Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

      “Yes.”

      She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered away from him.

      “You hate me,” broke from him.

      She made no answer.

      “Say you hate me!” he persisted.

      “That would have been so simple,” she answered with a strange smile. She dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead on her hand.

      “Was it much—?” she began at length.

      “Much—?” he returned vaguely.

      “The money.”

      “The money?” That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment he did not follow her thought.

      “It must be paid back,” she insisted. “Can you do it?”

      “Oh, yes,” he returned listlessly. “I can do it.”

      “I would make any sacrifice for that!” she urged.

      He nodded. “Of course.” He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt. “Do you count on its making much difference?”

      “Much difference?”

      “In the way I feel—or you feel about me?”

      She shook her head.

      “It’s the least part of it,” he groaned.

      “It’s the only part we can repair.”

      “Good heavens! If there were any reparation—” He rose quickly and crossed the space that divided them. “Why did you never speak?”

      “Haven’t you answered that yourself?”

      “Answered it?”

      “Just now—when you told me you did it for me.”

      She paused a moment and then went on with a deepening note—“I would have spoken if I could have helped you.”

      “But you must have despised me.”

      “I’ve told you that would have been simpler.”

      “But how could you go on like this—hating the money?”

      “I knew you’d speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I did.”

      He gazed at her with a kind of awe. “You’re wonderful,” he murmured. “But you don’t yet know the depths I’ve reached.”

      She raised an entreating hand. “I don’t want to!”

      “You’re afraid, then, that you’ll hate me?”

      “No—but that you’ll hate me. Let me understand without your telling me.”

      “You can’t. It’s too base. I thought you didn’t care because you loved Flamel.”

      She blushed deeply. “Don’t—don’t—” she warned him.

      “I haven’t the right to, you mean?”

      “I mean that you’ll be sorry.”

      He stood imploringly before her. “I want to say something worse—something more outrageous. If you don’t understand this you’ll be perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house.”

      She answered him with a glance of divination. “I shall understand—but you’ll be sorry.”

      “I must take my chance of that.” He moved away and tossed the books about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. “Does Flamel care for you?” he asked.

      Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. “What would be the use?” she said with a note of sadness.

      “Ah, I didn’t ask that,” he penitently murmured.

      “Well, then—”

      To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense redistribution of meanings.

      “I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”

      He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said with an effort—“Don’t blame him—he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man … a man who was dead…”

      She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.

      “You do despise me!” he insisted.

      “Ah, that poor woman—that poor woman—” he heard her murmur.

      “I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face hidden.

      “You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.

      “Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any check on his gathering purpose.

      “He cared for you—he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told you of the letters—”

      She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you? That —!”

      Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon … like another…”

      “A scoundrel’s!”

      He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”

      “Stephen! Stephen!” she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. “Don’t say such things. I forbid you! It degrades us both.”

      He put her back with trembling hands. “Nothing that I say of myself can degrade you. We’re on different levels.”

      “I’m on yours, wherever it is!”

      He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.

      —————

XIV.

      The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife, was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of a new language; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed grotesque and mean.

      Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which he leaned.

      They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it, to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned shade. If only they might cut a way through the thicket to that restoring spring!

      Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no natural sign is negligeable, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she meant