XI THE TOAD AND THE JEWEL

I didn’t exactly want to go; but there are cowardices for which there is no excuse. If I had come back to America, I must face America; and Joan Delabere was the thing in America supremely to be faced. I should have been showing my heels to the whole adventure if I had turned my back on her. I hadn’t seen her since the accident and the two—or was it three?—operations that followed. I had been away for four years, and not from one person had I had one vital fact about Joan. There were letters from the whole group—letters that skimmed the subject and took everything for granted. If I asked them plainly and directly for news of Joan Delabere, I got no answer; my question was flung silently back on my hands. And yet there must be news, I had always reasoned. A hideous thing like that didn’t happen to a creature like that, without results. If she had been completely done for, stricken into nullity, why did they mention her at all? If she had managed to be exquisite among the ruins of her life, why didn’t they sound the tabret in her honor? There was a conspiracy among them all not to answer the great, inevitable query: How, on the whole, has she made it out with life? Beautiful; adoring her husband and adored by him; waiting, almost like the slim girl in an old Annunciation, for her child—that blow could not have found a prettier mark than Joan Delabere. More than once, before I finally took my way to Joan’s own house, I recalled the fabulous toad with a jewel in its forehead; the toad that may, if one will, symbolize disaster. In what guise would disaster have come to her? Would it bear the jewel in its forehead, or should I see, on Joan Delabere’s threshold, only the squat batrachian figure unadorned?

The house was large and cool and empty; full of light, with pale vistas stretching everywhere. It was airy and soundless, like a palace kept in order but uninhabited. Joan had arranged it originally, I suspected, for a background to her own ambient vividness. The high walls and the polished floors called, like a stage, for moving human color. Joan would have been color enough; but now, in their purposeless state, they seemed more uncannily irrelevant than the shrouded and darkened chambers of a house before a funeral. The master, too, was absent—abroad, as I had learned in New York—and there was nothing anywhere that suggested male ownership or habitation. The rooms had evidently once been Joan’s; and since then had been no one’s.

It was half an hour before I was led up-stairs by a pale, cheerful nurse, and shown into a sunny sitting-room; panelled, floored, and ceiled in pale, polished woods, adorned with carved Eastern furniture. It was like Joan, I thought as I stood on the threshold, to change her æsthetic mood so completely on the second floor: down-stairs, the French perfections; here, this carved casket of a room. Then I saw her.

She lay on a broad chaise-longue, propped into a strange position with white silk cushions of every size and shape. She wore—if the word does not belie the shapelessness of her wrappings—a thin gown of apricot-colored stuff, frilled and pleated, ruffled and tucked into exceeding elaboration; and over her whole form—face, feet, and body—was thrown a sheer veil of white tulle. Through it, very vaguely, I could see her moving eyes; and at one side a white hand crumpled the soft folds. The eyes and the hand were all I could see of Joan Delabere; for the shapeless shape, in its yards of apricot chiffon, might have been anybody—or anything.

The hand disengaged itself and met mine—neither limply nor feverishly; a mere conventional clasp. For very awkwardness, I could not kiss her.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting. It takes them a long time to move me; and if I am moved beforehand, I have just so much less time to stay here. I wanted a good talk—I want to hear all about Europe.”

I sighed a little with relief. The voice, at least, was all right; fresh and healthy, though Joan’s old musical modulations seemed to have gone. I was soothed by it; it was recognizable, it made a frail bridge to the past. But it was hard to know what to say. I had intended to begin with something banal about her looking well. The veil somehow made it very difficult to say anything.

“Oh, Europe is always the same.” Joan Delabere and I, for talk, had come to this!

“Nonsense! Europe’s never the same two days running. That’s why I keep Tony over there so much.” There was a touch of the old imperiousness in her impatience.

I was tongue-tied. The vision must be worse than I had dreamed, since it could affect me so: that was the curious inverted path my reasoning took. The form on the chaise-longue stirred ever so slightly; there was the faintest perceptible movement in my direction of that mass of chiffon and lace; the head was turned to me beneath the veil. I felt the hand tighten on mine, and I looked down at it, fastening my corporeal gaze on that one member of familiar flesh.

“I have very little pain, you know, Garda. I’m just rather useless.” Her voice struck one or two of the crisp, sweet notes one had always stopped to listen to.

“Thank heaven for that, my dear! You see—oh, Joan, you see no one has ever told me anything I wanted to know! And until now, I couldn’t come.”

I felt the eyes roving over my lustreless crêpe dress, my long black veil.

“Your poor brother has died?”

“Yes, only two months since. I was with him to the last.”

“Lucky you—to be able to do things for him. Was it a bad illness?”

“Very bad, Joan. Day and night, for—well, you may call it years.”

“Oh, you lucky thing!”

It was the very tone with which, of old, she would have congratulated me on a heap of cotillion favors. I did not, just at once, see why. But I would give her no inkling of poor Philip’s bodily and mental decay—pile horrors on that veiled creature. If she thought me lucky, whether for Phil’s having lived or for his having died, let her think me so. It was luck enough for any human creature not to be Joan Delabere. Perhaps that was all she meant.

“No one is wholly lucky, Joan. But I do feel lucky, in spite of everything, just to see you again and hear your voice. It has been so long.”

“Ye-es. We’ll let it go at the voice for a little while, Garda, if you don’t mind. I’ll unveil before you go. I’m what you call—disfigured, you know.”

Joan was not making it easy for me; but the mere fact that she was not trying to helped me a little. I had known that she would not be lachrymose—imagine Joan lachrymose!—but I had been afraid that she would try to spare me things, and that I should break down under her futile efforts. It is a terrible thing when the weak and luckless play at ministering to one—worse when they seem to succeed. Joan had been very dear to me ever since we climbed the trees of the old orchard below the fish-pond ... and the staircase was near, and the car waiting. We would be magnificent together—or I would run. There need be no miserable compromise. I grew stronger moment by moment.

“Do as you like—you Eastern lady in an Eastern room. But I’m not afraid of anything—of anything, you understand.” I forced myself to seek the brilliant brown eyes beneath the veil.

Joan patted my hand. “Dear old Garda! I really believe you aren’t. But I’ll lead you down from giro to giro neatly, Virgil-fashion, if you don’t mind. I know a little better than you all about it. I’ve never shrunk from mirrors.” She drew her hand under the veil.

“It’s a charming hand, Joan. You needn’t pull it away.”

Immediately she laid it on the cushion beside her. “Yes, it’s a good hand. But useless—oh, how useless!... So you like my room?”

“Yes. It’s odd, and, decoratively speaking, has no place in the house; but I like it. It’s a wonder the architect let you do it. Of course it swears absolutely at the rest.”

“It’s lucky I got my way. I had it done last year. Imagine me down-stairs among the various French periods! Every chair in the drawing-rooms would know that I belonged in a convent. But this is Eastern and timeless. ‘Eastern and timeless’,” she repeated; “it just suits me. For any sense of company, I have to go to the zenana. If I’m like anything human, I’m like the first wife of a Rajput. I just might be that, you know. And it is excellent to feel oneself human, on any terms—to fall in with some type, no matter what. One comes to seem so outside of it all.”

She crossed her arms above her head—so familiar a gesture!—and the wide veil rippled like a wave and fell into new folds.

“This is what I have been waiting for, all this time: some one I could really talk to. Except when Tony is at home, there is no one; and there are so many things I can’t say to Tony—God bless him!—that it’s rather a relief to have him on the other side. We must have a long gossip, you and I. I can say anything to you, because you’re not involved.”

“How do you manage to get rid of Tony so much?” True, cataclysmic things had happened since I had seen Joan and Tony Delabere plight their troth before the dim high altar of Saint Jude’s; but it had been a real love, I fancied.

“I make Miss Stanley write and engage his passage. I make his man pack his things. I hold out the ticket to him; and then I give him a commission—something I am languishing for, that can’t be got this side of Paris or Rome or Constantinople. It takes a deal of thinking, for there’s not much you can’t get in New York, as we all know. But I am hoping to discover something yet that he’ll have to fetch in person from New Zealand—unless by that time his philosophy is as ripe as mine. He takes managing, Tony does.”

“Isn’t it a little unkind, Joan?”

“Well, of course”—her tones were growing more and more familiar—“it’s a pretty weak bluff to chuck; but Tony is too well-bred to question me. He sees I want him to go; and we play the game out, every time, very prettily. It’s a great strain on us both—there’s the truth. And Tony goes; and one of my sisters comes to stay with me, and I pack her off as soon as he has sailed. Miss Stanley’s worth all my family to me, and more. Imagine them, Garda, snuffling in their lace handkerchiefs! They do it by the hour—and whisper outside the door, and then come in with a smile that apparently aches. They don’t ask me to take off my veil. I do it in spite of them. Oh yes, I pack them off as soon as I get Tony’s first wireless. Tony used to come back always on the next steamer—‘sick for the leash,’ he would say; but now his excuses are nearly as transparent as mine. One day there’ll be no more excuses—naked truth between us, and then my blessed brain can go to sleep, as all my senses have done.” She broke off suddenly, and reached for the enamelled bell-handle beside. “Please, Miss Stanley, tell Myra we are ready for tea.” The cheerful nurse rearranged half a dozen cushions deftly, in accordance with some mysterious law, and went out, smiling. “A nice woman, that,” murmured Joan. “Treats me as if I had a mild case of grippe; has been doing it for four years. Treats me also as if all normal beings had atrophy of the emotions. A very nice woman.”

I laughed. Joan was so like herself that I had only to turn my eyes away from her to forget. But as I poised the teapot, my hand trembled a little. I realized that, to eat or drink, Joan would have to strip her face of the concealing veil. “None for me,” she said; and, looking down again, I saw that there was only one cup. My strength returned to me in a shamefaced flood. I would rather have broken something than have been so relieved.

“I eat queer nursery things at queer nursery times, and, I’m afraid, in queer nursery fashion.” She spoke quite simply. Nothing that she had said before had focussed light on so many elements of her frustration as did, by sheer trickery of phrase, that little speech. Poor Joan! It was not only one life, not even only two, but three that fate had reached by that “accident.” But her voice had not faltered; it had not even been carefully controlled; it had been colorless.

I drank some tea in silence. I ate one after the other, three infinitesimal cakes. In such trivial fashion I braced myself. Joan watched me, and waited—but not, I felt sure, to brace herself. She was giving me time. Joan Delabere was wonderful. In her place—I suddenly felt it as I watched the mockery of good cheer, the Sèvres and silver, carried out of the door—I would have opened my lips to taste only one thing....

“Yes; but you see, Garda, I can’t get it.” It was Joan’s voice, sounding very clear, as the footsteps of the maid, beyond the closed door, went down the hall.

I started. Witchlike, to an unloving eye, in all that formless drapery, she would from the first have seemed; now, in that bit of divination, she seemed witchlike to me. But Joan laughed.

“It’s what you all think of, sooner or later. You were bound to think of it sooner than some—and later than others. You thought of it, my dear Garda, at just about the right time. Sooner would have proved you hard; later would have proved you dull. I’m glad you’re neither; I’m still more glad you’re here.”

I bit my lip. The situation was, as always, Joan’s very own. Her luck could be maimed in every way but that.

“I was much too canny to ask for it explicitly, ever; but I’ve tried every indirect way that I could think of. No use: they have me utterly in their power; and they’ll give me every gift but poison. I’ve stopped thinking about it, even—that way lies madness. But you couldn’t help thinking of it—once. I used to hope the ether would play me tricks; but you have thought it was ‘my sister, Water,’ it was so loyal to my poor old heart. No, Garda; there is no discharge in this war. And that is the whole point. It is just there that Tony comes in to complicate a situation that without him would have the simplicity of hell.”

There was a long pause. She went on, half dreamily, yet always with that crispness in her voice which of old had given her lightest speech factitious weight.

“Did it ever occur to you that the only argument against purgatory is the complexity of it—that to keep purgatory going for all those millions would tax even the wits of Omniscience? Prison is organized, at least; but imagine being probation officer for all the sons of Adam! No, I’m not irreverent; but, as I said, I’ve only a brain left, and sometimes it whirls.”

Well, I had wanted to have, at any cost, vital talk with Joan Delabere, and I was to get it. It was clear to me, from the rapidity with which we had come to the core of the matter, that Joan had not intended, from the first, to waste time.

Again, as if in answer to the unspoken, she took up the thread of my thought.

“You see, they don’t allow me in here too long at a time. Miss Stanley will come at any minute to say I must be moved back. I don’t let any one see me in my bedroom except Tony—and for days together not even him. There are sickening paraphernalia there—I have to be propped in all sorts of queer ways. Not that they hope for anything better, but I will say they work like nailers to make me as comfortable as they can. And I am comfortable, you know, most of the time; only it takes queer things to make me so. Now, I rather fancy myself here. I feel like Madame Récamier—but much more like that faded Rajput queen. Smell the sandalwood, Garda! I love it. It’s my ‘ounce of civet, to sweeten my imagination.’ I tremble to think what Tony’s ounce of civet may be.”

I laid my hand on her arm gently, almost fearfully. “Don’t run on like that, Joan. It’s humiliating to have you trying to distract me. There’s nothing I can’t stand. Out with it!”

She clasped her hands on her breast. “I could go on ‘like that’ endlessly with no effort, I assure you. But I’m glad you’re game, for I haven’t overmuch time, as I said, and you may not come back.”

“Indeed I shall come back!” I cried.

“Well—I hope so; but you may not, all the same. I shan’t be hurt, because nothing hurts me any more. If things hurt me, I should be dead. There isn’t a thing in the world that could shock or wound me. Inaction has brought its anodyne. You can’t lie like a log for four years, with a veil between you and the world, and still care, you know. There’s only one thing I want; and I sometimes think it’s only for the honor of my five wits that I want that. See if you can help me.”

“What is it you want, Joan?”

“I want a way out for Tony.” She was silent for a moment, and we faced each other—lucidly and intimately, for all the veil between. I did not want to enter the labyrinth, but I could not step back and still be loyal.

“‘A way out for Tony.’” I repeated it mechanically while I searched the phrase for all its implications.

“Yes.” She clasped her hands. Her wedding-ring gleamed through the tulle. “You may not know what a sordid and useless tangle our divorce laws are,” she went on. “There’s no decent way, apparently, for him to be quit of me. I’m divorceable enough, one would think, but the law doesn’t see it in that light. Or, at least, the law sees nothing that Tony and I can bring ourselves to see. Besides, Tony won’t divorce me. I don’t know that you could expect him to. It’s in his tradition to fling himself in the path of the unfortunate and let poor crippled feet stamp on him.... Never marry a gentleman, Garda, unless you can be perfectly sure of giving him more than he gives you. Otherwise, he’ll make your life a hell of humility. It must have taken nerve to marry Cophetua. Certainly I never planned to do it; yet here I am.”

She stopped a minute; then, still with clasped hands, went on in her didactic tone, so like the occasional Joan of old.

“You can, as an impartial witness, consider that possibility eliminated. Tony will not divorce me. There remains only the possibility of my divorcing him. That, again, isn’t easy. If I could go out west, as the others do—but even then, what judge wouldn’t rock with laughter at the notion of a fragment like me wanting a divorce? I should be a by-word, nothing more. I ought to be glad and grateful—the whole world would say—to get any man to stick to me, even in the empty legal sense.... And here—Well, how, lying here, in the effete East, can I get a divorce? Especially as Tony won’t help.”

“If Tony won’t help, I should think it clear enough that Tony doesn’t want it. And really, Joan”—I tried to be very quiet and convincing—“if Tony doesn’t want it, I don’t see that you’ve anything to complain of. It’s unimaginable that you should care about being legally free. What would you get out of that?”

“Nothing of any importance—only my self-respect.” She spoke with concentrated bitterness.

“My dear Joan, if any human creature has a right to self-respect, I think it’s you.” I said it honestly, brooding for a moment on all the things that white hand of hers had gallantly rejected: hysteria, melancholy, egotistic evasions, vanity. I spoke my thought: “A platonic devotion to truth is enough for self-respect, I imagine. And that you’ve got; you’ve saved it out of whatever wreck there may have been.”

“Trust you to strike home, Garda!” she cried, softly. “Now that is the best thing that has been said to me for many a day, though Herbert Melcham has written a sonnet to me as I am—poor young decadent! ‘To hold the mirror up to nature’—and not let your hand shake. That’s it.... When the senses are dead, you must satisfy the brain. It clamors in the night—one’s brain. Why should I have a brain at all? I don’t know. But it will not release me until it has saved Tony. It will keep on working until it does.”

There was a long silence. I determined to let Joan herself break it. She stirred at last and spoke again.

“Probably you can’t imagine, Garda, what an odd thing it is to lie outside of time and space, as I do—discarnate, except for this accidental burden of flesh that I carry like a pack. I suppose it’s what happened to the saints. Perhaps I should be a saint if I could get rid of Tony. It’s worse than having passions of your own, to lie there like a dead thing and see other people’s passions hard at work. Usually one has something at stake, oneself. There’s the blindness and the beauty of the game to carry one on. I’m out of the game, but I mustn’t forget that Tony isn’t. That’s what my brain beats in on me. That’s why Tony drives me mad; why I have to send him off.”

“My dear child, you must remember that Tony has inhibitions, too. You’re not the only civilized person in the world.”

“‘Inhibitions!’” She mocked me. “We’ve all had them, always. That’s not the name of my malady. But don’t you suppose that I remember what life was before I was stricken? Do you suppose I imagine for a moment that Tony is in my case? I may have, as it were, no lips to kiss with; but Tony is still the magnificent young pagan god he always was.”

“It’s a very curious thing, Joan”—I bent forward to her—“that the great love has always been able to do anything it liked with the body; but so it is.”

She was very patient with me. “I don’t know whether or not you’ve ever been in love, Garda; but I do know that you’ve never been married to the man you loved. And I am forced to tell you that there is a part of the philosophy of life that can’t be resolved in the cloister.”

“One has eyes in one’s head, my dear, and life’s an open common. Why talk like an old wife by the fire?”

“Simply because you will babble like a child in arms.”

It was very like old times. As before, I had only to turn my head away to forget.

“What you perhaps don’t know, my dear girl,” she went on, crisply, “is that there’s love—and love. Tony will care for me always, in one way, more than anything else. But through these last years I’ve become a different creature. I’m not precisely the woman he loved. ‘Strange eyes, new limbs’—and ‘no lips to kiss.’ It’s not mere loss of any looks I had. If I were maimed as I am, and still cared, we could subsist, perhaps, on mere caring. It’s the lack of longing, the coldness of the grave between us, the absolute deadness of desire. I’ve sifted that tenderness of his to the last grain, and there’s not a whit of passion in it. How should there be? It would be morbid if there were.”

“How can you speak for Tony?”

“I speak for him by the letter of the law. It’s not that, by accident, I can no longer be Tony’s wife—your ‘inhibitions’ might manage that. It’s that I am wooden to his touch. In that sense, there is no life left in me. If I were a ghost, I couldn’t be more fleshless. When Tony kisses me—sometimes he does—I wonder why any two people have ever kissed. At that rate, he won’t want to kiss me very long. For coldness breeds coldness. Take that back to your cloister for a new addition to the sum of knowledge.”

“It’s not as if you didn’t love him.” I was perplexed, but I clung to that.

“That is where you are wrong. It is precisely as if I didn’t love him. Oh, if I longed for him, however vainly, it would be a very different problem, my dear Garda—and one I probably shouldn’t trouble you with. All I can get from Tony I do get. From me Tony gets nothing. He’s simply my kind Providence. Oh, I wouldn’t stick at alimony, you know—if that were all. I’d take it in a minute.”

“But there is something beyond all this, Joan; something that you are, unalterably, to each other.”

“Nothing”—and her voice sounded very clear and very cold—“that makes a man and a woman find it imperative to live under the same roof. One can be Beatrice at a distance. In fact, one usually is. And I never was precisely Beatrice, you know, Garda.”

“But Tony loves you.” I clung to it doggedly.

“He’s happier away from me—perhaps because he loves me.”

“Aren’t you quibbling?”

With a sudden movement she flung off her veil and stared fixedly at me. I did not flinch outwardly—one could not, for very shame, be weak with Joan Delabere—but within me it was as if every bone in my body had turned to arctic ice.

“That was brutal of you, Joan.” My voice, I suspect, was as cold as the rest of me. But what an argument to let fly at me, with a turn of the hand!

“I thought you needed strong drink. You looked it. I have it on tap for people who are fools enough to ask for it.” She flung the veil negligently by, and rested her head comfortably on the pillow. “We’ll face the rest of it in the light of this.” She stared past me out of the window. “Oh, Garda, Garda, if I were playing for sympathy, it would be a low trick; but I am playing only for Tony. I have to show you his side.”

I stole a look at her, while she was not facing me. Her argument was perfectly good; it covered all points. I turned my eyes away.

“What does Tony say? You must have had it out with him.”

“Often. The last time I had it out with him, I didn’t have to make Miss Stanley write for his ticket. He rushed to town and bought it himself.”

“Poor Tony!”

“That’s what I wanted you to say. Oh, I know you don’t mean it quite as I mean it. But you will, before the end.”

I thought very carefully before I spoke. “He has had hard luck with his bargain, but so have you. Your contract was the same. I suppose you’ll both have to abide by the results.”

“Ah, but I haven’t had such hard luck as Tony!”

The tears came to my eyes. “My dear, I think you have—if that’s any comfort.”

“You mean that he can get away from this thing that lies here, and that I can’t? True; and that is what Tony himself for a long time felt, I fancy. But I think he has come to see now how much more fortunate I am; for he has learned that I don’t feel. The days go by like long shimmering stretches of the desert. They shift and reshape themselves; but in the end they’re all the same. I don’t know by what law the physical catastrophe has managed to get at the very springs of the soul and dry them up; but I know that it has. The brain is left, but the heart is dried. And, accordingly, I see the terms of that contract more clearly than any one else, perhaps, ever has. For it’s not simply over for me with Tony; it’s over for me with everything. So long as you’re human, you may have a future—though sometimes you have to stoop pretty low to get it. I’m not human, and there’s no future at all for me. I can no more ‘care’ than I can walk. And therefore I’m a negligible quantity. It’s monstrous that I should interfere with any normal creature’s life.”

“My dear Joan”—I put it to her—“would you be so insistent on Tony’s marrying again if you died?”

“I shouldn’t have to be,” she flashed back at me. “Time and Tony would look out for that. But as it is, though I’m quite dead, I lie here and haunt Tony. And that’s not decent.”

“I wonder if you really hate him,” I mused. It was always best to say to Joan Delabere whatever crossed one’s mind. She herself would never keep the buttons off the foils.

Her eyes filled. “I’m excessively fond of Tony. I even feel about him—as sometimes one insanely feels it about a stranger—as if in some other life we had had a past together. I am always thinking, ‘How odd that I seem to know him so well.’ There was a long interval, you see, when only my body and the things they did to it in hospitals seemed to count; and just a few little feeble memories come across the interval to account for his being here. Indeed, indeed, I am fond of him, Garda; but not as I used to be. It’s as if, one of those times when they had me unconscious, they had cunningly removed my heart—as if there were a seat of the soul that a knife could find. And I think, if I could see Tony provided for—if I could arrange for him like a French mamma—I should be a curiously happy creature because of this anæsthetic state. There’s the case complete.”

“What do you really want? That he should fall in love with another woman?”

“Ultimately that, I suppose. But—don’t you see?—I want him in a position to love and woo any woman he pleases. The women who would take him as he is aren’t the women that would make him happy. I want him free to carry his heart, his hand, and all his young magnificence to some piece of loveliness who’ll have better luck than I did.”

“There are plenty of girls who wouldn’t marry a man, however ‘free,’ so long as his first wife lived.”

Joan tossed her head. “I’d like to see any girl tell him she wouldn’t marry him on my account! Send such a little fool to me. I’d soon have her at the nearest parson’s in an agony of impatience.”

Then and there, at the very heart of the tangle, I laughed.

“Joan, Joan, how could any man forego living with you?”

She turned her face to me again. I came back to the situation.

“What I want, please, Garda,” she went on crisply, “is a new law: divorce on demand, as they have it in France. Have you any political pull, anywhere? I should be willing to pay. Tony, that is, ought to be willing to run to a fat sum in his own interests.”

Her irony hurt like a rusty knife. It didn’t leave a clean wound. “I’m afraid if you want a divorce, there will have to be collusion. Tony will have to help you out.”

“Precisely what he won’t do. And when you come to think of it, it’s a grim and sordid thing to ask any man to go in for. So you think we shall have to wait?”

“I can see nothing else.”

“You lack imagination, Garda. But I have liked to talk to you. It’s a little hard to talk to Tony. He aches so with the strain of not giving himself away! But it’s odd, isn’t it, that there should be no divorce for decent people in our easy-going land? Somebody simply has to be a horror, somewhere. Why don’t you write a book about it, Garda? You used always to be scribbling.”

“Stop girding at me, Joan, and say what you really have to say.”

She beat her hands softly together, and moaned. “Oh, don’t you see? There’s bound to be another woman some time. Tony can’t live forever tied to a cold caricature of a wife. And I want her to be the right woman; and my brain tells me that, as things are, there’s little or no chance of that. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, that we should be damned in the end just because in the beginning we were a shade too decent to do the things that damn other people!”

“Time is up, I’m afraid, Mrs. Delabere.” It was the pale Miss Stanley who said it, cheerfully, after her light tap at the door had been answered. Having given her warning, she closed the door again and walked softly away.

Slowly Joan Delabere drew her veil over her face again, and arranged it in careful folds about her. It was like a corpse enshrouding itself with its own hands.

I rose and stood beside her. “I haven’t a way out for you, Joan. But don’t you see that it’s just the chance of such bad luck as yours that makes the magnificence of the whole contract? I don’t think I ever realized before”—I used my words deliberately—“what a splendid sporting proposition marriage is. I shall never blame either you or Tony for anything you do. But if you don’t do anything, I shall consider you the best losers I’ve ever known.”

She lay with shut eyes, and I put my hand on her forehead. I could not kiss that terrible veil. Finally she spoke, very quietly. “You were the last cartridge I had left, and you missed fire. I’ll never believe—never—in anything men do needlessly for other men’s pain. I’ll mock at us forever for being squeamish—only to come heaven knows what cropper in the end. Perhaps the only way out my brain will succeed in devising is for it deliberately to run itself off the track. I fancy that would make it easier for Tony. But it’s a little rough of you to tell me I’m not a sport. Who would let me in on any game, now? Is it my fault that I’m disqualified?”

“Joan, Joan!” I cried, bending to her, “didn’t I say you were magnificent?”

She took my hand in hers, and stroked it gently for good-bye. “You said so many things I was glad to hear! I have liked talking to you, my dear. I hoped you could help, but I might have known there was no help. I’ve spent a long time on it, myself.” She raised my hand to her lips. “Good-bye, dear. Thank you a hundred times for coming.” Her voice was very low and sweet. “You always were a bit of a prig, Garda.” She turned her face from me as the nurse and two servants entered the room.

Before I drove off I gave a long look at the stately lines of the façade. My mind recurred to the symbol of disaster. In the thickening twilight I seemed to perceive the squat form seated on the threshold; but the shadows were too heavy along the eastern front of Tony Delabere’s house for me to make out the jewel.