The Hermit and the Wild Woman

She stood before them in her bright evening dress, with an arrested brilliancy of aspect like the sparkle of a fountain suddenly caught in ice.  Her look moved rapidly from one to the other; then she came forward, while Shackwell slipped behind her to close the door.

“What has happened?” she said.

Shackwell began to speak, but the Governor interposed calmly: 

“Fleetwood has come to tell me that he does not wish to remain in office.”

“Ah!” she murmured.

There was another silence.  Fleetwood broke it by saying:  “It is getting late.  If you want to see me to-morrow—­”

The Governor looked from his face to Ella’s.  “Yes; go now,” he said.

Shackwell moved in Fleetwood’s wake to the door.  Mrs. Mornway stood with her head high, smiling slightly.  She shook hands with each of the men in turn; then she moved toward the sofa and laid aside her shining cloak.  All her gestures were calm and noble, but as she raised her hand to unclasp the cloak her husband uttered a sudden exclamation.

“Where did you get that bracelet?  I don’t remember it.”

“This?” She looked at him with astonishment.  “It belonged to my mother.  I don’t often wear it.”

“Ah—­I shall suspect everything now,” he groaned.

He turned away and flung himself with bowed head in the chair behind his writing-table.  He wanted to collect himself, to question her, to get to the bottom of the hideous abyss over which his imagination hung.  But what was the use?  What did the facts matter?  He had only to put his memories together—­they led him straight to the truth.  Every incident of the day seemed to point a leering finger in the same direction, from Mrs. Nimick’s allusion to the imported damask curtains to Gregg’s confident appeal for rehabilitation.

“If you imagine that my wife distributes patronage—­” he heard himself repeating inanely, and the walls seemed to reverberate with the laughter which his sister and Gregg had suppressed.  He heard Ella rise from the sofa and lifted his head sharply.

“Sit still!” he commanded.  She sank back without speaking, and he hid his face again.  The past months, the past years, were dancing a witches’ dance about him.  He remembered a hundred significant things. . . . Oh, God, he cried to himself, if only she does not lie about it!Suddenly he recalled having pitied Mrs. Nimick because she could not penetrate to the essence of his happiness.  Those were the very words he had used!  He heard himself laugh aloud.  The clock struck—­it went on striking interminably.  At length he heard his wife rise again and say with sudden authority:  “John, you must speak.”

Authority—­she spoke to him with authority!  He laughed again, and through his laugh he heard the senseless rattle of the words, “If you imagine that my wife distributes patronage . . .”

He looked up haggardly and saw her standing before him.  If only she would not lie about it!  He said:  “You see what has happened.”

“I suppose some one has told you about the ‘Spy.’”

“Who told you?  Gregg?” he interposed.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“That was why you wanted—?”

“Why I wanted you to help him?  Yes.”

“Oh, God! . . .  He wouldn’t take money?”

“No, he wouldn’t take money.”

He sat silent, looking at her, noting with a morbid minuteness the exquisite finish of her dress, that finish which seemed so much a part of herself that it had never before struck him as a merely purchasable accessory.  He knew so little what a woman’s dresses cost!  For a moment he lost himself in vague calculations; finally, he said:  “What did you do it for?”

“Do what?”

“Take money from Fleetwood.”

She paused a moment and then said:  “If you will let me explain—­”

And then he saw that, all along, he had thought she would be able to disprove it!  A smothering blackness closed in on him, and he had a physical struggle for breath.  Then he forced himself to his feet and said:  “He was your lover?”

“Oh, no, no, no!” she cried with conviction.  He hardly knew whether the shadow lifted or deepened; the fact that he instantly believed her seemed only to increase his bewilderment.  Presently he found that she was still speaking, and he began to listen to her, catching a phrase now and then through the deafening clamor of his thoughts.

It amounted to this—­that just after her husband’s first election, when Fleetwood’s claims for the Attorney-Generalship were being vainly pressed by a group of his political backers, Mrs. Mornway had chanced to sit next to him once or twice at dinner.  One day, on the strength of these meetings, he had called and asked her frankly if she would not help him with her husband.  He had made a clean breast of his past, but had said that, under a man like Mornway, he felt he could wipe out his political sins and purify himself while he served the party.  She knew the party needed his brains, and she believed in him—­she was sure he would keep his word.  She would have spoken in his favor in any case—­she would have used all her influence to overcome her husband’s prejudice—­and it was by a mere accident that, in the course of one of their talks, he happened to give her a “tip” (his past connections were still useful for such purposes), a “tip” which, in the first invading pressure of debt after Mornway’s election, she had not had the courage to refuse.  Fleetwood had made some money for her—­yes, about thirty thousand dollars.  She had repaid what he had lent her, and there had been no further transactions of the kind between them.  But it appeared that Gregg, before his dismissal, had got hold of an old check-book which gave a hint of the story, and had pieced the rest together with the help of a clerk in Fleetwood’s office.  The “Spy” was in possession of the facts, but did not mean to use them if Fleetwood was not reappointed, the Lead Trust having no personal grudge against Mornway.

Her story ended there, and she sat silent while he continued to look at her.  So much had perished in the wreck of his faith that he did not attach much value to what remained.  It scarcely mattered that he believed her when the truth was so sordid.  There had been, after all, nothing to envy him for but what Mrs. Nimick had seen; the core of his life was as mean and miserable as his sister’s. . . .

His wife rose at length, pale but still calm.  She had a kind of external dignity which she wore like one of her rich dresses.  It seemed as little a part of her now as the finery of which his gaze contemptuously reckoned the cost.

“John—­” she said, laying her hand on his shoulder.

He looked up wearily.  “You had better go to bed,” he interjected.

“Don’t look at me in that way.  I am prepared for your being angry with me—­I made a dreadful mistake and must bear my punishment:  any punishment you choose to inflict.  But you must think of yourself first—­you must spare yourself.  Why should you be so horribly unhappy?  Don’t you see that since Mr. Fleetwood has behaved so well we are quite safe?  And I swear to you I have paid back every penny of the money.”