IV
Wyvill left Paris in a fury, determined to discover what Trella was up to if he had to employ a detective to do it. In the Channel the fury evaporated. When he reached Shane Towers he was glad he had probed no deeper. When the funeral was over he was glad that he had not questioned more.
As to that he was right. To expect some women to tell the truth is as naive as to expect them to go about naked. They simply can’t. Then, too, there are mysteries concerning them which we may determine to solve, but which if time but intervene we prefer to ignore. Wyvill’s attitude was, therefore, perfectly natural. But in upbraiding the lady he had been absurd. There are complaints that are compliments, and reproaches which are testimonies of love.
Some inkling of this Trella probably intercepted. In any event, he was presently urged to return. But to return to what? He was still passionately in love with the girl who but a few months before had become his wife; the beauty and the charm of her were as dear to him as ever, dearer, even, by comparison; for in her place there seemed to have come a woman whom he had never known, and who, though her counterpart in charm, was otherwise a counterfeit.
Presently another letter came. He was urged again to return. But to whom? To Trella? Yes, and at once. The trains and the boats were not built that could take him to her fast enough. But with that stranger who had come in her place he had no concern whatever.
Then more letters came. Some were from his wife, offering to join him, and some were from Mrs. Verelst, whom Trella’s prompt elevation to the rank and attributes of peeress had entirely appeased.
It was then winter. But the winter passed and the spring came before he himself felt appeased. The appeasing was due to a note from the lady, in which she expressed a wish to explain.
As he read the note he could not but recall other explanations of which he had been cognizant. Yet, then, also, he could not but let them go. Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. We are unaware that it has been acting on us, and suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work.
That night Trella received the telegram which was brought to her as Villiers was leaving her house.
Meanwhile she had found herself entertaining and being entertained by all that is best and worst in that curious cosmopolis which is called Tout-Paris. Yet there, even the worst have fits of propriety. Society abroad is very much the same as at home. It is not censorious. Provided a woman lives, outwardly, at least, on good terms with her husband; provided, as Villiers had noted, that there is an avoidance of open scandal, a lady is free to be as unladylike as she likes. With the men, at all times everything goes. Yet, now and then they do object to certain associations for their wives.
Of Lady Cloden stories began to be told. To begin with, she was not living with her husband, and it was rumored that, for reasons, which, however interesting, would not look well in print, he did not propose to live with her again. Such things dishearten. Moreover, it is not pleasant for a woman of position to see that position fade. Men acquire with her an easy form of address. They bow to her sometimes when they should not, and again omit to when they should. Matters had by no means come to that pass yet with Trella, but unless a halt were called social dégringolage was on the way.
And now on this particular night, as she stared in the mirror, at the sunburst of beauty which she was, it was of these things that she thought.
A step aroused her. She turned, glanced at the great, bare, brilliant room, then at the telegram which had been brought. Someone was approaching. She turned again. At the door her husband stood. With a little bleat which, if not of joy, was a very good imitation of it, she moved to meet and greet him, and at once, before he could speak, with a volubility to which she had not accustomed him, she acknowledged that she had been at fault, begging his forgiveness, relating things which he had never known, that she had a brother, that the latter had disgraced himself, that he had got into fresh difficulties, that that last afternoon at the Bristol she had gone to aid him, and that if she had hid the truth, it was out of delicacy, and the Lord knows what else, besides.
She paused, for lack of breath, perhaps. At the moment, from the avenue without, through the open window, came pouring the madness of a song of love. Wyvill had heard it somewhere, sometime, a long while ago, yet where or when he could not recall. Then suddenly he was back again in fairyland. The air was scented with flowers, he was speaking to someone, there was an aria that seemed to help his speech, that seemed to multiply the music of the replies. It was from the “Somnambula,” of course. He remembered now. Perhaps so, too, did she.
Pretty as a peach, and just as witty, savorous as a pineapple and with quite as much heart, commonplace in everything except in beauty, that aria in filtering through her pulp, must have stirred a memory, encountered a fiber, awakened an echo, for to her face she raised a hand and from her eyes there fell a tear.
Wyvill saw that tear. At once his arms were about her, his lips on hers. It seemed to him that they
