“What did you do this afternoon?” he asked, when the soup had gone. Without waiting for an answer, he told her about the horses. “Ce sont des alezans superbes,” he added—a phrase which he had caught from de Chose.
Trella did not know what alezans were. He explained. Then again he asked what she had done, but indifferently, as a husband may, not out of curiosity, but for the sake of talk.
“Nothing,” she answered. “After you went out my mother came and stayed here with me until nearly 5. Then I took a turn with her in the Bois.”
“Five is rather late nowadays for the Bois, is it not?” he asked, with the same air of indifference.
“The air does me good,” Trella replied, and let the subject drop.
Wyvill stared at her. Her hair made a garland of gold. Her eyes were sultry, her lips were scarlet. About her throat was a diamond collar. Her bodice was sewn with pearls. Between the diamonds and the pearls there glowed the silk of her skin. Never had she looked more beautiful. In the poise of her head, in her appearance and costume, she exhaled a charm almost intolerably aphrodisiac. She seemed created for love, for life at its fullest, and, as it now occurred to Wyvill, for lies.
The dinner proceeded. A maître d’hôtel after presenting a dish for inspection, superintended the serving of it by his underlings. Covers succeeded each other. Of what they consisted Wyvill did not notice. It had been arranged that he and Trella were to go that night to a première and afterward to the Embassy. This arrangement a remark of hers recalled.
Through the flowers and lights on the table he stared over at her again. When a man loves a woman, it is not an excess of ambition on his part to wish to trust her also. And suddenly a solution visited Wyvill. Might she not have accounted for her afternoon as she had, solely to save him and herself the boredom of the narration of some tiresome occurrence?
The solution was so stupid that it soothed. But even in the process of welcoming it there were incidents unconsciously recalled which trooped out and interfered. There was, for instance, a secretiveness which she had recently displayed in regard to such letters as were brought her. Recently, too, it had been obvious to him that she had preoccupations which she did not wish to disclose, thoughts to which he was a stranger. Moreover, there was that change in her, one that had filtered through such subtle gradations that only latterly the portent had perplexed.
Those who have suffered from jealousy know that it is physical, they know that it can no more be argued away than can any other distemper, and they know, too, to their own cost, perhaps, that its most torturesome form comes of thoughts that are hidden, and emotions they may not share.
To Wyvill the lie returned, but unvarnished now, and with it that determination to know which, in certain crises, is as imperious as famine. But of the inward tumult he gave no sign.
“What did your mother say?” he asked, leisurely.
By way of reply, Trella contented herself with shrugging her bare white shoulders.
“And you were here with her until nearly five?”
Trella nodded.
“Why not tell me the truth?”
At this she started. If he had struck her she could not have flushed more highly. But Wyvill omitted to pursue the advantage. At the sight of her confusion there came to him a sense not of anger, but of sorrow for himself and her.
The maître d’hôtel and his underlings had gone. Wyvill got from his chair and moved it nearer to her own.
“Distrust and affection don’t hit it off very well together, Trella. If you thought that I was deceiving you, you would think, too, that I was ceasing to care. It may be that you are ceasing to care for me. In that case, how shall I blame you? We cannot command affection. It commands us. Then, too, the quantity of it being limited, some day or other it must give out. When it does, love ends. No effort can prevent it. You have loved me now for a long time—almost six months. Unfortunately for us both, this is not a love affair, it is a marriage.”
He hesitated, hoping for an interruption, for some explanation or protest, but as she sat, tantalizingly beautiful and irritatingly dumb, he bent forward and, probing her with his eyes, very deliberately he asked:
“Where were you this afternoon?”
“I have told you.”
“No, forgive me, you are mistaken, you have not. You told me you were here until five. At three you passed me in the Rue Royale. Where were you going?”
Trella stood up, and with a little princess air which she could assume very well when she chose, she looked him in the face.
“You appear to be cross-questioning me.”
“Ah!” said Wyvill, rising, too. “Very good. I shall not presume to do so again. But I will presume to call your attention to the fact that you have lied to me. You have lied stupidly, wantonly. Whether the lie was meant to cover something equally stupid and wanton, I do not know. I do, though, know that while a wanton act may be shameful yet human, a wanton lie is shameless and vile.
“What is it, Harris?” he interrupted himself to ask. “No one rang.”
“No, sir, thank you, sir,” his valet, who had entered, answered, producing a dispatch which he had brought. “The carriage is at the door, sir.”
Wyvill opened the message. “Then you may dismiss it,” he ordered.
He
