Mr. Menemon crossed the room and looked out of the window. “See, Eden,” he continued; “there must be a whole regiment. Not his own, though. The better part of that went down at Gettysburg. You remember, don’t you—”
With this Mr. Menemon turned with a haste he strove to conceal. “It’s almost dinner time,” he added, inconsequently. “I will just change my coat.” And immediately he left the room.
For a moment Eden thought she heard his voice in the hall. Then all was still again. She was wholly alone. She envied her father’s friend who lay in some catafalque across the square. And presently the sense of desolation grew so acute that she threw herself prostrate on the lounge, and clasping a cushion in her arms, she buried her face in its silk.
From the square beyond came a muffled roll, and on her shoulder the touch of a hand. It was her father, she was sure. She half turned, her cheeks wet with tears. “What is it?” she sobbed. “Father—”
“It is I, Eden.” And through a rift of understanding there filtered the sound of Usselex’s voice. With the flutter of a bird surprised, she looked up. She started, and would have risen, but the hand weighed her down. She tried to move, and raising her arm as though to shield her eyes from some distasteful sight, suddenly she extended it, and motioned him back.
“Eden,” he began.
“Don’t speak to me!” she cried; and shaking herself from his hold, she stood up and dashed the tears away. “Don’t speak to me!” she repeated; “and if anywhere within the purlieus of your being there is a spark of shame, leave me, and never—”
“Eden, you are unjust.”
“Ah, I am unjust, am I not? I am unjust, because I believed in you. I am unjust, because I discover you in some coarse intrigue, I am unjust, because I thought myself your wife. I am unjust, am I? Did you get my note? Is it for that that you are here?”
“Eden, if you will listen a moment—”
“I have listened too long. Where is my father? Why is it you pursue me here? Are you not satisfied with your work? You meet a girl who only wishes to trust, and before her eyes you unroll a panorama of deceit. Oh! you chose her well—”
“It cannot be that you believe that man, Eden—”
“The man I believed was you. What matters the testimony of others when I find myself deceived—”
“Eden, you have deceived yourself. Last night I told you there were things I had not wished to tell, not from lack of confidence, but because—”
“Because you knew that did I hear them I would go.”
“No, not that; but because I did not wish to cause you pain.”
“Yes, protest. My father said you would. But the protest comes too late. Besides, I do not care to listen.”
And thereat she made a movement as though to leave the room. But this Usselex prevented. He planted himself very firmly before her. His attitude was arrestive as an obelisk and uncircuitable as a labyrinth. Attention was his to command, and he claimed it with a gesture.
“You shall not go,” he said; “you shall hear me.”
She stepped back to elude him, but he caught her by the wrist.
“Look at me,” he continued. “It took fifty years to make my hair gray; one day has made it white.”
Eden succeeded in disengaging herself from his grasp, and she succeeded the more easily in that a servant unobserved by her, yet seen by Usselex, had entered the room. He loosed his hold at once and glanced at the man.
“What is it?” he asked. “No one rang.”
“A letter, sir,” the man answered; “it was to be delivered to you.”
Usselex took the note and held it unexamined in his hand. Eden caught a glimpse of the superscription. The writing was her own. It was, she knew, the note which she had dispatched a half hour before. Meanwhile the servant had withdrawn.
“When I came home this afternoon,” Usselex continued, “and found that you had gone, I could not understand—”
“You might have gone to the Ranleigh for information. Let me pass!”
“Why to the Ranleigh? surely—”
“To Mrs. Feverill, then, since you wish me to be explicit. Let me pass, I say.”
“It was of her I wished to tell you—”
“Was it, indeed? You were considerate enough, however, not to do so.”
“Let me tell you now?”
“Rather let me go. I prefer your reticence to your confidence.”
“Eden—”
“No, I have no need to learn more of your mistress—”
Usselex stepped aside. “She is my daughter,” he said, sadly. “Go, since you wish to.”
—“Nor of your wife,” she added, as he spoke.
“I have no other wife than you,” he answered, and with the note which he held in his hand he toyed despondently. As yet he had not so much as glanced at the address.
Something, a light, an intonation, and influence undiscerned yet sentiable, stayed her steps. She halted in passing and looked him in the face. And he, seeing that she hesitated, repeated with an accent sincere as that which is heard in the voice of the moribund, “No other wife than you.”
“You say that Mrs. Feverill is your daughter?” she exclaimed. It may be that the average woman, conscious of her own mobility, is more inattentive of the past than of the present. But however that may be, the assurance which Eden had just received seemed to affect her less than the preceding announcement. “You say that she is your daughter,” she repeated. “Why, you told me—You said—”
“I have told you nothing. Will you sit a moment and let me tell you now?”
Coerced and magnetized, the girl moved back and sank down again on the lounge. Usselex still toyed absently with the note, and as he too found a seat, for the first time she recalled its contents. Then a shudder beset her.
“I ought perhaps,” he began, “to have been franker in
