Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/566

520 denia. He took it out. It had been all the evening in Delevan's coat—now she saw it in her husband's hands.

"Who is going down to Georgia with you?"

She named a number of her friends—and not Delevan; as she mentioned each person she promised herself, "I will put him next,"—finally, "I will put him last!" At the end she had suppressed his name. She finished, "You really think you can't get away?"

"No; but I'll come after you if I can."

"Do!" She dropped her cloak, threw it over her arm. As she was now, Delevan had seen her and thought, "She is the handsomest woman in New York." Amory, "The most beautiful in the world." In a voice husky with feeling, he said:

"Speaking of getting away, Edith, I thought—that perhaps—in the spring, at Easter, when the rush is over we might run out to Chicago together. There's a little farm near town, a pretty little place where I was a boy; it's an awfully pretty country, and I thought you would like to see it with me; there are some stunning wheat-fields"

Just what unfortunate spirit bewitched the poor fellow to offer this sylvan proposition to his wife at this hour, who can say? He bent his eager eyes on hers as he stood twisting Delevan's gardenia in his nervous hands.

She exclaimed, impatiently, "What do you crush the poor flower for? Give it to me," and took it from him.

She could fancy Delevan's smile when she should tell him of her husband's proposition. "A farm in Illinois!" She would never tell him.

Perhaps she wanted to go. Perhaps she wanted Amory to tell her now, to forbid her to go to Georgia. She replied, however:

"I can't imagine anything more awful than the West. You know I hate it! I hate long overland travel. We'll see when the spring comes. Good night." She stretched out her hand. "Don't sit up any longer; you are completely worn out."

If he had thought to put his arms about her, to evince the emotion shaking him, her words and tone froze him to ice. After she had shut the door behind her, he remained standing as she left him. Why was he such a coward and fool? Was he a man and did not claim his wife? He smiled bitterly. Claim? Why, he had bought her. Between them was alone the bond of money—how frail it was growing! How insecure! Tears sprang to his eyes—he dashed them away with an imprecation, crumpled the scribbled papers on his desk, threw them into the waste-basket, and went out of the room.

Mrs. Callender appears to have been created before the days which blandly deny the existence of Conscience. The savans who have convinced a portion of the reasoning world that the old-fashioned faculty is purely an idea and has no existence would have failed to convince a certain woman in her library at Belmont on this particular afternoon that she had no conscience!

The room where, alone for the first time in hours, she permitted the assailing voice of her inner self to be heard was full to her still of the personality of the man who was making it hard for her to live her life according to laws she had sworn to obey. Not half an hour before, she had made him go, forced him to leave her. Her cheeks scarlet, her eyes brilliant, she walked aimlessly to and fro in the little room that with maddening fidelity held his presence.

Amory had haunted these weeks at Belmont. His face, haggard and strained, as she saw it last, the night before she left New York, came persistently before her, and she reluctantly read a misery which she knew must have existed for a long time—the vision was pregnant with appeal. As she remembered that there remained another week of her planned stay, of a sudden it seemed to her as though never in the world could she live it through! She would go—now—at once! A wave of fear and dread, a singular horror, flashed over her—not for herself, not regret or hesitation as to her own conduct, but a terror of something unknown, a feeling of predestined, impending evil She must go home!

She rang the bell and said to her maid who appeared:

"Pack my things; get ready yourself; we will take the half-past seven train