Running Sands Part 56

"I did not mean to trap you. I meant only to confirm a theory that has been in my mind for some time."

"So you have been suspecting me for some time and hiding your suspicions! Why couldn't you be brave enough to come out with them at the first?"

"Why couldn't you be brave enough to tell me of your love affair?"

"Love affair? There has been no love affair."

Stainton rose and nervously walked to the window. For a few moments he stood with his back to her, his eyes on the moonlit sea.

"Have you noticed," he at last asked, without turning, "that I haven't for some time mentioned your former distaste for the Captain's society?"

Muriel was silent.

"It seemed strange to me at the very beginning," Jim went on; "but I tried hard to misinterpret it. I tried to shut my eyes to it. Then, that night at L'Abbaye, I saw how you felt at the sight of him with the Spanish dancer----"

Muriel had an instant of weakness. During that instant, the low flames of the lamp, the empty sconces, the whole white-panelled room revolved, with an upward motion, slowly around her.

"You saw that!"

"I saw that something inside the restaurant had upset you, and, naturally, as you started down the stairs, I turned about to observe what it was."

The wife fought for her self-control and won it.

"Deceit! Deceit even then!"

"Since you didn't seem to want the matter mentioned, I, of course, did not mention it; but I understood why you wanted to leave Paris--and I understood later why you wanted to go back."

He paused. She scorned to give him a reply.

"To be sure," he presently continued, "I tried, when I learned of your illness, to believe that your illness was really the cause; but I did not wholly believe what I tried to believe. After our trip to Italy, too, there came the night of the fete. I could tell when von Klausen and you came back from the Bois that morning that there was something in the air, and I resolved to give you a fair chance. I was not lost on the boulevards: I separated myself from you."

He was looking at her now. She sprang to her feet. Her features, once beautiful, twisted themselves between amazement and anger.

"A fair chance!" she screamed. "You wanted to give me a fair chance?

You threw me into his arms--or tried to--and you call that a fair chance?"

Stainton, worn and travel-stained, his face dark with coal-dust, which clogged the furrows and accentuated them, appeared grey and old. Yet he smiled quietly.

"Certainly," he said. "While I was in the party, there was no danger; your love for me--or failing your love, your moral strength--need not a.s.sert itself against von Klausen so long as I was by. I absented myself to give your love and your moral strength a fair chance."

"You coward!"

"Not at all. To have feared that you would fail me would have been to be a coward. The only way to end the fear was to give it its full opportunity. Otherwise the fear--a very small one then--would have continued indefinitely: after von Klausen had dropped out of our lives, his influence untried, I should have feared you with other men."

"You dare to say that!"

He was returning to the att.i.tude of mind in which he had entered the room. The novelty of her attack was, from its frequent thrusts, losing its point.

"Why not?" he asked. "The surest thing about a fault of this kind is that it depends wholly upon the person destined to commit it, not at all upon any particular accomplice." He was quite calm again. "If," he went on, "a woman compromises herself with X, at least after she has become a wife, it is only a question of time before she will compromise herself with Y and Z. If she wants to compromise herself with X and only exterior circ.u.mstances interfere to prevent her, she is certain, sooner or later, to commit the fault with Y or Z, either or both, when the Y and Z happen to appear, as appear they infallibly must. Their personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."

Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a lightning-flash on a darkened sea.

"I shan't stay in this room and listen any longer to such things," she declared.

He raised a steady hand.

"Only a moment more, please," he said.

Her reply was merely to stand there before him. He continued:

"So, as I say, I gave you that fair chance. You weren't equal to it. I took you away from Paris again--the next day, wasn't it?--because you wanted to go, but I knew that your wanting to go away from von Klausen was a purely temporary mood of repentance. I had been patient, for I am by nature a patient man; but I grew tired of waiting. When this Austrian turned up here in Ma.r.s.eilles, as I was sure he would soon turn up, I decided to make an end of it. Now"--he spoke as if he were concluding an affair of business--"I have made that end."

"How have you made that end?"

Stainton smiled wanly.

"My dear----" he said.

"Don't call me that."

"Then, Muriel. Muriel, don't try to bluff it out. You can't do it: you are not naturally a liar, and the successful liar is born, not made."

"How have you made an end?"

"By coming back from Avignon; by never going farther away than Avignon."

"You mean that you think--that you dare to think that I--that the Captain and--that we----"

"I don't think," said Stainton in a tone still restrained; "I know.

Given what your temperament has shown itself to be; given, too, the preliminary circ.u.mstances; remembering that von Klausen came to this house----"

"At your invitation!"

"Oh, yes, he came at my invitation. But remembering that he remained alone with you in this room until after midnight--I say, given all these facts, and then adding the determining piece of evidence that I wanted--the evidence of seeing you in his arms--no man in his senses would for one moment doubt----"

"Don't say it! Don't you dare to say it!" She sprang back from him, her disordered hair tossed blackly about her face, her deep eyes blazing.

"Muriel," he cried, "are you still going to say----"

"I am going to say that I hate you! I say that after to-night I will never look at you again! I say I loathe you! I hate you! You liar! You unclean-minded old man!"

He shook under her words as if they had been strange, unexpected blows.

At the sight of him, at the sound of that final phrase in her own high-pitched voice, at the release of the thought of him that had been so long festering in her mind--at first unguessed, then vehemently denied, but always there and always becoming more and more poisonous--the imp of fear leaped from her heart. Jim had once planned to perform a process that he mentally called "making a woman of her": in a way that he had never suspected, his plan had met success. Muriel had achieved maturity.

"Now you listen to me," she commanded.

Her head was thrown back. Her figure was erect. She pointed to a chair.