Gonfallon, weary of Jones and of his tiresome tale, consulted his watch again. Down the room some of the guests had encircled Mrs. Fox. At the piano Miss Raritan was still seated, her exquisite face upturned to some man who was fingering a sheet of music. From behind, Gonfallon heard a rustle, Jones ceased speaking, and abruptly the room was in commotion.
Miss Raritan, rising from her seat, hurried forward, followed by Mrs. Manhattan, and in a moment by the other guests.
Gonfallon started and turned. On the sofa, Claire, her eyes closed, her head on her shoulder, her face but little less white than her frock, seemed to have sunk into a heap. “She’s fainted,” he heard Miss Raritan exclaim, and saw Mrs. Manhattan raise the girl up and beat her small hands with her own. Almost immediately the girl opened her eyes, and Gonfallon rushed to her aid. Yarde, who had stood up, glanced down at her and then over at Jones.
“There, I am right enough,” she lisped.
Again Yarde glanced at her, and then, as though assured of her well-being, he moved to where the novelist stood and looked him in the face. “You brute—”
Jones caught him by the arm. “Listen to me, Trement. There, don’t struggle: she’s over it already. Besides, Gonfallon has his eye on you. Did you ever hear of Balzac? Of course not. Well, Balzac was a machine that blackened paper. One day, or rather one night, someone said to him, ‘There’s a pretty girl.’ He answered, ‘You mean a plot.’ Not a novel did he write that he had not dug from a woman’s heart. For a week I have been hunting for a climax. This evening I tried an experiment; it succeeded. I have my climax now. Call me a brute if you care to, but be good enough to understand that I am perfectly domesticated and thoroughly well trained. I always mask my heroine. There, Miss Bucholz is motioning to you.”
And with that Jones turned on his heel and adjusted his cravat. “I wonder,” he mused, “I wonder what that little imbecile would think of Vernet, who lashed himself to a masthead that he might study a storm?”
X
The drive from Mrs. Manhattan’s to the rectory was always a short one, but on this occasion it was brief indeed. The noise of the wheels brought to Gonfallon the echo of Miss Raritan’s song; and as in a constant resummons of the same refrain it beset and pursued him, forcing him whether he willed it or not into a lunatic duo with the vehicle in which he sat, a disorganized lamppost caught and detained the obsession, and he fell to wondering whether electricity was preferable to gas.
Then at once the query departed of itself. Jones was standing opposite, relating less to him than to an audience behind his back some endless story of nothing at all. And that story, to which five minutes before he had accorded only the show of interest which civility exacts, suddenly became poignant and fraught with interest.
At Mrs. Manhattan’s, in the earliest surprise at the unexpected, he had attributed Claire’s collapse to fatigue, to the heat of the room and the strain of her stays; but now, in fumbling about for the logic of Jones’s anecdote, he recalled the novelist’s significant forgetfulness of his hero’s name, the manner in which he had talked at the occupants of the sofa recurred to him, he remembered the epithet which Yarde had blurted out, and at once a panorama unrolled. He had not been the auditor of a pointless tale; he had assisted at the fabulization of a masquerade; but the clock had struck, the dominos had fallen, the masks were raised.
In a confusion of visions he saw Claire dismissing her suitor like a lackey, the interview between Bucholz and himself, interrupted by her and indubitably overheard; he divined the conflict within her, the rememoration of Yarde’s offer, the knowledge of her father’s guilt. Then one after another he comprehended the first incitement, the inward revolt, the renewed assault, the rebellion in her of all that was best, the martyrdom that ensued, the self-crucifixion, the tension of nerves, the defeat that was a victory, the agony over the wording of the note, the despatch of the message, the comedy played for Ruth, the suffocation hid with a smile, the anguish of the preparation, the dread, perhaps the hope, of detention, the horror of the unlighted stairs, the tragedy of the cab that waited there, the agony of her thoughts as she was driven away, her hysterical entrance into Yarde’s apartment, and then, to the man she loathed, her offer in payment of her father’s shame. No, it was more than noble; it was Greek.
Of her possible contempt of him, Gonfallon gave no thought. And as his fancy veered from Claire to Yarde it was with a little undercurrent of applause. Truly he had misjudged the man, not much perhaps, but still misjudgment there had been. He could have throttled him on that afternoon when he had heard him, in anger at his rejection, make that offer which he had coupled with the insulting assurance that the walls of his rooms were dumb. Yes, he could have throttled him then with delight. And yet, when Claire, in her haste to rescue her father, had in her helplessness knocked at his door, he had been better than his word: assistance had been accorded unexactingly, and
