Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/568

522 for New York. Order a carriage from the club. I will dress, and have something to eat in my room on a tray."

She would call up Delevan and tell him she had been telegraphed for—to New York No it was better to go without explanation. He would then understand What did she wish him to understand? She had not made up her mind.

A hurricane blew the rain and sleet into the faces of those who were so unlucky as to find themselves on foot this night of January. In the fierce midwinter fury Callender walked up-town from Wall Street. Every man abroad went more slowly against the storm than this hurrying figure, chased, hunted, hounded through the streets to a self-appointed destiny.

He was ruined.

Stinging, cutting winds whipped the fact in his face. The laboring cables swayed it out to him. The dreary history, like that of thousands of failures, was his own—his own tragedy: he was ruined.

But what it meant of embarrassment, anxiety, humiliation (for it is only the rich qui ont toujours raison), the difficulty at his age of starting again, with heavy liabilities back of him, what it represented to him as a man of affairs, would not have sapped his courage and the life out of him: it was the dishonor of poverty, the news of a wretched failure that he was to bring to the woman he adored, that Amory could not brook. Chagrin and misery were deepened and accentuated by a more terrible thing. Not only had he been unable to keep his money, but he had not been able to keep his wife, despite the sacrifice. She loved Delevan, so he believed, and Delevan was rich—very rich, indeed. A paragraph in a society paper during these weeks of her absence at Belmont had stung his eyes to tears as he read it in his office. Yet he had not once for a second doubted her. It was incompatible with his nature. There was for him but one last thing to do for Edith—leave her free. Failures such as his had driven men violently out of life before this, and there was no reason why any other importance than that of his finances should attach itself to his act.

As he let himself noiselessly into his house the atmosphere of the hall bathed him with delicious warmth—a hospitable cloak flung around his shivering figure. Torn by anguish and despair, his body at the point of dissolution, life behind him and eternity at his lips, he was keyed to a tension at whose pitch unimportant things and details make strong impressions. He remarked the carpet's varied color, and how softly yielding it was; and as he crept up-stairs the odor of flowers, the fragrance of burning wood from the drawing-room fires, filled the upper halls. He seemed to haunt his own home—a spectre as he slipped along. He got as far as the drawing-rooms, and there the thick substance of the curtains fell before him in a crimson, deadening wall. Behind these was the infernal sound—the sound he knew so well, the haunting horror: the murmur of two voices, his wife's and Delevan's. He stopped stock-still. Impossible! He was quite mad! This proved it. His wife was in Belmont: she would not return till the news of his death should bring her home in haste. He listened, moistening his parched lips. No, he was quite sane. They were there together—together again—after all these weeks together—and on the first day of her return!

With an imprecation he put his hands on the curtains as though to tear them violently apart, and so stood for a half-second, and then he let the draperies fall and went on to his own room.

Over his shaving-stand the light was pulled down: everything was prepared for his toilet; on the bed his evening clothes were laid out, and in the dressing-room beyond, the water had been running for his bath. The envelope of home and its ease and comfort, the good of the land of the living—all were about him in inanimate shapes. These he had bought with money which had cost his very body and soul. He had been able to purchase nothing else. There was no child to hold him back now from his end—no woman whom his passing would leave desolate.

The water from his soaked clothes ran in little pools on the floor where he stepped; the carpet was wet and muddy. He still wore his dripping hat, which he