This was the man she knew and she preferred him that way, rather than buoyant because of some other woman, even though that other was as lovable and innocent of any deliberate mischief as her niece. Not that she was jealous so much as she was hurt. When a woman has fortified herself, after years of the existence to which Mrs. Wade had submitted, with the final conviction that undoubtedly her husband’s is a nature that cannot be other than it is, and then learns there are emotional potentialities not yet plumbed, not to mention a capacity for pleasant comradeship of which he has never vouchsafed her an inkling, she finds herself being ground between the millstones of an aching admission of her own deficiencies and a tattered, but rebellious, pride.
Martin, when her remark concerning his apparent happiness had registered, let his answer be a sober inspection of the garment he had just removed.
“I don’t suppose you can talk to me now after such a strenuous evening,” she went on more emphatically. And as he maintained his silence, she continued with: “Oh, don’t think I’m blind, Martin Wade. I know exactly how far this has gone and I know how far it can go.”
“What are you driving at?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean—the way you are behaving toward Rose.”
“Are you trying to imply that I’m carrying on with her?”
“I certainly am. I’m not angry, Martin. I never was calmer than I am right now, and I don’t intend to say things just for the sake of saying them. I only want you to know that I have eyes, and that I don’t want to be made a fool of.”
To her surprise, Martin came over to her and, looking at her steadily, returned with amazing candidness: “I’m not going to lie to you. You’re perfectly welcome to know what’s in my mind. I love her with every beat of my heart—she has brought something new into my life, something sacred—you’ve always thought I cared for nothing but work, that all I lived for was to plan and scheme how to make money. Haven’t you? I don’t blame you. It’s what I’ve always believed, but tonight I’ve learned something.” Mrs. Wade could see his blood quicken. “She has been in this house only a few days and already I am alive with a new fire. It seems as if these hours are the only ones in which I have ever really lived—nothing else matters. Nothing! If there could be the slightest chance of my winning her love, of making her feel as I am feeling now, I’d build my world over again even if I had to tear all of the old one down.” Martin was now talking to himself, oblivious to his wife’s presence, indifferent to her. “Happiness is waiting for me with her, with my little flower.”
“Your Rose of Sharon?” Her tone was biting.
“If only I could say that! My Rose of Sharon!” It seemed to Mrs. Wade that the very room quivered with his low cry that was almost a groan. “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on, “but you know I have never loved you. You knew it when I married you, you must have.” The twisting agony of it—that he could make capital out of the very crux of all her suffering. “I have never deceived you and I never intend to. My life with you hasn’t been a Song of Solomon, but I’m not complaining.”
“You’re not complaining! I hope I won’t start complaining, Martin.”
“Well, now you know how I feel. I’ll go on with the present arrangement between us, but I’m playing square with you—it’s because there’s no hope for me. If I thought she cared for me, I would go to her, right now, tonight, and pour out my heart to her, wife or no wife. Oh, Rose, have pity! It can’t do you any harm if I drink a little joy—don’t spoil her faith in me! Don’t frighten her away. I can’t bear the thought of her going out into the world to work. She’s like a gentle little doe feeding on lilies—she doesn’t dream of the pitfalls ahead of her. And she will never know—she doesn’t even suspect how I feel towards her. She will meet some young fellow in town and marry. I’m too old for her—but Rose, you don’t understand what it means to me to have her in the same house, to know that she is sleeping so near, so beautiful, so ready for love; that when I wake up tomorrow she will still be here.”
Disarmed and partly appeased by the frankness of his confession, Mrs. Wade sat silently taking in each word, studying him with wet eyes, her lips almost blue, her breath a little short. The fire in his voice, the reality of his strange, terrible love, the eyes that gazed so sadly and so unexpectantly into space, the hands that seemed to have shed their weight of toil and clutched, too late, for the bright flowers of happiness—all filled her with compassion. Never had he looked so splendid. He seemed, in casting off his thongs, to have taken on some of the Herculean quality of his own magnificent gesture. It was as if their barnyard well had burst into a mighty, high-shooting geyser. To her dying day would she remember that surge of passion. To have met it with anger would have been of as little avail as the stamp of a protesting foot before the tremors of an earthquake.
She offered him the comforting directness which she might have given Bill. “I didn’t know you felt so deeply, Martin. Life plays us all tricks; it’s played many with me, and it’s playing one of its meanest with you, for whatever happens you are going to suffer—far more than I am. You can believe it or not, but I’m sorry.”
Martin felt oddly grateful to her; he had not expected this sense of understanding. She might have burst into wild tears. Instead, she was pitying him. More possessed of his usual immobility, he remarked:
“I must be a fool, a great, pathetic fool. I look into a girl’s eyes and immediately see visions. I say a few words to her and she is kind enough to say a few to me and I see pictures of new happiness. I should have more sense. I don’t know what is the matter with me.”
Although countless answers leaped to his wife’s tongue she made none but the cryptic: “Well, it’s no use to discuss it any more tonight. We both need rest.” But all the while that she was undressing with her usual sure, swift movements, and after she had finally slipped between the sheets, her mind was racing.
She was soon borne so completely out on the current of her own thoughts that she forgot Martin’s actual presence. She remembered as if it were yesterday, the afternoon he came to the office and asked her to marry him. She wondered anew, as she had wondered a thousand times, if anything other than a wish for a housekeeper had prompted him. She remembered her misgivings—how she had read into him qualities which she had believed all these years were not there. But hadn’t her intuition been justified, after all, by the very man she had seen tonight? Yes, her first feeling, that he was something finer, still in the rough, had been correct. She had thought it was his shyness, his unaccustomedness to women that had made him such a failure as a lover—and all the while it had been simply that she was not the right woman. When love touched him, he became a veritable white light.
All these years when he had been so cold, so hard toward her, it simply was because he disliked her. She remembered the day she was hurt, and the night her first baby came. Martin’s brutality even now kindled in her a dull blazing anger, and as she realized what depths of feeling were in him, his callousness seemed intensified an hundred-fold. Well, she was having her revenge. All his life he had thwarted her, stolen from her, used her as one could not use even a hired hand, worked her more as a slave-driver hurries his underlings that profits may mount; now, by her mere existence, she was thwarting him. She saw him again as he had flashed before her when he had talked of Rose and she admitted bitterly to herself, what in her heart she had known all along—that if Martin could have loved her, she could have worshipped him. Instead, he had slowly smothered her, but she had at least a dignity in the community. He should not harm that. If they were unhappy, at least no one knew it. Her pride was her refuge. If that were violated she felt life would hold no sanctuary, that her soul would be stripped naked before the world.
But why was she afraid? Didn’t Martin have his own position to think of? What if he had said nothing was to be compared to his new-found love for Rose. What stupidity on his part not to realize that it was his very position, power and money that commanded her respect. Did he command anything else from her? Mrs. Wade reviewed the evening. Yes, response had been in Rose’s laugh, in every movement. Hadn’t she always adored Martin, even as a tiny girl? Hadn’t there always been some mystic bond between them? How she had