“She’s gone, you mean? Left me? With another man?”
Mr. Spragg drew himself up with a kind of slouching majesty. “My daughter is not that style. I understand Undine thinks there have been mistakes on both sides. She considers the tie was formed too hastily. I believe desertion is the usual plea in such cases.”
Ralph stared about him, hardly listening. He did not resent his father-in-law’s tone. In a dim way he guessed that Mr. Spragg was suffering hardly less than himself. But nothing was clear to him save the monstrous fact suddenly upheaved in his path. His wife had left him, and the plan for her evasion had been made and executed while he lay helpless: she had seized the opportunity of his illness to keep him in ignorance of her design. The humour of it suddenly struck him and he laughed.
“Do you mean to tell me that Undine’s divorcing ME?”
“I presume that’s her plan,” Mr. Spragg admitted.
“For desertion?” Ralph pursued, still laughing.
His father-in-law hesitated a moment; then he answered: “You’ve always done all you could for my daughter. There wasn’t any other plea she could think of. She presumed this would be the most agreeable to your family.”
“It was good of her to think of that!”
Mr. Spragg’s only comment was a sigh.
“Does she imagine I won’t fight it?” Ralph broke out with sudden passion.
His father-in-law looked at him thoughtfully. “I presume you realize it ain’t easy to change Undine, once she’s set on a thing.”
“Perhaps not. But if she really means to apply for a divorce I can make it a little less easy for her to get.”
“That’s so,” Mr. Spragg conceded. He turned back to his revolving chair, and seating himself in it began to drum on the desk with cigar-stained fingers.
“And by God, I will!” Ralph thundered. Anger was the only emotion in him now. He had been fooled, cheated, made a mock of; but the score was not settled yet. He turned back and stood before Mr. Spragg.
“I suppose she’s gone with Van Degen?”
“My daughter’s gone alone, sir. I saw her off at the station. I understood she was to join a lady friend.”
At every point Ralph felt his hold slip off the surface of his father-in-law’s impervious fatalism.
“Does she suppose Van Degen’s going to marry her?”
“Undine didn’t mention her future plans to me.” After a moment Mr. Spragg appended: “If she had, I should have declined to discuss them with her.” Ralph looked at him curiously, perceiving that he intended in this negative way to imply his disapproval of his daughter’s course.
“I shall fight it—I shall fight it!” the young man cried again. “You may tell her I shall fight it to the end!”
Mr. Spragg pressed the nib of his pen against the dust-coated inkstand. “I suppose you would have to engage a lawyer. She’ll know it that way,” he remarked.
“She’ll know it—you may count on that!”
Ralph had begun to laugh again. Suddenly he heard his own laugh and it pulled him up. What was he laughing about? What was he talking about? The thing was to act—to hold his tongue and act. There was no use uttering windy threats to this broken-spirited old man.
A fury of action burned in Ralph, pouring light into his mind and strength into his muscles. He caught up his hat and turned to the door.
As he opened it Mr. Spragg rose again and came forward with his slow shambling step. He laid his hand on Ralph’s arm.
“I’d ‘a’ given anything—anything short of my girl herself—not to have this happen to you, Ralph Marvell.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Ralph.
They looked at each other for a moment; then Mr. Spragg added: “But it HAS happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I’ve found that a good thing to remember.”
XXIII
In the Adirondacks Ralph Marvell sat day after day on the balcony of his little house above the lake, staring at the great white cloud-reflections in the water and at the dark line of trees that closed them in. Now and then he got into the canoe and paddled himself through a winding chain of ponds to some lonely clearing in the forest; and there he lay on his back in the pine-needles and watched the great clouds form and dissolve themselves above his head.
All his past life seemed to be symbolized by the building-up and breaking-down of those fluctuating shapes, which incalculable wind-currents perpetually shifted and remodelled or swept from the zenith like a pinch of dust. His sister told him that he looked well—better than he had in years; and there were moments when his listlessness, his stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life, might have passed for the serenity of recovered health.
There was no one with whom he could speak of Undine. His family had thrown over the whole subject a pall of silence which even Laura Fairford shrank from raising. As for his mother, Ralph had seen at once that the idea of talking over the situation was positively frightening to her. There was no provision for such emergencies in the moral order of Washington Square. The affair was a “scandal,” and it was not in the Dagonet tradition to acknowledge the existence of scandals. Ralph recalled a dim memory of his childhood, the tale of a misguided friend of his mother’s who had left her husband for a more congenial companion, and who, years later, returning ill and friendless to New York, had appealed for sympathy to Mrs. Marvell. The latter had not refused to give it; but she had put on her black cashmere and two veils when she went to see her unhappy friend, and had never mentioned these errands of mercy to her husband.
