The Letter of the Contract Part 18

He rose on saying this, apparently with the intention of going back to the hotel. Chip remained seated. He smoked mechanically, without knowing what he did. Questions rose to his lips and died there. Was Edith in Berne? Had she seen him? Was she keeping out of his way? Was she being kept out of his way? Was she suffering? Was it through her that he had been recognized? The fact that he _had_ been recognized brought with it a kind of humiliation. The humiliation was the greater because of the way in which he had singled out this man and approached him. During all those days of studying the stranger with respectful discretion, seeking an opportunity to address him, the stranger, without deigning him a look, had known perfectly well who he was and had been imputing motives to his presence. The reference to the long arm of coincidence was stinging. Because it was so he tried to muster his dignity.

"I've no intention of hurrying away," he began; "but--"

"If you like, I'll put it this way," the measured voice broke in, courteously. "If you have time to wait a little longer I should be glad if you'd do it."

"Would there be any point to that?"

"I think you might trust me not to make the request if there were not."

He added presently: "It's a wise policy to let sleeping dogs lie; but when they've once been roused, they've got to be quieted."

"Quieted--how?"

"I can't tell you that as yet. I may have some vague idea concerning the process; I've none at all as to the result."

Chip was not sure that the stranger said good night. He knew he lifted his hat and moved away. He watched him as, with stately, unhastening step, he walked down the promenade, the Inverness cape and soft felt hat silhouetted in the moonlight.

For the next forty-eight hours Walker hung about the hotel like a culprit. He would have sacrificed even a glimpse of Edith to feel free to go away. He couldn't go away while the other man's plans remained enigmatical; but he wished he hadn't come. He felt his position undignified, grotesque, like that of a boy detected in some bit of silly daring.

Two days later they met again on the terrace of the Kleine Schanze. It was not an accidental meeting. The stranger had walked directly up to Chip to say:

"The lady to whom we were referring the other night--"

But Chip was still on his guard. "Did I refer to a lady?"

"Perhaps not. But I did. And that lady is ill. You may be interested to know it. She was ill when she arrived in Paris from London ten days ago."

"Then she's here."

"She's here. That's why I'm taking your time in asking you to remain."

Chip forced the next question with some difficulty: "Does she--does she want to--to see me?"

"She hasn't said so."

"Has she--said anything about me at all?"

"That, I think, I must leave you to learn later. But I should like you to know at once that I'm not keeping you here without a motive."

The stately figure moved on, leaving Chip to guess blindly at the possibilities in store.

More days pa.s.sed--nearly a week. Chip spent much of his time in the Kleine Schanze, noticing that the distinguished stranger frequented it less. Idleness would have got on his nerves, and Berne begun to bore him, had it not been for the knowledge that he was under the same roof with Edith. That gave him patience. It was the kind of comfort a man or a woman finds in being near the prison where some loved one is shut up in a cell.

It was again an afternoon when the s.h.i.+ning spiritual presences were making themselves visible--not with the gleaming suddenness with which they had appeared ten days before, but slowly, with vague wonders, as if finding it hard to bring themselves within mortal ken. Rounding the corner of the promenade at the end remote from the hotel, at a point from which he had the whole line of the bluff and the green depths of the valley and the slopes of the Gurten and the curtain of Alpine mist in one superb _coup d'oeil_, Chip saw a great white shoulder baring itself luminously in the eastern sky. For long minutes that was all. It might have been one of the gates of pearl of which he had heard tell.

It was the sort of thing from which no earth-dweller could take his eyes. He stood leaning on his stick, his cigar smoldering in his left hand. He couldn't see that the clouds lifted or that the mists rolled away; he only grew aware that what seemed like a gate became a bastion, and what seemed like a bastion rose into a tower, and that out of the tower and in the midst of the tower and round about the tower white pinnacles glistened in white air. Nothing had happened that he could define, beyond a heightening of his own capacity to see. Nothing on that horizon seemed to emerge or to recede: looking wrought the wonder; he either saw or he didn't see; and just now he saw. He thought of something he had heard or read--he had forgotten where: "Immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales." That, apparently, was the process, while the spiritual presences ranged themselves slowly within his vision--row upon row, peak upon peak, dome upon dome, serried, ghostly--white against a white sky, white in white air.

He withdrew his gaze only because the people, ever eager for this spectacle which they had seen all their lives, crowded to the parapet.

As the children were still in school, it was a quiet throng, elderly and sedate. Leaning on the bal.u.s.trade, all faces turned one way, they fringed the promenade, leaving the broad, paved s.p.a.ces empty.

For this reason Chip's eye caught the more quickly at the other end of the terrace the figures of a man and a woman who stood back from the line of gazers. They were almost in profile toward himself, the man's erect, stately form allowing the fact that a woman was clinging to his arm to be just perceptible. It required no such movement as that of a few minutes later--a movement by which the woman came more fully into view--for Chip to recognize Edith.

_His_ Edith, _his wife_, clinging to another man's arm, clinging to her husband's arm, clinging to the arm of a husband who was not himself, dependent on him, supported by him, possessed by him, coming and going with him, living and eating with him, bearing him children, sharing with him whatever was most intimate, directed by him and dominated by him!--yet, all the while, in everything that could make two beings one except that stroke of the pen called law, _his wife_!

How had it come about? What had he done, what had she done, to make this hideous topsyturvydom a fact? He put his hand to his forehead like a man dazed; but he withdrew it quickly. His forehead was wet and clammy. He was shaken, transpierced. He saw now that, in all the three years since he had heard she was married, he hadn't really known it. Perhaps it was his imagination that was at fault--perhaps his incapacity for believing what wasn't under his very eyes--perhaps his own success in keeping the dreadful fact at a distance--_but he hadn't really known it_. Nothing could have brought it home to him like this--this glimpse of her intimate a.s.sociation with the other man, and her dependence upon him.

His first impulse was to get out of their sight, to hide, to find some place where he could grasp the appalling fact in silence and seclusion.

Second thoughts reminded him that there was a situation to be faced and that he might as well face it now as at any other time. What sort of situation it would be he couldn't guess; but he was sure that behind the immobile mask of the other man's grave face there was something that would be worth the penetration. He would give him a chance. He would go forward to meet them. No, he wouldn't go forward to meet them; he would wait for them where he stood. No, he wouldn't wait for them where he stood; he would slip into the little rotunda close beside him--a little rotunda generally occupied by motherly Bernese women, but which for the moment the commanding spectacle outside had emptied.

It was a little open rotunda, with seats all round and a rude table in the middle. In sitting down he placed himself as nearly as possible in full view, but with his face toward the mountains. It gave him a preoccupied air to be seen relighting his cigar. It was thus optional with the couple who began to advance along the promenade to pa.s.s him by or to pause and address him.

Nothing but a shadow warned him of their approach.

"Chip--"

He turned. Edith was standing in the doorway, the man behind her. The haggard pallor of her face and the feverishness of her eyes reminded Chip of the morning little Tom was born. He was on his feet--silent. He couldn't even breathe her name. It was the less necessary since she herself hastened to speak:

"Chip, Mr. Lacon knows we met in England. I told him as soon as I reached Paris; I didn't want him not to know. And now he wants us all to meet--I don't know why."

Since he had to say something, he uttered the first words that came to him: "Was there any harm in it--our meeting? Mr. Lacon knows we have children--and things to talk over."

"Oh, it isn't only that," she said, excitedly. "It's more. I don't know what--but I know it's more."

He looked puzzled. "More in what way?"

"More in this way," said the measured voice, that had lost no shade of its self-control. "I understand that Edith feels she has made a mistake--that you've both made a mistake--"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Edith was standing in the doorway, the man behind her.

"Chip, Mr. Lacon knows we met in England."]

"I never said so," she interrupted, hurriedly.

Lacon smiled, as nearly as his saddened face could smile. "I didn't say you said so," he corrected, gently. "I said I understood. There's a difference. And, since I do understand, I feel it right to offer you--to offer you both--"

Exhaustion compelled her to drop into a seat. "What are you going to say?"

"Nothing that can hurt you, I hope--or--or Mr. Walker, either. Suppose we all sit down?"

He followed his own suggestion with a dignity almost serene. Chip took mechanically the seat from which he had just risen. It offered him the resource of looking more directly at the range of glistening peaks than at either of his two companions.

"The point for our consideration is this," Lacon resumed, as calmly as if he were taking part in a meeting at the Bundespalast. "Admitting that you've both made a mistake, is there any possibility of retracing your steps?--or must you go on paying the penalty?"

Chip spoke without turning his eyes from the mountains: "What do you mean by--the penalty?"

"I suppose I mean the necessity of making four people unhappy instead of two."

"That is," Chip went on, "there are two who must be unhappy in any case."

"Precisely. There are two for whom there's _no_ escape. Whatever happens now, nothing can save _them_. But, since that is so, the question arises whether it wouldn't be, let us say, a greater economy of human material if the other two--"