________________________________________________
_ TEN DAYS later, Mr. Sellers, still house-bound, asked Waythorn to
call on his way down town.
The senior partner, with his swaddled foot propped up by the fire,
greeted his associate with an air of embarrassment.
"I'm sorry, my dear fellow; I've got to ask you to do an awkward
thing for me."
Waythorn waited, and the other went on, after a pause apparently
given to the arrangement of his phrases: "The fact is, when I was
knocked out I had just gone into a rather complicated piece of
business for--Gus Varick."
"Well?" said Waythorn, with an attempt to put him at his ease.
"Well--it's this way: Varick came to me the day before my attack. He
had evidently had an inside tip from somebody, and had made about a
hundred thousand. He came to me for advice, and I suggested his
going in with Vanderlyn."
"Oh, the deuce!" Waythorn exclaimed. He saw in a flash what had
happened. The investment was an alluring one, but required
negotiation. He listened intently while Sellers put the case before
him, and, the statement ended, he said: "You think I ought to see
Varick?"
"I'm afraid I can't as yet. The doctor is obdurate. And this thing
can't wait. I hate to ask you, but no one else in the office knows
the ins and outs of it."
Waythorn stood silent. He did not care a farthing for the success of
Varick's venture, but the honor of the office was to be considered,
and he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner.
"Very well," he said, "I'll do it."
That afternoon, apprised by telephone, Varick called at the office.
Waythorn, waiting in his private room, wondered what the others
thought of it. The newspapers, at the time of Mrs. Waythorn's
marriage, had acquainted their readers with every detail of her
previous matrimonial ventures, and Waythorn could fancy the clerks
smiling behind Varick's back as he was ushered in.
Varick bore himself admirably. He was easy without being
undignified, and Waythorn was conscious of cutting a much less
impressive figure. Varick had no head for business, and the talk
prolonged itself for nearly an hour while Waythorn set forth with
scrupulous precision the details of the proposed transaction.
"I'm awfully obliged to you," Varick said as he rose. "The fact is
I'm not used to having much money to look after, and I don't want to
make an ass of myself--" He smiled, and Waythorn could not help
noticing that there was something pleasant about his smile. "It
feels uncommonly queer to have enough cash to pay one's bills. I'd
have sold my soul for it a few years ago!"
Waythorn winced at the allusion. He had heard it rumored that a lack
of funds had been one of the determining causes of the Varick
separation, but it did not occur to him that Varick's words were
intentional. It seemed more likely that the desire to keep clear of
embarrassing topics had fatally drawn him into one. Waythorn did not
wish to be outdone in civility.
"We'll do the best we can for you," he said. "I think this is a good
thing you're in."
"Oh, I'm sure it's immense. It's awfully good of you--" Varick broke
off, embarrassed. "I suppose the thing's settled now--but if--"
"If anything happens before Sellers is about, I'll see you again,"
said Waythorn quietly. He was glad, in the end, to appear the more
self-possessed of the two.
The course of Lily's illness ran smooth, and as the days passed
Waythorn grew used to the idea of Haskett's weekly visit. The first
time the day came round, he stayed out late, and questioned his wife
as to the visit on his return. She replied at once that Haskett had
merely seen the nurse downstairs, as the doctor did not wish any one
in the child's sick-room till after the crisis.
The following week Waythorn was again conscious of the recurrence of
the day, but had forgotten it by the time he came home to dinner.
The crisis of the disease came a few days later, with a rapid
decline of fever, and the little girl was pronounced out of danger.
In the rejoicing which ensued the thought of Haskett passed out of
Waythorn's mind and one afternoon, letting himself into the house
with a latchkey, he went straight to his library without noticing a
shabby hat and umbrella in the hall.
In the library he found a small effaced-looking man with a thinnish
gray beard sitting on the edge of a chair. The stranger might have
been a piano-tuner, or one of those mysteriously efficient persons
who are summoned in emergencies to adjust some detail of the
domestic machinery. He blinked at Waythorn through a pair of
gold-rimmed spectacles and said mildly: "Mr. Waythorn, I presume? I
am Lily's father."
Waythorn flushed. "Oh--" he stammered uncomfortably. He broke off,
disliking to appear rude. Inwardly he was trying to adjust the
actual Haskett to the image of him projected by his wife's
reminiscences. Waythorn had been allowed to infer that Alice's first
husband was a brute.
"I am sorry to intrude," said Haskett, with his over-the-counter
politeness.
"Don't mention it," returned Waythorn, collecting himself. "I
suppose the nurse has been told?"
"I presume so. I can wait," said Haskett. He had a resigned way of
speaking, as though life had worn down his natural powers of
resistance.
Waythorn stood on the threshold, nervously pulling off his gloves.
"I'm sorry you've been detained. I will send for the nurse," he
said; and as he opened the door he added with an effort: "I'm glad
we can give you a good report of Lily." He winced as the _we_
slipped out, but Haskett seemed not to notice it.
"Thank you, Mr. Waythorn. It's been an anxious time for me."
"Ah, well, that's past. Soon she'll be able to go to you." Waythorn
nodded and passed out.
In his own room, he flung himself down with a groan. He hated the
womanish sensibility which made him suffer so acutely from the
grotesque chances of life. He had known when he married that his
wife's former husbands were both living, and that amid the
multiplied contacts of modern existence there were a thousand
chances to one that he would run against one or the other, yet he
found himself as much disturbed by his brief encounter with Haskett
as though the law had not obligingly removed all difficulties in the
way of their meeting.
Waythorn sprang up and began to pace the room nervously. He had not
suffered half so much from his two meetings with Varick. It was
Haskett's presence in his own house that made the situation so
intolerable. He stood still, hearing steps in the passage.
"This way, please," he heard the nurse say. Haskett was being taken
upstairs, then: not a corner of the house but was open to him.
Waythorn dropped into another chair, staring vaguely ahead of him.
On his dressing-table stood a photograph of Alice, taken when he had
first known her. She was Alice Varick then--how fine and exquisite
he had thought her! Those were Varick's pearls about her neck. At
Waythorn's instance they had been returned before her marriage. Had
Haskett ever given her any trinkets--and what had become of them,
Waythorn wondered? He realized suddenly that he knew very little of
Haskett's past or present situation; but from the man's appearance
and manner of speech he could reconstruct with curious precision the
surroundings of Alice's first marriage. And it startled him to think
that she had, in the background of her life, a phase of existence so
different from anything with which he had connected her. Varick,
whatever his faults, was a gentleman, in the conventional,
traditional sense of the term: the sense which at that moment
seemed, oddly enough, to have most meaning to Waythorn. He and
Varick had the same social habits, spoke the same language,
understood the same allusions. But this other man...it was
grotesquely uppermost in Waythorn's mind that Haskett had worn a
made-up tie attached with an elastic. Why should that ridiculous
detail symbolize the whole man? Waythorn was exasperated by his own
paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him,
became as it were the key to Alice's past. He could see her, as Mrs.
Haskett, sitting in a "front parlor" furnished in plush, with a
pianola, and a copy of "Ben Hur" on the centre-table. He could see
her going to the theatre with Haskett--or perhaps even to a "Church
Sociable"--she in a "picture hat" and Haskett in a black frock-coat,
a little creased, with the made-up tie on an elastic. On the way
home they would stop and look at the illuminated shop-windows,
lingering over the photographs of New York actresses. On Sunday
afternoons Haskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of
them in a white enameled perambulator, and Waythorn had a vision of
the people they would stop and talk to. He could fancy how pretty
Alice must have looked, in a dress adroitly constructed from the
hints of a New York fashion-paper; how she must have looked down on
the other women, chafing at her life, and secretly feeling that she
belonged in a bigger place.
For the moment his foremost thought was one of wonder at the way in
which she had shed the phase of existence which her marriage with
Haskett implied. It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, every
inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period
of her life. If she had denied being married to Haskett she could
hardly have stood more convicted of duplicity than in this
obliteration of the self which had been his wife.
Waythorn started up, checking himself in the analysis of her
motives. What right had he to create a fantastic effigy of her and
then pass judgment on it? She had spoken vaguely of her first
marriage as unhappy, had hinted, with becoming reticence, that
Haskett had wrought havoc among her young illusions....It was a
pity for Waythorn's peace of mind that Haskett's very
inoffensiveness shed a new light on the nature of those illusions. A
man would rather think that his wife has been brutalized by her
first husband than that the process has been reversed.
"Why, how do you do?" she said with a distinct note of pleasure _
Read next: CHAPTER IV
Read previous: CHAPTER II
Table of content of Other Two
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
