decorations—in imitation of a bamboo swamp—were tasteless, that the supper had been unwholesome, that the women were badly dressed, and that the band was practically insane, when he suddenly became aware that his cousin Raymond, another nephew, was in the room, dancing with a girl—a young girl, and always the same girl.
John looked about to see if Beatrice, his cousin's wife, was there, but she wasn't. Raymond and the girl went back after each dance to a table for two, where they sat in complete silence staring out at the room with round blank eyes. They did not look very gay.
There was no real reason why Raymond shouldn't be there, only as John had spent most of the evening apologizing for American customs, or at least explaining them, he felt disinclined to explain this incident; especially as he knew his aunt would consider it a tribute to her Continental experiences to think the worst; and so he suggested rather suddenly that it was about time to be going home. Aunt Lucy (she preferred her name to be pronounced “Lucie,” but John's thoroughly Anglo-Saxon tongue could not compass it, and so he insisted on the English spelling, as if from virtue instead of a disability)—Aunt Lucy was shrewd and quick.
“Oh, my dear John!” she said. “I've seen them—saw them as a matter of fact long before you did. What a sweet-looking girl—almost young enough to be Raymond's daughter! Fancy Raymond's having a love affair!”
John felt the irritation usually experienced when near relations say exactly what we expect them to say. “I must confess,” he replied stiffly, “that to my crude American eyes there is nothing whatever to indicate”
“A tragic love affair,” continued his aunt as if he had not spoken, “which is now obviously ending. Yes, they are parting, poor things.”
John wagged his head. “And might I ask on what you base these assumptions, Aunt Lucy?”
She wanted him to ask. “In the first place,” she answered, “this is not a casual meeting. If it were they would rush over here to speak to us and to explain incidentally that it was casual. In the next place it is not a continuing love affair, for in that case—although they might have sense enough to know that it is wiser not to explain—they would have at least discussed the advisability of an explanation. When they saw us first, he would have said: 'Good heavens, there's my old aunt over there with John! Now it will be all over New York,' and she would have said: 'Hadn't you better take me over and introduce me and tell them this or that?' Something of that sort would have passed between them. Nothing did. He saw us and hardly noticed our presence. So you see...”
“As a lawyer, I must say your evidence seems weak,” said John.
“And then, of course,” said the older lady, “the girl has been crying all evening—look at her eyes.”
At this moment the music, with its strange suggestion of the barnyard and the war dance, broke out again. John watched his cousin as he and his partner rose to dance. Raymond Saunders was a tall man, who without being exactly awkward had retained a certain boyish angularity. His large eyes of the deepest blue were young and shy; his thick straight hair was apt to be a little ruffled like a schoolboy's—in fact he was a man about whom every woman who saw him felt a conviction that she could help and protect him, and arrange a better, easier life for him. Any woman left alone with Raymond almost always began recommending to him a new kind of diet, or shoe, or philosophy...
But not this girl—John could see that wasn't her attitude, and as he studied her she took her left hand from Raymond's shoulder and with a curved knuckle she wiped first one set of eyelashes and then the other. Aunt Lucy was right—she was crying—dancing and weeping.
“Well, well,” said John, admitting everything. “I am sorry.”
“Sorry they're parting?” asked his aunt. “Yes, poor Raymond, it's too bad. The girl is a lady—a gentlewoman in the true sense of the word—just what he needs to enable him to support life with that hard, ruthless woman he's married to.”
There was never much use in arguing with Aunt Lucy, but John could not allow any one to speak like that about Beatrice. He himself had his rare moments of criticism of her, but he did not allow any one else to have them.
“Beatrice is anything but hard and ruthless,” he said. “Or if there is such an element in her character, she has never shown it to Ray. She's always been tender and devoted enough to him. Good heavens, when you think of her beauty and her brilliant ability—what she might not have done if she had been a man.”
“Oh, as a man—yes,” said Aunt Lucy, quite hatefully.
“When you think,” John went on, ignoring the interruption, “of all poor Ray's business failures, and what she has done for him—how to-day they are living on her little capital—I must say it seems to me that every member of his family ought to be abjectly grateful to her.”
“H'm—abject,” observed Aunt Lucy, “a very good word. That's what Beatrice makes people—abject. As a matter of fact that's what she does to poor Raymond. I dare say that's why he hasn't been more successful in business.”
“It isn't,” returned John crossly. “It's because he has no business sense. She has. He hasn't.”
“Yes, that's what we are always told,” said his aunt. “But all I know is that the only time Beatrice had a chance to do something really worth while for Raymond in a business way, she made a mess of it—at least nothing whatever happened.”
There was a short silence. “You mean Lord Barham?” asked John.
She nodded. “Yes, every one wrote to me how Raymond was to make his fortune as Lord Barham's representative in this country—how wonderful it was that Beatrice had found Lord Barham and won his friendship. Well, nothing came of it. Lord Barham went back to Canada and Raymond was left looking rather like a fool, I thought, although all of you continued to say how beautifully Beatrice managed for him. I can't see it.”
John debated with himself. He too had noticed that the Barham incident had melted away unexpectedly into nothingness. “Did it never occur to you, Aunt Lucy,” he said rather solemnly, “that there was a natural explanation of that? I mean that Barham might have fallen in love with Beatrice?”
“I thought that was the point of the whole thing,” she answered briskly. “I thought that was the only reason why he was giving Raymond this wonderful position—for love of Beatrice. But I suppose he got over it—men do so quickly fall out of love with these domineering women.”
“You would not like your nephew to be given a position only because the head of the firm was in love with his wife, would you?” asked John, and felt that he put the thing a trifle too brutally.
Aunt Lucy nodded: “I should like Raymond to have a good position—and to be happy and successful and independent. As for her—oh, well, there's a way of getting things without paying for them, if that's the idea of feminine morality in this country, as I believe it is.”
“You shock me,” said John. “There's a way of not taking things you don't intend to pay for. If I understand the situation correctly, Beatrice behaved not merely well but nobly—for of course she wants Raymond to succeed more than any one else does.”
“How that New England grandfather of yours does come out, John!” replied his aunt. “There's a mean course to steer between Puritanism and vice. Foreign wives understand these adjustments so beautifully—but of course Beatrice wouldn't. That's what I mean when I say that in my opinion she has been a great disadvantage to her husband. But,” Aunt Lucy added honestly, “I may think so only because she has always been so rude to me.”
John could not defend Beatrice against the charge of being rude—she was rude at times, but it was this very quality in her, the fact that she was capable of being hard and ambitious, that made her tender devotion to Raymond all the more creditable. Of course if she had been one of these gentle, timid women who would not have known what to do with a life of large opportunity, the sacrifices she made for her husband would have been less. But Beatrice was a woman not only able to take advantage of great opportunities—she instinctively craved them, as all of us crave the chance to use the powers which nature has given us.
In Beatrice's poverty her friends regretted not the lack of luxury—clever, healthy young people ought not to mind that—but the lack of scope. Of freedom to move about the world, of time to work for great objects, of chances to meet great people. If Barham had made Raymond his representative, Beatrice would have profited more in a way than Raymond—all these things would have come to her. All these things John believed she had given up rather than accept them at the hands of a lover.
But he did not attempt to tell all this to Aunt Lucy, who would not have believed it anyhow. It shocked him to see how his aunt's dislike of Beatrice made her sympathetic to Raymond's imagined love affair—some silly girl, John said to himself impatiently, who is making a fool of herself about Ray as women did every now and then.
For the next few days every time the blank, tragic face of the girl wiping her eyes with her crooked knuckle rose before him, he refused to remember it—and so after a time he forgot it.
Months passed. Aunt Lucy sailed back to the flat in the rue St. Domenic, telling every one who had struggled to make her stay attractive that she was delighted to be going back to a country where people knew how to make life attractive.
Then one afternoon soon after Christmas, he was told by his secretary that Mrs. Raymond Saunders wanted to speak to him. There was nothing unusual in this. John was not only his cousin's lawyer, but Beatrice turned to him for advice whenever anything went wrong with Raymond's business. Lately John had heard rumors that the real estate firm with which Raymond was connected was not doing well. Beatrice's crisp, well-bred voice insisted that he come up-town at once—she wanted to see him. It was half past two in the afternoon, and though John was not busy he felt he ought to be. He resented, too, being ordered about—he said that it was not convenient at the moment, but that he would stop on his way up-town about five or half
“That won't do, John,” said Beatrice. “We need you now. Lord Barham is here, and I want you.”
John agreed to come. He hung up the receiver thoughtfully. The arrival of Lord Barham in the country was generally noted in headlines. How long had he been here? How long had he been with Beatrice? Half past two—it struck John as a particularly unaccountable hour. Yet if there were anything wrong, why should they want him? She had said that they needed him—not herself only, but Barham. To be wanted by Lord Barham was an event in the life of any business man.
The Raymond Saunderses had always lived in a tiny apartment—really an old-fashioned flat—overlooking somebody else's garden in a district so far up-town as to have been almost suburban, although now fashion was creeping up to it. The sitting-room was full of pretty things, for Beatrice had taste, and poverty develops selectiveness. Now it was crowded with bowls and high vases of exotic flowers—Barham's flowers, of course.
Beatrice herself was the prettiest object in the room—rather small but so perfectly made in every detail that she seemed to be nature's excuse for all the monsters and cripples in the human species. Her golden-brown hair was ridged like the sea the day after a storm, and her skin was of that rich glowing color that often goes with russet hair. It was particularly becoming to her to be flushed, and she was flushed now.
But it was not her flush or her beauty that caught John's attention—it was a change in her personality—a change in spiritual pace. It was as if he had long known a vessel riding at anchor in a harbor and suddenly saw it under full sail putting to sea. Not, it appeared, that Beatrice was putting to sea—on the contrary. The first words she said were these:
“I have sent for you, John, because I want you to tell Lord Barham why it is I could never leave Raymond. I can't make him understand.”
“No one ever will,' said Barham.
John was already staring at Barham—a man of whom he knew a great deal but whom he now saw for the first time.
Lord Barham was not an aristocrat with an historic name. In fact, his title was only five or six years old. He was not an Englishman but a Canadian. His father had come to the Dominion to seek his fortune, and had not found it. The son had knocked about—had staked gold claims and drilled oil wells, had served in the mounted police; had finally made his money in land speculation, and won a title for services during the war. An astute friend had once said of him that he had made his success by combining innate American qualities—or qualities Americans like to think are theirs—of activity and daring and imagination, with an English method of presenting himself—a calm, imperturbable, superior, English manner. He was blond with clear gray-blue eyes like bubbles of glass, a long fine mouth, and a high nose rather like the Duke of Wellington's.
He was standing, when John entered, with his long legs a little straddled and his hands in his pockets—emanating something quiet but rather alarming.
“He wishes you to leave your husband?” said John, as if in all his legal experience he had never heard of such a thing as that.
“I wish to marry her,” replied Barham.
Beatrice smiled at him. “You usually say you intend to marry me,” she said.
“I do,” he answered.
It flashed upon John after seeing that admiring smile what was the change in his cousin's wife. He was used to seeing her kind, competent, considerate, wise—displaying the qualities of the responsible superior. He saw her now coöperating, or rather clashing, with an equal; could it be with an acknowledged superior? Could it be that she was humble? Beatrice? The idea shocked John more even than the suggestion of a divorce. He, a determined advocate of the established order, felt it was indeed threatened if Beatrice were going to begin to be humble.
“If,” he began stiffly, “you ask me as a lawyer whether or not a divorce could be obtained”
“We ask you,” Beatrice interrupted, “or rather I ask you to try to make Lord Barham believe that Raymond would go to pieces if I left him. He seems to think this is just an egotistical fancy of mind.”
“Do you want to leave him?” asked John. He meant to ask the question impersonally, as a lawyer seeking information, but at the last moment his voice took on a tone of reproof.
Beatrice locked at him, and her gold-colored eyes blazed. Then as if she felt they said too much, she shut them, and with a face like a mask she enunciated only one word.
“Yes,” she said.
Looking at that blank eyeless face, John saw she was suffering, but he did not pity her. Pity was not the emotion Beatrice roused. She couldn't wring your heart with a gentle look as Raymond could. His pity was for Raymond.
“I do not think,” he said coldly, “that Lord Barham needs an attorney to come up-town to inform him that a man would be wrecked by taking from him a wife whom he loves and depends upon and to whom he has always been faithful.” He had spoken the words before a faint vision of the girl weeping and dancing rose before his mental vision, and when it did he thrust it out again. It had not weakened the stern effect of his words.
Beatrice made a little gesture, as much as to say that there the case was in a nutshell, but Barham, who had been looking, not at any one but straight before him, now observed: “Ah, well, I see we have called in a special pleader for the other side.”
“You say that,” replied John, “because I don't tell you what you want to hear.”
“I say it,” answered Barham, “because you give your opinion offhand, without consideration, and without informing yourself as to the facts.”
“I know the essentials.”
“No,” said Barham.
And then it came out that the great fact which John did not know was that Barham intended to give Raymond a million dollars. It was not put so crudely, but it was made clear enough, and John colored with anger and with a sort of family shame.
“Even I,” he said, “who am not in love with Beatrice, would not assume that a million dollars would compensate for her loss.”
“Oh, John, don't address the jury!” said Beatrice.
“It depends on the man,” Barham observed, in his almost unbearably quiet manner. “Not fifty millions—not all the money in the world would compensate me, because I've had it. I know the feeling of success and power—as a matter of fact, I could do it again. But Saunders is different. The taste of failure is bitter in his mouth. Each hundred thousand as it came would give him a sense of self-confidence he has never had. You should think twice before you deprive a man of the one thing he has longed for vainly since he was a schoolboy.”
John really did not get the idea. “Oh,” he exclaimed, very bitter and sarcastic, “so in your opinion it would spell success for my cousin to accept a million dollars in exchange for his wife! I must confess that to me”
“No,” said Barham, patient with difficulty, “I should not give him a million, which of course he would not take. I should simply stay here and see that he made it. Then and not until then would Beatrice move for her divorce. It would be very easily arranged. And you have no idea the difference it would make in the man's ability to stand on his own feet.”
“By the amount that he had been corrupted,” said John. No one answered and he rose to his feet. “I cannot stay here,” he said. No one opposed his going.
Beatrice went as far as the door with him. She did not look at him or speak, but he looked at her and saw that she was drawing her eyelids together like a person in bodily pain. Still his heart was not softened.
“I'm afraid I have not been of very much help to you,” he said proudly.
“No,” Beatrice answered. “You haven't exactly grasped the situation. But you said what I meant you to say,” and she added with that tone of unalterable decision which was the best and the worst of her, “I don't intend to do it.” And then she turned quickly away from him, going back, John felt, to be clasped for the last time in the arms of that hard, insolent, rich, unmoral man who was waiting for her.
John walked away, not flattering himself that he had influenced the situation very much, but sure that as far as he had influenced it at all he had influenced it right.
A few days later the papers announced that Lord Barham, who had been in New York for a few days on business, had sailed for England. Nothing, as far as John could see—and he devoted some conscientious attention to the subject—was changed in the lives of his cousin and his cousin's wife. He dined with them as often as ever, met them at dinner, lunched frequently with Raymond down-town. Raymond, John felt sure, knew nothing about Barham's visit, and Beatrice, whatever her wishes had been, had not been broken by her renunciation.
The only question he asked himself was whether the break had really been final. Barham stayed on in England, but there was no proof he would not come back. Beatrice was determined, but so was he. Who could say that he might not return and get his own way? The question was completely answered a few months later when Barham's engagement to a distinguished English widow was announced—the Honorable Mrs. Drummond—the mingling of a new fortune and an old name.
John and Beatrice had never mentioned that triangular interview, and he would not have spoken of it now, but Beatrice herself spoke to him of the engagement. She spoke calmly, showing a human recognition that John would be interested to know the truth. She said it was a marriage that had been contemplated a long time by the friends of Barham and Mrs. Drummond—contemplated long before she and Barham had met; an excellent arrangement—not, she believed, a love match. Then she smiled and answered John's unasked question.
“No, John,” she said, “it makes no difference to me, except that I hope it works well for him. When I refuse a man, I don't hope to tie a string to him. He and I parted that afternoon.”
John was not of an imaginative temperament, and yet when he read of the yacht in which Barham was going to take his bride round the world, of the rubies he was giving her as a wedding present, he could not help wondering what Beatrice, still saving odd pennies in the tiny flat, thought when she read such items. Had she no moments of passionate regret? He saw no sign of it, and his respect rose not only for her but for his own judgment.
That spring Raymond experienced one of his business disasters. It was not that Raymond lost his jobs—not always, at least—but he seemed to have an instinct for accepting jobs with businesses on the brink of failure. Perhaps it was that heads of firms who could appreciate Raymond's gentle integrity and charm were people essentially unfitted to business competition.
Anyhow, that spring the real estate company with which Raymond had been for some years went out of business, and it became necessary to find him another position. Every one set to work, Beatrice of course the most active of all, and by May he was established in a tobacco company. As soon as this was accomplished, Beatrice went to Washington for a visit of some weeks.
“I'll be back before the tobacco people fail,” she said, with a wan smile. It was the first time John had ever heard her bitter at her husband's expense.
Now that all danger was over, John found he could be a little sorry for her. After all, Barham was a great man, and she a woman capable of appreciating greatness. He smiled almost tenderly at her.
“Regret anything but your good deeds, dear Beatrice,” he said.
“I regret nothing,” she answered. “I acted with my eyes open—deliberately. The only thing that could make me regret would be if I found that I had been wrong in thinking myself necessary. I don't mean, John, that I am glad of Raymond's failures—I'm not; but every incident like this makes me see more and more clearly how right I was to stay. The only thing that would break my heart would be to convince me that Raymond might have made a better life for himself without me—that what I did was useless.”
There seemed no special danger of that. The tobacco people did not fail—never failed, indeed, though Raymond's position there was not brilliant. Everything, however, seemed to be going smoothly enough, and then one night, or rather one morning, a few days before Beatrice's return, John was wakened by the ringing of the telephone beside his bed. He groped for the instrument in the dark, prepared to tell the caller of a wrong number just how the incident affected him, and heard to his surprise that it was Raymond's voice speaking—asking him to come to him at once.
“Are you ill?” asked John.
“I'm half crazy,” answered Raymond.
John dressed rapidly, without fluster, refraining, as his training was, from trying to imagine what could be wrong with his cousin. It was unlike Raymond to make such an inconsiderate request.
John found him wandering about the flat—a long figure in striped pajamas with a cigarette in his hand.
“What's wrong?” said John.
“How would you feel,” answered Raymond, “if you had killed the person you loved best in the world?” John repressed an impulse to say “Not Beatrice?” and the silence was just what was needed. Raymond went on:
“I don't mean with an ax, you know, but I killed her.”
“How?”
“I think I broke her heart,” said Raymond. “I sacrificed her to what I believed was my duty.”
“And wasn't it?” said John, the remark being a question only in form.
“To kill some one as gentle and good as an angel—to tell her you would never see her or speak to her again, when you knew perfectly well... They called it pneumonia, but I know she just didn't want to live. If we'd gone off together, John, it wouldn't have killed Beatrice. Beatrice would have made a new life for herself. She doesn't need me. That's what tortures me so—that I sacrificed Lorna needlessly. What is that about charity? I wonder if some crimes aren't committed in the name of duty, too... And yet,” he continued after a second, striking his clenched fist on the back of a chair, “you can't go to a woman who's done what Beatrice has done to me, stuck to me through thick and thin—mostly pretty thin, I'm afraid—and say, 'Good-by, I've seen some one I love better.' I couldn't do that—and yet I suppose it was weakness—not to do it—weakness for which Lorna paid.”
“Now, look here, Raymond,” said John sternly, “you know perfectly well you did right. In this world we must act on principle, even if now and then the special case works badly.” And he went on to argue, with great justice and clarity, for a moral code as against the individual desires.
But Raymond, like most people in distress, did not want to be enlightened; he wanted only to unload the terrible weight of sorrow upon his heart—to tell John—to tell any one, but John happened to be there—all about Lorna's tenderness and consideration for him; of her generosity toward his established ties; of the way she depended on him, and most surprising, the way that dependence made him strong and almost efficient.
“The strangest thing, John, there never was a cloud between us—or the least misunderstanding or jealousy or sense of coercion. We trusted each other absolutely—and yet I killed her.”
He kept coming back to that as he walked up and down, up and down the narrow space of the flat, passing again and again over the very spot where Barham had stood with his legs straddled and his hands in his pockets telling John his plans for making Raymond make a million.
John could not flatter himself he was of much comfort or help to his cousin except as a human presence was a comfort. Although he was a man dependent on his sleep, and had an important case coming to trial the next day, he stayed on with Raymond until dawn began to light up the windows of the flat—a pale green dawn above the smoky violet haze over Long Island City. John stood at the window looking at it, and Raymond moved about behind him, still ending his sentences in questions and never listening to the answers, so that after a little while John ceased to make them.
“It wasn't that I did not love her enough. I loved her utterly—you understand that, don't you?”
John determined at this point to be heard. “But you love Beatrice too,” he said firmly.
“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Raymond. “Yes, I do love Beatrice, and I'm very grateful to her, but I've become rather doubtful as to whether she has much affection left for me.”
Up to this point in the interview John had been aware that he was nothing but a sounding board—a humiliating position for one whose profession was to give sane and valuable advice. Now for the first time he saw an opportunity to be really helpful. Nothing, he thought, could be as terrible as to think your supreme sacrifice was useless. He could at least save Raymond that agony.
“Beatrice loves you, Raymond,” he said. “I know it.”
Raymond, who thought this merely friendly conviction and was not deeply interested in John's opinion, gave a mild shake of his head, meaning “Well, who can know that?” but John pressed on:
“I know—I have the best of reasons for knowing. She too made a great sacrifice for you—a thing a woman like Beatrice wouldn't have done unless she had loved you—for she is a red-hot individualist, like most women.”
“Oh, she's made lots of sacrifices for me, poor Beatrice!” said her husband.
“You don't understand. Barham wanted her to leave you—wanted her to get a divorce and marry him—was very insistent. She sent for me.”
“To arrange it for them?”
“On the contrary,” John replied, “to explain to Barham as only a third person could why it was that she could never leave you.”
“And what did you explain?” asked Raymond. “That I'd starve if it weren't for my wife?—that seems to be what most of my friends think.”
John did not answer this question directly. “You would not have starved,” he returned, “for Barham's scheme was to make you a rich man first—to engineer a fortune for you without your knowing what he was doing—a clever program, Ray, but Beatrice wouldn't hear of it.”
“A fortune?”
“A million was the figure—but Beatrice would not let you be put in such a position, even though for her it had its charm. Yes, I must admit that, but she refused, because she loved you, Ray. You need not feel that your sacrifice was in vain, because”
“Just when was this?” asked Raymond sharply.
John was able to identify the date, and there was a short silence. It was John's opportunity, and he took it. He said simply and directly that his cousin must not feel regret for one of the noblest acts of his life—for there could not be virtue or honor or law or business or marriage or any organized society unless people were willing to make just such sacrifices as his to a code, to a moral principle; every one of character and worth did it in some form or another; and if these sacrifices did not bring wild happiness, they brought contentment and self-respect and an honorable peace. He had gone on in this vein some time before he became aware that his cousin had at last given up prowling, had sat down and, leaning his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, was sobbing.
John had not been sorry for Beatrice, but his heart ached for Raymond—Raymond being the kind of person for whom your heart did ache. But when he went away through the early sunlight, he felt at peace about his cousin. He had made the right decision—incontrovertibly. John saw Raymond and Beatrice growing old together with rich memories of gratitude and unselfishness to sweeten a companionship which would peacefully fill the void left by their former romantic love. Human relations, he said to himself, were valuable only in proportion to the sacrifices you made for them. Hence, he thought, as he paused to let a Lexington Avenue car roll past in the solitary grandeur of early morning, hence the enormous rewards of maternal affection.
He himself made some sacrifices during the next few days to keep an eye on his cousin—at least until Beatrice's return. It was perhaps a little on their account that he rented a small place near the water with a tennis-court that summer. The Raymond Saunderses had never been able to afford a summer place, but to John's house they could go almost as if it were their own.
They came often and seemed to enjoy it, and yet that summer for the first time John noticed that Beatrice, who had always been so nobly indifferent to her poverty, showed signs of resenting it; she resented always coming by the train when every one else had a motor, or even a motor-boat. She who had always so gayly insisted that New York was the most amusing summer resort in the world began to complain of the heat and the dust and smell.
“You used to like a summer in New York,” said John with that irritation we all feel when our friends lapse from perfect nobility.
“A summer—not all summers,” said Beatrice crossly.
But what worried him even more was that she began to notice and to comment on other women's jewels and clothes and luxuries—not enviously, for Beatrice was too well-bred for that, but it was not difficult for John to guess what she was thinking.
He never knew when it was he began to suspect that she knew about the other girl. He felt convinced she did one day when he was talking to her about conscience and unselfishness and she broke out: “Oh, I'm against unselfishness, John—and I'm against walling up nuns and human sacrifice, too. The gods aren't placated—the nun's soul wasn't saved—useless suffering, John, absolutely useless.”
He examined his conduct to see if he had unconsciously betrayed his cousin's secret. Later he found out that Raymond had told her himself. “I thought it was her right to know, John,” Raymond had said, but John knew this was not the true reason. Raymond's gentle nature had a need for confidence.
“How did Beatrice take it?” John asked.
Raymond shrugged his shoulders. “She was very kind,” he answered. “She did not seem to take very much interest in it.”
Raymond himself was not quite the same. In the old days he had been perfectly content if he felt he was doing his work competently—he was so grateful for holding his job, he never dreamed of complaining of it. Now, though he did not exactly complain, John noticed that every one knew that his hours were long and the work dull and the pay small. The result was that while every one sympathized with him, they began to admit in private that he was a complete failure. “Poor Ray,” they said, “I'm afraid he's pretty hopeless,” which perhaps was just what he was. Certainly the dependence he had always shown now began sometimes to look a little like fear of his wife; and her care of him, which in old times had been at the worst maternal, began to be shot through now and then with flashes of contempt.
John was disappointed, after all the trouble and interest he had taken in their problems, to find they were not quite as splendid as he had thought them. So it was not wholly a surprise to him when, after some years, Aunt Lucy having died and left her savings to Raymond, the first result of the bequest was that he and Beatrice parted.
By this time they were middle-aged people, in the neighborhood of fifty. They did not divorce. Separately they both used the same phrase about that: “What's the use—now?” they said. Beatrice lived entirely abroad, managing her little income so that she could follow the fashionable sequence from St. Moritz to Rome, to Paris, to Biarritz, to Venice. She did not lose her looks; in fact in a way she grew handsomer, better dressed, thinner, sharper as to profile, but with that adamant look which women get who are not obliged to think of anything but their own wishes, unless it is the material means of carrying out those wishes.
Raymond changed less. He remained his sweet gentle self, but he grew a little remote and dreamy, living apparently in a world of his imaginings. He gave up the tobacco business—the first time in all his life that he had left a position by his own choice—for he had enough to live on. He took to buying first editions of rather unimportant American authors, which, he told every one who would listen to him at the club, would be immensely valuable in fifty or sixty years. But as time went on, fewer and fewer of his fellow members were willing to listen.