“No, no,” he answered, impatiently. The 12th, indeed! He would be in little mood for dining then. “No,” he repeated. “Send a regret.”
“But, Chris, Claire will want to go. Do—”
“Then let her go alone: as for me—” He halted abruptly: an expression in Ruth’s face warned him that he was betraying an obsession of which no sign should be conveyed. “I am tired,” he added, inconsequently.
“Chris, you work so hard—”
To this, with a despondent air, he assented remotely.
“And a little gayety will do you good. Besides—”
“If I could only get away,” he thought. “Is there no place where I can hide?”
“It is one of your duties to go about among your parishioners. I believe it is even a canon in ecclesiastical law.” Ruth laughed as she spoke, and gave her husband a look in which pride and love commingled.
“There,” he said, “do as you will.”
After all, what did it matter? When the time came, Mrs. Manhattan would expect neither him nor Claire. And through his thoughts but one thing fluttered—the longing for a place to hide.
“That is sweet of you, Chris. I will write to Mrs. Manhattan at once.—Come in.”
Someone had rapped on the door, and in a moment Jane entered. “A letter for you, sir,” she said, and extended a note on a salver.
Instinctively he shuddered. It was about that accursed check, he knew. But the superscription reassured him. “It’s from Jones,” he mumbled, and tore the envelope apart.
“Dear Gonfallon,” it ran—“I have just received a telegram from Bronx. My aunt is dying. She begs you to come to her. I go down in the eight-o’clock train. Will you not meet me at the Grand Central?
“It is there,” thought Gonfallon, “there that I can hide.” He turned to the servant and handed the note to Ruth.
“Is anyone waiting? Very good. Tell him to say to Mr. Jones that I will be there.”
He stood up, and added, in an undertone, “Tell Mr. Bucholz—” But whatever message he had wished to send was lost.
“He’s gone, sir,” the woman interrupted.
And Ruth, intent on the note, murmured, as Jane withdrew, “To think that it was in her house we met! It seems but yesterday to me.”
“I must hurry,” said Gonfallon: “it is seven now.”
VI
It was midnight when the train halted at Bronx. During the journey Jones had been loquacious and Gonfallon dumb. To the one the illness of the countess represented an eternal farewell to the exigencies of syndicates and publishers; to the other, a refuge from the scandal with which New York would presently resound.
Jones, enveloped in an Inverness, wandered out into voluptuous anticipations of wealth to be. “I can go to Constantinople,” he confided to his companion, “or, like Stevenson, I can sail the Southern seas. I can lounge in Quaritch’s, or on the Grand Canal. I can go to Ecuador and foment a revolution. I can turn Buddhist and penetrate Tibet. From an editor’s chair I can bombard my friends and caress my enemies. I will have time to be noble, to be just, and to forgive. I can disappear as though the earth had swallowed me, or I can write a book to please myself. I can live, as Baudelaire wanted to, in a grot of basalt surrounded by slaves whose sole duty it will be to discover the secret of my immense ennui. Like Flaubert, I can call to a chimera to lift me on its wings. Like the Chimera, I can whisper to the Sphinx, ‘O Unknown, I am amorous of thine eyes.’ On the fingers of my sweethearts I can put the crystallized essence of banknotes. I can even pay my debts—some of them, at least. I can—”
And while Jones rambled on, discounting his inheritance in advance, Gonfallon’s thoughts had also taken him afar. In the abruptness of the departure he had no time to make so much as an effort to stay the approaching joust; and now, as he tormented himself with its possibilities, some breath of the philosophies to which the preceding night had been given rose to him, graciously as a balm. “Whatever will be, is,” he mused. “No one can combat the inevitable. If it is written that Bucholz is to founder in the mire and bespatter us all with the mud, no act of mine can prevent it.” But, even as his fancy was comforted, abruptly before him the reef to which he was veering loomed, and in the wreck which it menaced he saw the bishopric gone forever, Gethsemane lost as well. He saw himself a wanderer in unfamiliar parishes, the pulpit loaned on trial, the subsidence in some Western town, and then that most terrible trial of all, the attempt to begin life anew.
In his misery he moaned, dumbly and vaguely afflicted. In an effort to console himself he reflected that Jesus had been a vagabond too—one who had not where to lay his head. Yet Jesus, he instantly remembered, had conquered the world, while he could not conquer himself.
Presently his thoughts deserted father for daughter, and as the train flashed through the night, something in the roll of the car seemed to echo the music of her voice. The irritation which had visited him in the afternoon faded, as irritation ever does. He closed his eyes: he was alone with her again, in his ears was the bubbling ripple of her laugh, his lips were on hers, his were the savors of her skin, his the wonders and caresses of her hair.
Yes, the poets were right: nothing in all the world imitated happiness more perfectly than did love. And if only that nightmare would disappear! If the memory of Bucholz and of his visit would vanish, life,
