The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself
with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the
extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a
tragic importunity. He knew, of course, that they were wonderful;
that, unlike the authors who give their essence to the public and
keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of
her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of tenderness.
Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost, by
the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her
interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy;
but he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the
production of a distinguished woman; had never measured the
literary significance of her oppressive prodigality. He was
almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation
of her love had never weighed on him like this gift of her
imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her something
to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified his
claim.

He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and
in the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy
some alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He
had the sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of
another self observing from without the stirring of subconscious
impulses that sent flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At
length he stood up, and with the gesture of a man who wishes to
give outward expression to his purpose--to establish, as it were,
a moral alibi--swept the letters into a heap and carried them
toward the grate. But it would have taken too long to burn all
the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one fitted
the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
put them back into the locked drawer.

III

It was one of the laws of Glennard's intercourse with Miss Trent
that he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to
give her up. There was a special charm about the moments thus
snatched from the jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their
significance was on this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed
the added gravity of her welcome.

His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her
nearness had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of
view, so that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once
into a rational perspective. In this redistribution of values the
sombre retrospect of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud
on the edge of consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved
woman can render the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his
illusions about her rival. It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn's
memory to serve as a foil to Miss Trent's presence, and never had
the poor lady thrown her successor into more vivid relief.

Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be
renewed by rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil
surface to the demonstrations of others, and it was only in days
of storm that one felt the pressure of the tides. This
inscrutable composure was perhaps her chief grace in Glennard's
eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely the locking of
empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss
Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made
him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the
neophyte.

"You didn't come to the opera last night," she began, in the tone
that seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a
reflection on it.

He answered with a discouraged gesture. "What was the use? We
couldn't have talked."

"Not as well as here," she assented; adding, after a meditative
pause, "As you didn't come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead."

"Ah!" he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach
him from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was
their wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One
felt them to be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were
capable of intervals of serene inaction.

"We had a long talk," Miss Trent went on; and she waited again
before adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked
her graver communications, "Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad
with her."

Glennard looked up with a start. "Abroad? When?"

"Now--next month. To be gone two years."

He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. "Does she
really? Well, I want you to go abroad with ME--for any number of
years. Which offer do you accept?"

"Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration," she
returned, with a smile.

Glennard looked at her again. "You're not thinking of it?"

Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were
so rare that they might have been said to italicize her words.
"Aunt Virginia talked to me very seriously. It will be a great
relief to mother and the others to have me provided for in that
way for two years. I must think of that, you know." She glanced
down at her gown which, under a renovated surface, dated back to
the first days of Glennard's wooing. "I try not to cost much--but
I do."

"Good Lord!" Glennard groaned.

They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument.
"As the eldest, you know, I'm bound to consider these things.
Women are such a burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but
with his own children to provide for it isn't very much. You see,
we're all poor together."

"Your aunt isn't. She might help your mother."

"She does--in her own way."

"Exactly--that's the rich relation all over! You may be miserable
in any way you like, but if you're to be happy you've got to be so
in her way--and in her old gowns."

"I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia's old gowns," Miss Trent
interposed.

"Abroad, you mean?"

"I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad
will help."

"Of course--I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting
its advantages negatively."

"Negatively?"

"In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on
what it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course,
to get away from a life like this." He summed up in a disparaging
glance the background of indigent furniture. "The question is how
you'll like coming back to it."

She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. "I
only know I don't like leaving it."

He flung back sombrely, "You don't even put it conditionally
then?"

Her gaze deepened. "On what?"

He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and
paused before her. "On the alternative of marrying me."

The slow color--even her blushes seemed deliberate--rose to her
lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves
into a smile and she waited.

He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose
nervous exasperation escapes through his muscles.

"And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!"

Her eyes triumphed for him. "In less!"

"The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be
then? It's slaving one's life away for a stranger!" He took her
hands abruptly. "You'll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo?
I heard Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht
over to the Mediterranean--"

She released herself. "If you think that--"

"I don't. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean." He
broke off incoherently. "I believe your Aunt Virginia does,
though. She somehow connotes Hollingsworth and the
Mediterranean." He caught her hands again. "Alexa--if we could
manage a little hole somewhere out of town?"

"Could we?" she sighed, half yielding.

"In one of those places where they make jokes about the
mosquitoes," he pressed her. "Could you get on with one servant?"

"Could you get on without varnished boots?"

"Promise me you won't go, then!"

"What are you thinking of, Stephen?"

"I don't know," he stammered, the question giving unexpected form
to his intention. "It's all in the air yet, of course; but I
picked up a tip the other day--"

"You're not speculating?" she cried, with a kind of superstitious
terror.

"Lord, no. This is a sure thing--I almost wish it wasn't; I mean
if I can work it--" He had a sudden vision of the
comprehensiveness of the temptation. If only he had been less
sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave the situation the base
element of safety.

"I don't understand you," she faltered.

"Trust me, instead!" he adjured her, with sudden energy; and
turning on her abruptly, "If you go, you know, you go free," he
concluded.

She drew back, paling a little. "Why do you make it harder for
me?"

"To make it easier for myself," he retorted.

IV

Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than
usual, turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.

He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the
librarian was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative
request for letters--collections of letters. The librarian
suggested Walpole.

"I meant women--women's letters."

The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.

Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. "I mean letters to--to
some one person--a man; their husband--or--"

"Ah," said the inspired librarian, "Eloise and Abailard."

"Well--something a little nearer, perhaps," said Glennard, with
lightness. "Didn't Merimee--"

"The lady's letters, in that case, were not published."

"Of course not," said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.

"There are George Sand's letters to Flaubert."

"Ah!" Glennard hesitated. "Was she--were they--?" He chafed at
his own ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.

"If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or
Madame de Sabran--"

But Glennard insisted. "I want something modern--English or
American. I want to look something up," he lamely concluded.

The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.

"Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I'll have
Merimee's letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn't
it?"

He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a
cab which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at
a small restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.

Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible
impulse had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was
bad enough to interfere with the girl's chances by hanging about
her to the obvious exclusion of other men, but it was worse to
seem to justify his weakness by dressing up the future in delusive
ambiguities. He saw himself sinking from depth to depth of
sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to renounce his hold on
her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the highest
feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such
base elements.

His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He
tore her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded
the first page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the
forerunner of evil.

"My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day
after to-morrow. Please don't come till then--I want to think the
question over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won't you help me
to be reasonable?"

It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn't
stand in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been
living some other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he
must drop back into his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to
grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material
difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like a
fog.

"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.

He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of
a man philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by
another.

Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known
Flamel since his youth could have given no good reason for the
vague mistrust that he inspired. Some people are judged by their
actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of
defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency of view was
vaguely divined to include himself. Simple minds may have
resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his
perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge
against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of
those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may
occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy
escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could
no more be worn in Flamel's presence than a surplice in the
street.

"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the
younger man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead? You'll
see one bore instead of twenty."

The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its
one claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest
of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive
dilettanteism. Against this background, which seemed the visible
expression of its owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine
books detached themselves with a prominence, showing them to be
Flamel's chief care.

Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines
of warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the
uncorking of Apollinaris.

"You've got a splendid lot of books," he said.

"They're fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of
the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking
of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets,
began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--
"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as
tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days
when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as
society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift
compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down
on me almost as much as the students."

Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book
after another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over
the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages.
Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript.

"What's this?" he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.

"Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf. I've been going in for that
sort of thing lately." Flamel came up and looked over his
shoulders. "That's a bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--
and here are some letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville."

Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. "Who was Madame
Commanville?"

"His sister." He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him
with the smile that was like an interrogation point. "I didn't
know you cared for this kind of thing."

"I don't--at least I've never had the chance. Have you many
collections of letters?"

"Lord, no--very few. I'm just beginning, and most of the
interesting ones are out of my reach. Here's a queer little
collection, though--the rarest thing I've got--half a dozen of
Shelley's letters to Harriet Westbrook. I had a devil of a time
getting them--a lot of collectors were after them."

Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets.
"She was the one who drowned herself, wasn't she?"

Flamel nodded. "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty
per cent. to their value," he said, meditatively.

Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined
Flamel. He was in no humor to be amused by the older man's talk,
and a recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy
tide.

"I believe I must take myself off," he said. "I'd forgotten an
engagement."

He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of
a duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed
itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering
desire to stay and unbosom himself to Flamel.

The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
pressure on his arm.

"Won't the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars.
I don't often have the luck of seeing you here."

"I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely. He found
himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low
stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.

Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him
through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man
to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was
implicit in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the
outrageous loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of
his nerves.

"I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard
himself asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he
had laid aside.

"Oh, so-do--depends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him
thoughtfully. "Are you thinking of collecting?"

Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way round."

"Selling?"

"Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--"

Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.

"A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who
left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he
was fond of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I
suppose, that they might benefit me somehow--I don't know--I'm not
much up on such things--" he reached his hand to the tall glass
his host had filled.

"A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?"

"Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to him--by one
person, you understand; a woman, in fact--"

"Oh, a woman," said Flamel, negligently.

Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather
think they'd attract a good deal of notice if they were
published."

Flamel still looked uninterested. "Love-letters, I suppose?"

"Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well.
They were tremendous friends, he and she."

"And she wrote a clever letter?"

"Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn."

A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the
words had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.

"Great Scott!" said Flamel, sitting up. "A collection of Margaret
Aubyn's letters? Did you say YOU had them?"

"They were left me--by my friend."

"I see. Was he--well, no matter. You're to be congratulated, at
any rate. What are you going to do with them?"

Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones.
"Oh, I don't know. I haven't thought much about it. I just
happened to see that some fellow was writing her life--"

"Joslin; yes. You didn't think of giving them to him?"

Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a
bronze Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment
of an Italian cabinet. "What ought I to do? You're just the
fellow to advise me." He felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.

Flamel sat with meditative eye. "What do you WANT to do with
them?" he asked.

"I want to publish them," said Glennard, swinging round with
sudden energy--"If I can--"

"If you can? They're yours, you say?"

"They're mine fast enough. There's no one to prevent--I mean
there are no restrictions--" he was arrested by the sense that
these accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the
strongest check on his action.

"And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?"

"No."

"Then I don't see who's to interfere," said Flamel, studying his
cigar-tip.

Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint
Catherine framed in tarnished gilding.

"It's just this way," he began again, with an effort. "When
letters are as personal as--as these of my friend's. . . . Well,
I don't mind telling you that the cash would make a heap of
difference to me; such a lot that it rather obscures my judgment--
the fact is if I could lay my hand on a few thousands now I could
get into a big thing, and without appreciable risk; and I'd like
to know whether you think I'd be justified--under the
circumstances. . . ." He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to
him at the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink
lower in his own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of
weighing the temptation than of submitting his scruples to a man
like Flamel, and affecting to appeal to sentiments of delicacy on
the absence of which he had consciously reckoned. But he had
reached a point where each word seemed to compel another, as each
wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure behind it; and
before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--"You don't think
people could say . . . could criticise the man. . . ."

"But the man's dead, isn't he?"

"He's dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--"

Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard's scruples gave
way to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an
inopportune reluctance--!

The older man's answer reassured him. "Why need you assume any
responsibility? Your name won't appear, of course; and as to your
friend's, I don't see why his should, either. He wasn't a
celebrity himself, I suppose?"

"No, no."

"Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn't that
make it all right?"

Glennard's hesitation revived. "For the public, yes. But I don't
see that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to
publish them at all?"

"Of course you ought to." Flamel spoke with invigorating
emphasis. "I doubt if you'd be justified in keeping them back.
Anything of Margaret Aubyn's is more or less public property by
this time. She's too great for any one of us. I was only
wondering how you could use them to the best advantage--to
yourself, I mean. How many are there?"

"Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven't counted. There may be
more. . . ."

"Gad! What a haul! When were they written?"

"I don't know--that is--they corresponded for years. What's the
odds?" He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.

"It all counts," said Flamel, imperturbably. "A long
correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been
written within a year. At any rate, you won't give them to
Joslin? They'd fill a book, wouldn't they?"

"I suppose so. I don't know how much it takes to fill a book."

"Not love-letters, you say?"

"Why?" flashed from Glennard.

"Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they
WERE--why, you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn's love-
letters."

Glennard was silent.

"Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
association with her name?"

"I'm no judge." Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into
his overcoat. "I dare say I sha'n't do anything about it. And,
Flamel--you won't mention this to anyone?"

"Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You've got a big thing."
Flamel was smiling at him from the hearth.

Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while
he questioned with loitering indifference--"Financially, eh?"

"Rather; I should say so."

Glennard's hand lingered on the knob. "How much--should you say?
You know about such things."

"Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if
you've got enough to fill a book and they're fairly readable, and
the book is brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down
from the publisher, and possibly one or two more in royalties. If
you got the publishers bidding against each other you might do
even better; but of course I'm talking in the dark."

"Of course," said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had
slipped from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic
spirals of the Persian rug beneath his feet.

"I'd have to see the letters," Flamel repeated.

"Of course--you'd have to see them. . . ." Glennard stammered;
and, without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate
"Good-by. . . ."

V

The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It
had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the
geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers
in a bonnet. The garden was prospering absurdly. Seed they had
sown at random--amid laughing counter-charges of incompetence--had
shot up in fragrant defiance of their blunders. He smiled to see
the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch. The
tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler
mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried. A breeze
shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to
boil. So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of
a stage setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see
her step forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous
happiness from the veranda-rail.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7