The Younger Set Part 71

When he had finished his figuring he fished out a check-book, detached a tiny gold fountain-pen from the bunch of seals and knick-knacks on his watch-chain, and, filling in the checks, pa.s.sed them over without comment.

Fane rose, stretching his long neck, gazed about through his spectacles, like a benevolent saurian, and finally fixed his mild, protruding eyes upon Orchil.

"There'll be a small game at the Fountain Club," he said, with a grin which creased his cheeks until his retreating chin almost disappeared under the thick lower lip.

Orchil twiddled his long, crinkly, pointed moustache and glanced interrogatively at Harmon; then he yawned, stretched his arms, and rose, pocketing the check, which Ruthven pa.s.sed to him, with a careless nod of thanks.

As they filed out of the card-room into the dim pa.s.sageway, Orchil leading, a tall, shadowy figure in evening dress stepped back from the door of the card-room against the wall to give them right of way, and Orchil, peering at him without recognition in the dull light, bowed suavely as he pa.s.sed, as did Fane, craning his curved neck, and Harmon also, who followed in his wake.

But when Ruthven came abreast of the figure in the pa.s.sage and bowed his way past, a low voice from the courteous unknown, p.r.o.nouncing his name, halted him short.

"I want a word with you, Mr. Ruthven," added Selwyn; "that card-room will suit me, if you please."

But Ruthven, recovering from the shock of Selwyn's voice, started to pa.s.s him without a word.

"I said that I wanted to speak to you!" repeated Selwyn.

Ruthven, deigning no reply, attempted to shove by him; and Selwyn, placing one hand flat against the other's shoulder, pushed him violently back into the card-room he had just left, and, stepping in behind him, closed and locked the door.

"W-what the devil do you mean!" gasped Ruthven, his hard, minutely shaven face turning a deep red.

"What I say," replied Selwyn; "that I want a word or two with you."

He stood still for a moment, in the centre of the little room, tall, gaunt of feature, and very pale. The close, smoky atmosphere of the place evidently annoyed him; he glanced about at the scattered cards, the empty oval bottles in their silver stands, the half-burned remains of cigars on the green-topped table. Then he stepped over and opened the only window.

"Sit down," he said, turning on Ruthven; and he seated himself and crossed one leg over the other. Ruthven remained standing.

"This--this thing," began Ruthven in a voice made husky and indistinct through fury, "this ruffianly behaviour amounts to a.s.sault."

"As you choose," nodded Selwyn, almost listlessly, "but be quiet; I've something to think of besides your convenience."

For a few moments he sat silent, thoughtful, narrowing eyes considering the patterns on the rug at his feet; and Ruthven, weak with rage and apprehension, was forced to stand there awaiting the pleasure of a man of whom he had suddenly become horribly afraid.

And at last Selwyn, emerging from his pallid reverie, straightened out, shaking his broad shoulders as though to free him of that black spectre perching there.

"Ruthven," he said, "a few years ago you persuaded my wife to leave me; and I have never punished you. There were two reasons why I did not: the first was because I did not wish to punish her, and any blow at you would have reached her heavily. The second reason, subordinate to the first, is obvious: decent men, in these days, have tacitly agreed to suspend a violent appeal to the unwritten law as a concession to civilisation. This second reason, however, depends entirely upon the first, as you see."

He leaned back in his chair thoughtfully, and recrossed his legs.

"I did not ask you into this room," he said, with a slight smile, "to complain of the wrong you have committed against me, or to retail to you the consequences of your act as they may or may not have affected me and my career; I have--ah--invited you here to explain to you the present condition of your own domestic affairs"--he looked at Ruthven full in the face--"to explain them to you, and to lay down for you the course of conduct which you are to follow."

"By G.o.d!--" began Ruthven, stepping back, one hand reaching for the door-k.n.o.b; but Selwyn's voice rang out clean and sharp:

"Sit down!"

And, as Ruthven glared at him out of his little eyes:

"You'd better sit down, I think," said Selwyn softly.

Ruthven turned, took two unsteady steps forward, and laid his heavily ringed hand on the back of a chair. Selwyn smiled, and Ruthven sat down.

"Now," continued Selwyn, "for certain rules of conduct to govern you during the remainder of your wife's lifetime... . And your wife is ill, Mr. Ruthven--sick of a sickness which may last for a great many years, or may be terminated in as many days. Did you know it?"

Ruthven snarled.

"Yes, of course you knew it, or you suspected it. Your wife is in a sanitarium, as you have discovered. She is mentally ill--rational at times--violent at moments, and for long periods quite docile, gentle, harmless--content to be talked to, read to, advised, persuaded. But during the last week a change of a certain nature has occurred which--which, I am told by competent physicians, not only renders her case beyond all hope of ultimate recovery, but threatens an earlier termination than was at first looked for. It is this: your wife has become like a child again--occupied contentedly and quite happily with childish things. She has forgotten much; her memory is quite gone. How much she does remember it is impossible to say."

His head fell; his brooding eyes were fixed again on the rug at his feet. After a while he looked up.

"It is pitiful, Mr. Ruthven--she is so young--with all her physical charm and attraction quite unimpaired. But the mind is gone--quite gone, sir. Some sudden strain--and the tension has been great for years--some abrupt overdraft upon her mental resource, perhaps; G.o.d knows how it came--from sorrow, from some unkindness too long endured--"

Again he relapsed into his study of the rug; and slowly, warily, Ruthven lifted his little, inflamed eyes to look at him, then moistened his dry lips with a thick-coated tongue, and stole a glance at the locked door.

"I understand," said Selwyn, looking up suddenly, "that you are contemplating proceedings against your wife. Are you?"

Ruthven made no reply.

"_Are_ you?" repeated Selwyn. His face had altered; a dim glimmer played in his eyes like the reflection of heat lightning at dusk.

"Yes, I am," said Ruthven.

"On the grounds of her mental incapacity?"

"Yes."

"Then, as I understand it, the woman whom you persuaded to break every law, human and divine, for your sake, you now propose to abandon. Is that it?"

Ruthven made no reply.

"You propose to publish her pitiable plight to the world by beginning proceedings; you intend to notify the public of your wife's infirmity by divorcing her."

"Sane or insane," burst out Ruthven, "she was riding for a fall--and she's going to get it! What the devil are you talking about? I'm not accountable to you. I'll do what I please; I'll manage my own affairs--"

"No," said Selwyn, "I'll manage this particular affair. And now I'll tell you how I'm going to do it. I have in my lodgings--or rather in the small hall bedroom which I now occupy--an army service revolver, in fairly good condition. The cylinder was a little stiff this morning when I looked at it, but I've oiled it with No. 27--an excellent rust solvent and lubricant, Mr. Ruthven--and now the cylinder spins around in a manner perfectly trustworthy. So, as I was saying, I have this very excellent and serviceable weapon, and shall give myself the pleasure of using it on you if you ever commence any such action for divorce or separation against your wife. This is final."

Ruthven stared at him as though hypnotised.

"Don't mistake me," added Selwyn, a trifle wearily. "I am not compelling you to decency for the purpose of punis.h.i.+ng _you_; men never trouble themselves to punish vermin--they simply exterminate them, or they retreat and avoid them. I merely mean that you shall never again bring publicity and shame upon your wife--even though now, mercifully enough, she has not the faintest idea that you are what a complacent law calls her husband."

A slow blaze lighted up his eyes, and he got up from his chair.

"You decadent little beast!" he said slowly, "do you suppose that the dirty accident of your intrusion into an honest man's life could dissolve the divine compact of wedlock? Soil it--yes; besmirch it, render it superficially unclean, unfit, nauseous--yes. But neither you nor your vile code nor the imbecile law you invoked to legalise the situation really ever deprived me of my irrevocable status and responsibility... . I--even I--was once--for a while--persuaded that it did; that the laws of the land could do this--could free me from a faithless wife, and regularise her position in your household. The laws of the land say so, and I--I said so at last--persuaded because I desired to be persuaded... . It was a lie. My wife, shamed or unshamed, humbled or unhumbled, true to her marriage vows or false to them, now legally the wife of another, has never ceased to be my wife.

And it is a higher law that corroborates me--higher than you can understand--a law unwritten because axiomatic; a law governing the very foundation of the social fabric, and on which that fabric is absolutely dependent for its existence intact. But"--with a contemptuous shrug--"you won't understand; all you can understand is the gratification of your senses and the fear of something interfering with that gratification--like death, for instance. Therefore I am satisfied that you understand enough of what I said to discontinue any legal proceedings which would tend to discredit, expose, or cast odium on a young wife very sorely stricken--very, very ill--whom G.o.d, in his mercy, has blinded to the infamy where you have dragged her--under the law of the land."

He turned on his heel, paced the little room once or twice, then swung round again:

"Keep your filthy money--wrung from women and boys over card-tables.

Even if some blind, wormlike process of instinct stirred the shame in you, and you ventured to offer belated aid to the woman who bears your name, I forbid it--I do not permit you the privilege. Except that she retains your name--and the moment you attempt to rob her of that I shall destroy you!--except for that, you have no further relations with her--nothing to do or undo; no voice as to the disposal of what remains of her; no power, no will, no influence in her fate. _I_ supplant you; I take my own again; I rea.s.sume a responsibility temporarily taken from me. And _now_, I think, you understand!"