On the mantel before him was a mirror, a convenience serviceable on those occasions when, surprised by some unawaited visit, it was necessary to filch a reflection for the adjustment of neckcloth or of hair. But now in the surprise at a visitant such as he had never encountered before he fronted the mirror, his teeth still set, the jaw unrelaxed; and as he stood the rumor of the inward conflict moved his lips. “Ah, Tartuffe!” he muttered, “is it for this you toiled?”
In his ears a ripple of laughter still rang, a laugh that was sylvan, the laugh of a young faun made merry by the sorceries of spring. “Ah, Tartuffe!” he repeated. And still the ripple continued, insistent, insinuating, jubilant in wantonness, clear and heady as the upper notes of a flute. “Is it for this?”
With the grimace of a hound at a vagabond he glared at his image. He was angered and distraught at the intussusception of a presence more terrible than that which Luther outfaced in his cell. “Do you think,” he cried in menace at himself, “do you think that I have fear of you?” At the unanswering mirror he raised his hand. “What have you to do with her, or she with you?” And as his arm fell again to his side some fume of disgust must have mounted to his brain, for he added, in a murmur, “I am as a Jesuit: I argue with myself.”
“Did you call, Chris?”
Gonfallon turned with a start of a subject awakening from a trance. In the doorway was Ruth.
“Did you call?” she repeated.
He blinked, but made no answer. And Ruth, gazing at him from the doorway, one hand on the woodwork, the other upholding the curtain, her eyes full of interrogations, her lips just parted, her head nimbused with the jonquil of her hair, had about her a suggestion of that grace with which Boucher pleasured the Pompadour. To one as myope as her husband, the lines that extended from the edge of the nostril, the circles that shadowed the cheekbones like inverted circumflexes over an i, were unperceived. Through the saffron shade of the lamp she appeared younger, more tentative, than she had for months, and in her voice which now seemed to reach him across inordinate distances was the caress he had loved so well. But he was still imprisoned in himself. He shook his head and blinked as one does who passes from darkness into light.
“No,” he said, at last, “no—”
“Oh, Chris, you are composing your sermon! Forgive me: I did not mean to interrupt.”
With a finger she threw him an apology and a kiss. The curtain fell again, and she was gone.
Sermon, indeed! The sermon was in that patient face that just had disappeared. He sat down again on the chair, and let his thoughts roam back again to Bronx and the wooing of his wife. When first she had put her hand in his it was as though life were fulfilled to its tips: he had conceived no greater earthly joy than the possibility of calling her his own, to his after-days she had brought the blithest airs, and now, after three years of marriage, if nothing remained save that friendship which is born of love and which the fabulist has declared to be better than love itself, if of the ardors which he had believed inextinguishable only cinders remained, was the fault his own? Surely he had been sincere. It is a maxim in law that against a promise to do something in the future no charge of fraud can lie. And if the maxim hold good in law, why not in love as well? When before God and man he had promised to love her always, had he not as fully intended to keep that promise as the honest trader does who makes a note? If bankruptcy intervene and the note be protested, it is humiliating, no doubt, but conscience at least is undisturbed. And yet an elenchicism such as this one with which, as was his duty, he would have dulled the remorse of any parishioner who had come to him in similar strait, left him rudderless and derelict. Truly the advice we give is rarely that to which we hold. Gonfallon sounded its sophistry with a sneer. He would have given hope itself to be able to touch Ruth’s hand and feel again the electricity which it had once communicated, that spasm which in days gone by had seized him between the shoulder-blades and gone pulsing down the spinal cord, leaving him during the moment that followed quasi-dumb, and ineffectual of speech; indeed he would have given much could the old thrill have outlasted satiety, and, though it were through the very force of love that satiety had been begot, he wondered could the fault be nature’s, not his own.
To Ruth he had brought his firstfruits, and in the bringing he had deemed them imperishable as the apples of the Hesperides. He had revelled in the offering of them; he had laid them glistening at her feet; he had marvelled at the blossoms with which she crowned the gift; he had thought them both enduring as the stars; he would have staked his soul that their twin hearts made one would mount, inseparate, into those realms no eye has scanned, but which the gracious Christ, his Master, has vouchsafed to whomso does believe in Him. These things had been the securest tenets
