The Transgression of Andrew Vane: A Novel. Carryl Guy Wetmore

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СКАЧАТЬ unsteady hand, and, as she opened it, the contents leapt at her like a blow:

      "HELEN:"

      "Let me be as brief as you will think me brutal. When this reaches you I shall already be far at sea – with another woman. I have seen how you despised me, and I think that you know this, and that I hate you for it. I shall not ask you to forgive me, for I, too, have many things to forgive. If you had understood me, much that has happened might never have been. But what is past is past. Let us bury it and have done."

"JOHN."

      For minutes, which seemed an eternity, Helen stood, fingering the wretched sheet, and gazing straight before her with blank, unwinking eyes. Then, with a rush, came remembrance, and with it a great wave of relief. Before she fully comprehended her intention, she was at the gate of the cottage. But there she halted, with a nameless sense of loss and desperation. From the distance had come the yelp of a signalled locomotive, and then a dozen short, choking pants, as it dragged the reluctant train into motion. He had gone!

      "But he will come back!" she murmured, "and, that he may come sooner, I will write."

      It was only towards the end of her black, sleepless night that she remembered that she did not even know his name.

      Late autumn slid gloomily into winter, and winter into spring, before she realized that he would never come. To her father she had written nothing of Vane's desertion. For a year past, his name had not been mentioned in their letters, so the omission was no longer noted, and Mr. Sterling's remittances enabled her to live in material comfort. She clung to the forlorn little cottage with a vague feeling that by it alone could she be traced when He should come back for her; but took a servant, a slovenly little wench, who moved in a circumambient odour of carbolic acid, and amassed dust under beds and sofas as a miser hoards his gold.

      Helen herself saw nothing, heeded nothing. Save in the impulse which followed her reading of Vane's letter, her mind was never wholly clear from the shadow which had descended upon it at the moment of that hand-grip on the hillside. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, she sat at the window, motionless, listening for the creak of the gate, the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, which would tell her that He had returned.

      With spring the disillusion came, and she crept back to the shelter of her father's house, but to no change, save slow and listless surrender to the inevitable. Sometimes they heard her whispering to herself, as she sat, with some book which they had brought her, unopened on her knee – odd scraps of sentences, and broken phrases, without apparent relevancy or connection. The family physician, a friend from boyhood of Andrew Sterling, tapped his forehead significantly at such times as these, and the hands of the two men would meet in a grasp of mutual understanding.

      One night in late August her child was born, and the west wind that brought a new soul to the Sterling door, pausing an instant in its passing, gathered up, and in its kind arms bore away, on its pathless flight into the Great Unknown, the tired spirit of Helen Vane.

      CHAPTER I

      MR. CARNBY RECEIVES A LETTER

      Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Carnby furnished to the reflective observer a striking illustration of the circumstance that extremes not only meet, but, not infrequently, marry. Mrs. Carnby confessed to fifty, and was in reality forty-seven. As, in any event, incredulity answers "Never!" when a woman makes mention of her age, she preferred that the adverb should be voiced with flattering emphasis and in her presence, rather than sarcastically and behind her back. She was nothing if not original.

      Mrs. Carnby was distinctly plain, a fact which five minutes of her company effectually deprived of all significance: her power of attraction being as forceful as that of a magnet, and similar to a magnet's in its absence of outward evidence. She was a woman of temperate but kaleidoscopic enthusiasms, who had retained enough of the atmosphere of each to render her interesting to a variety of persons. Prolonged experience of the world had invested her with an admirable broad-mindedness, which caused her to tread the notoriously dangerous paths of the American Colony, in which she was a constant and conspicuous figure, with the assurance of an Indian fakir walking on broken glass – pleasurably appreciative of the risk, that is, while assured by consummate savoir faire against cutting her feet. Her fort was tact. She had at one and the same time a faculty for forgetting confidences which commended her to women, and a knack of remembering them which endeared her to men. It was with the latter that she was preëminently successful. What might have been termed her masculine method was based on the broad, general principle that the adult male is most interested in the persons most interested in him, and it never failed, in its many modifications, of effect. Men told her of their love-affairs, for example, with the same unquestioning assurance wherewith they intrusted their funds to a reputable banker; and were apt to remember the manner in which their confidences were received, longer than the details of the confidences themselves. And when you can listen for an hour, with every evidence of extreme interest, to a man's rhapsodies about another woman, and, at the end, send him away with a distinct recollection of the gown you wore, or the perfume on the handkerchief he picked up for you, then, dear lady, there is nothing more to be said.

      Mr. Jeremy Carnby infrequently accompanied his wife to a reception or a musicale, somewhat as Chinese idols and emperors are occasionally produced in public – as an assurance of good faith, that is, and in proof of actual existence. As it is not good form to flaunt one's marriage certificate in the faces of society, an undeniable, flesh-and-blood husband is, perhaps, the next best thing – when exhibited, of course, with that golden mean of frequency which lies between a hint of henpeck on the one side and a suggestion of neglect upon the other. Mrs. Carnby blazed in the social firmament of the American Colony with the unwavering fixity of the Polar Star: Jeremy appeared rarely, but with extreme regularity, like a comet of wide orbit, as evidence that the marital solar system was working smoothly and well.

      Mrs. Carnby was, and not unreasonably, proud of Jeremy. They had lived twenty-five years in Paris, and, to the best of her knowledge and belief, he was as yet unaware, at least in a sentimental sense, that other women so much as existed. Since one cannot own the Obélisque or the Vénus de Milo, it is assuredly something to have a husband who never turns his head on the Avenue du Bois, or finds a use for an opera-glass at the Folies-Bergère. Jeremy was not amusing, still less brilliant, least of all popular; but he was preëminently loyal and unfeignedly affectionate – qualities sufficiently rare in the world in which Mrs. Carnby lived, and moved, and had the greater portion of her being, to recommend themselves strongly to her shrewd, uncompromising mind. In her somewhat over-furnished life he occupied a distinct niche, which one else could have filled; and in this, to her way of thinking, he was unique – as a husband. After foie gras and champagne, Mrs. Carnby always breakfasted on American hominy, a mealy red apple, and a glass of milk. She was equally careful, however, to take the meal in company with Jeremy. He was part of the treatment.

      The Carnby hôtel was one of the number in the Villa Dupont. One turned in through a narrow gateway, from the sordid dinginess of the Rue Pergolèse, and, at a stone's throw from the latter's pungent cheese and butter shops, and grimy charbonneries, came delightfully into the shade of chestnuts greener than those exposed to the dust of the great avenues, and to the sound of fountains plashing into basins buried in fresh turf. It was very quiet, like some charming little back street at St. Germain or Versailles, and the houses, with their white walls and green shutters and glass-enclosed porticos, were more like country villas than Parisian hôtels. The gay stir of the boulevards and the Avenue du Bois might, to all seeming, have been a hundred kilometres distant, so still and simple was this little corner of the capital. Jeremy frankly adored it. He had a great office looking out upon the Place de l'Opéra, and when he rose from his desk, his head aching with the reports and accounts of the mighty insurance company of which he was the European manager, and went to the window in search of distraction, it was only to have his eyes met by a dizzier hodge-podge than that of the figures he had left – the moil of camions, СКАЧАТЬ