The Touchstone Part 10

Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. "On the ground that you sold Mrs.

Aubyn's letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is ent.i.tled to a percentage on the sale."

Flamel paused before answering. "You find, you say. It's a recent discovery?"

"Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I'm new to the business."

"And since when have you discovered that there was any question of business, as far as I was concerned?"

Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. "Are you reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?"

Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice, rejoined, good-humoredly, "Upon my soul, I don't understand you!"

The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. "It's simple enough--"

he muttered.

"Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly service?

I don't know what your other friends expect!"

"Some of my friends wouldn't have undertaken the job. Those who would have done so would probably have expected to be paid."

He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other.

Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate note. "If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I've never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publis.h.i.+ng the letters."

"That's just it!"

"What--?"

"The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man's got stolen goods to p.a.w.n he doesn't take them to the police-station."

"Stolen?" Flamel echoed. "The letters were stolen?"

Glennard burst into a coa.r.s.e laugh. "How much longer to you expect me to keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were written to me."

Flamel looked at him in silence. "Were they?" he said at length. "I didn't know it."

"And didn't suspect it, I suppose," Glennard sneered.

The other was again silent; then he said, "I may remind you that, supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the originals."

"What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It's the kind of thing one can easily do."

Flamel glanced at him with contempt. "Our ideas probably differ as to what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me."

Glennard's anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought.

"It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES know about the letters--has known for some months...."

"Ah," said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel's muscles were under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to speak.

"If she knows, it's not through me." It was what Glennard had waited for.

"Through you, by G.o.d? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed of my actions? I didn't suppose even such egregious conceit as yours could delude a man to that degree!" Struggling for a foothold in the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, "My wife learned the facts from me."

Flamel received this in silence. The other's outbreak seemed to have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a deliberation implying that his course was chosen. "In that case I understand still less--"

"Still less--?"

"The meaning of this." He pointed to the check. "When you began to speak I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was intended as a random insult. In either case, here's my answer."

He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.

Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his self-respect by the simple expedient of a.s.sailing Flamel's, the result had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a pa.s.sionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel's unwillingness to quarrel with him was the last stage of his abas.e.m.e.nt.

In the light of this final humiliation his a.s.sumption of his wife's indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a fact.i.tious world wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.

It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis.

He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his vision, she had once more become the central point of consciousness.

XIII

It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have missed the purport of the doc.u.ment he had put in her way. What if, in her hurried inspection of the papers, she had pa.s.sed it over as related to the private business of some client? What, for instance, was to prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown person who had sold the "Aubyn Letters." The subject was one not likely to fix her attention--she was not a curious woman.

Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel's company; the att.i.tude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough, after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone else.

As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant anger. His sentiments had lost all their fact.i.tious complexity. He had already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and she had pa.s.sed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as incommunicably apart as though the trans.m.u.tation had never taken place.

Every other pa.s.sion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love pa.s.sed like the flight of a s.h.i.+p across the waters.

She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the mantel.

Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.

He moved across the room and stood before her.

"There's something that I want to say to you," he began in a low tone.

She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her ironically.

"I've never prevented your seeing your friends here," he broke out. "Why do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so cheap--"

She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive," he went on, the utterance of the charge reviving his anger.

"Ah," she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.