V
There are lakes which a breeze from the valley disturbs, but which the high winds from the summits leave unruffled. Then, for no appreciable reason, they reverse the order of things. There are natures that resemble those lakes. You never know where you are with them.
In attempting to display the cumulative incidents of this drama, no better analogy occurs by which to explain the opposite effects that circumstances, relatively identical, produced on Wyvill.
They were then at Deauville. Meanwhile, the stranger had gone, and with her every doubt of Trella. She was charmful, the more so, perhaps, because she had had what is called an experience with her husband, and it is said that experience teaches. Mrs. Verelst, who had had something in the nature of an experience also, tried to profit by it in offering to restore Shane Towers, and to maintain the place in proper fashion. At this Wyvill protested. It was, he declared, the gloomiest keep in England. Mrs. Verelst paid no attention to his nonsense. Trella, either. Paris had palled on her. For reasons of her own she was glad to evolve from it into what her mother termed her rightful sphere. All this was pleasant to Wyvill. The present was pleasant, also, and the future looked, as the future always does look, even pleasanter. And so the days fell by until, the Grand Prix over, they went down to Deauville.
There Mrs. Verelst contented herself with a suite in a hotel. But for Wyvill and Trella there was a house. This house, known, locally, because of its arrangements, as the Villa Portugaise, squats sumptuously before the sea. It is of two stories. The bedrooms are on the ground floor, the dining and reception-rooms adjoining. Between the two principal suites is a wide hall. One of these suites Trella selected for herself. Wyvill took the other. Both are splendid, and the villa itself is a gem.
It was early in July when they reached there. At that period Deauville is usually delightful. But in August it becomes infernal. The season is then at its height, and to its confluence surges a mob of viveurs and rastas.
Among others who appeared there that year was the Duke of Thule. Yet, owing to an attack of Anglophobia with which France is periodically afflicted, he came incog., as a private gentleman, merely. For the purposes of his sojourn he also had a villa. About it night and day men in plain clothes strolled unobtrusively. So are the mighty guarded.
The royal villa was next to the Villa Portugaise, and there, occasionally, as a friend and neighbor may, the duke dropped in, sometimes in beautiful flannels for a game of tennis, sometimes alarmingly begoggled for a flight in an auto, but always amiable and aimless.
And so the days fell by, punctuated by the diversions of Deauville—dips, drives, dinners, dances, polo matches, hurdle races and baccarat, but particularly by that general deviltry which, in an atmosphere dripping with ammonia and desire, scented with caprices and seaweed, those consorts of Society, wealth and idleness, inevitably produce.
Through the diversions and the deviltry of them the confidences apprehensible were truffled with a sans-gêne quite idyllic. In the flow of these confidences there was, apparently, not an honest woman in the place. Everything being possible, such may have been the case.
One night the possibility occurred to Wyvill. That afternoon the Prix de Deauville had been run. He and Trella had been driven to the course by the duke. At the track he left them for a look in the paddock. On the way back his progress was momentarily impeded. Before him were two men. In a brief halt which a congestion of the crowd occasioned he garnered a snatch of their talk.
“C’est sa maîtresse,” one was saying.
“Ah! ah! Et le mari?”
“Il faut croire qu’il trouve ça charmant.”
But the congestion had diffused, Wyvill passed on, mounted to the tribune, where, looking down, he saw two men looking up. They were raising their hats. Their names he might have remembered, but he had forgotten their faces. He raised his own hat. The duke raised his. There was a clamor, a scurry, a clearing of the track, a careering of thoroughbreds, a riot of color, a shout, the horses were off, the Prix was being run, and the incident forgot.
Truth is an objective phenomenon. It acts in us and on us like a chemical precipitate. You may have given it no thought, and there it is revealed. That night, apropos to nothing, the incident returned to Wyvill. With it, from the depths of his being, there issued an obsession vague and obscure, something opaque and formless, but which, little by little, took shape and changed from an impossibility into a monstrous fact. Wyvill disowned it, disavowed it, would have none of it. But there it was. Presently the disavowals ceased. In certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at home with what it must.
Wyvill was seated in the library. An hour previous Trella, pretexting some one or other of those many malaises which women always have within beck and call, had disappeared for the night. Latterly these malaises and their coincidental disappearances had been frequent, and in considering them the dialogue overheard at the track returned, but freighted now with significance. The soul may accustom itself to what it must, but it will struggle first. We believe less what we should than what we wish.
For relief from the obsession Wyvill got up. He would have gone to Trella. But, presumably, she was asleep. In any event, he divined that her door was locked, and he knew that if she answered his knock at all, it would be but to reproach him with having disturbed her. Even otherwise, what could
