Short Fiction · A Transaction In Hearts (4/12)

III

For a moment Gonfallon stared, open-mouthed, astonished as a yokel at a thimble-rigger. And as Claire picked up the book which she had dropped at his entrance, he stood quite still, groping among the obscurities of her speech. But it was impossible, he told himself, that a girl so fragrant of innocence should wittingly make a remark as paradoxically unanswerable as was that. It was a mistake; he had not heard her words aright, or else she had uttered them as a child utters haphazard a phrase caught up and retained. But something in her attitude, the manner in which she turned the page, the carriage of her head, the abandonment of the body, the indiscretion of a foot uptilted on a cushion, the contraction of the underlip betokening a smile suppressed and suggestive of merriment aroused not by the book she held but by some picture which memory had just disclosed⁠—these things, intercepted in a glance, revealed a Claire unknown and wholly undivined.

Noiselessly as he had entered he turned and left the room. Across the hall was his study; and as he sank on the ample lap of an easy-chair in which it was his custom to scaffold his homilies, suddenly his pulse was stirred. At the moment he made no attempt to dominate, he sat in wonder at himself, the will refractory and perverse. But presently he was on his feet again, his teeth set, and in his eyes that expression which the horseman has when he masters with curb and with knee.

On the mantel before him was a mirror, a convenience serviceable on those occasions when, surprised by some unawaited visit, it was necessary to filch a reflection for the adjustment of neckcloth or of hair. But now in the surprise at a visitant such as he had never encountered before he fronted the mirror, his teeth still set, the jaw unrelaxed; and as he stood the rumor of the inward conflict moved his lips. “Ah, Tartuffe!” he muttered, “is it for this you toiled?”

In his ears a ripple of laughter still rang, a laugh that was sylvan, the laugh of a young faun made merry by the sorceries of spring. “Ah, Tartuffe!” he repeated. And still the ripple continued, insistent, insinuating, jubilant in wantonness, clear and heady as the upper notes of a flute. “Is it for this?”

With the grimace of a hound at a vagabond he glared at his image. He was angered and distraught at the intussusception of a presence more terrible than that which Luther outfaced in his cell. “Do you think,” he cried in menace at himself, “do you think that I have fear of you?” At the unanswering mirror he raised his hand. “What have you to do with her, or she with you?” And as his arm fell again to his side some fume of disgust must have mounted to his brain, for he added, in a murmur, “I am as a Jesuit: I argue with myself.”

“Did you call, Chris?”

Gonfallon turned with a start of a subject awakening from a trance. In the doorway was Ruth.

“Did you call?” she repeated.

He blinked, but made no answer. And Ruth, gazing at him from the doorway, one hand on the woodwork, the other upholding the curtain, her eyes full of interrogations, her lips just parted, her head nimbused with the jonquil of her hair, had about her a suggestion of that grace with which Boucher pleasured the Pompadour. To one as myope as her husband, the lines that extended from the edge of the nostril, the circles that shadowed the cheekbones like inverted circumflexes over an i, were unperceived. Through the saffron shade of the lamp she appeared younger, more tentative, than she had for months, and in her voice which now seemed to reach him across inordinate distances was the caress he had loved so well. But he was still imprisoned in himself. He shook his head and blinked as one does who passes from darkness into light.

“No,” he said, at last, “no⁠—”

“Oh, Chris, you are composing your sermon! Forgive me: I did not mean to interrupt.”

With a finger she threw him an apology and a kiss. The curtain fell again, and she was gone.

Sermon, indeed! The sermon was in that patient face that just had disappeared. He sat down again on the chair, and let his thoughts roam back again to Bronx and the wooing of his wife. When first she had put her hand in his it was as though life were fulfilled to its tips: he had conceived no greater earthly joy than the possibility of calling her his own, to his after-days she had brought the blithest airs, and now, after three years of marriage, if nothing remained save that friendship which is born of love and which the fabulist has declared to be better than love itself, if of the ardors which he had believed inextinguishable only cinders remained, was the fault his own? Surely he had been sincere. It is a maxim in law that against a promise to do something in the future no charge of fraud can lie. And if the maxim hold good in law, why not in love as well? When before God and man he had promised to love her always, had he not as fully intended to keep that promise as the honest trader does who makes a note? If bankruptcy intervene and the note be protested, it is humiliating, no doubt, but conscience at least is undisturbed. And yet an elenchicism such as this one with which, as was his duty, he would have dulled the remorse of any parishioner who had come to him in similar strait, left him rudderless and derelict. Truly the advice we give is rarely that to which we hold. Gonfallon sounded its sophistry with a sneer. He would have given hope itself to be able to touch Ruth’s hand and feel again the electricity which it had once communicated, that spasm which in days gone by had seized him between the shoulder-blades and gone pulsing down the spinal cord, leaving him during the moment that followed quasi-dumb, and ineffectual of speech; indeed he would have given much could the old thrill have outlasted satiety, and, though it were through the very force of love that satiety had been begot, he wondered could the fault be nature’s, not his own.

To Ruth he had brought his firstfruits, and in the bringing he had deemed them imperishable as the apples of the Hesperides. He had revelled in the offering of them; he had laid them glistening at her feet; he had marvelled at the blossoms with which she crowned the gift; he had thought them both enduring as the stars; he would have staked his soul that their twin hearts made one would mount, inseparate, into those realms no eye has scanned, but which the gracious Christ, his Master, has vouchsafed to whomso does believe in Him. These things had been the securest tenets of his marriage-pact. And then, as sometimes happens with those mated over-hastily, he awoke one day to the knowledge that it was the woman he had loved, not the individual⁠—the bottle, not the wine.

Of sweeter than she, one fairer and more gentle, a woman kindlier, juster, yet more debonair, it was not within his power to conceive. She was still to him admirable in each respect, a woman whom as sister he would have adored, as another’s sister he would have envied, but who as wife left him as marble is, unmalleable, and chilling to the touch. Where had the emotions gone? Where were the roses of the yesteryear? Where was the vision he had sought to clasp? Though the flutter of her kiss still hovered, ambient, in the air, he told himself that her love had departed like his own, that between them but one thing subsisted⁠—the sanctity of the marriage-vow, unbreakable by either. Of her, in that regard, he had, of course, no fear. And it was perhaps that very confidence, that security and facility in love, that had brought him to his present pass. Whoso has nothing to desire has nothing left to dread. But for himself he had trembled indeed. Claire had exhaled an atmosphere headier than the headiest breath of spring. There was about her an attraction, undiscerned till that night, but which, latent perhaps for days gone by, had suddenly enveloped and coerced him with its force. But now that too was gone.

Ah, yes, it was gone indeed; and he cracked the joints of his fingers in testimony to his deliverance from its spell. For a second he had been weaker, more unstable than water; and now, as he smiled a trifle grimly at the remembrance, he bethought him of the legends of the saints, of Saint Anthony, Saint Dominick, Saint Maur. It was a disaster which overtook all men. But it needed strength to combat⁠—he would have added faith, but something choked the utterance down⁠—it needed strength; and that strength was his. Again he smiled. He would have no need to cope again. Yet, for the moment, he wondered what sudden invocation of the flesh could have oppressed him so. Nothing, he could have sworn, in connection with that girl that lay sprawled on the sofa across the hall. No, it was not that: it was one of those ills which had afflicted and would continue to afflict many another more steadfast than he. Besides, independent of that, what had he of all men to do with such a thing? aside from his cloth, were not his temples gray? and, save spectacles, what better guarantee against love can there be?

In thought he had really tried to trick himself, but in an instant he was at the mirror again. At school, at the seminary, even so recently as the preceding summer, he had been spoken of as That Handsome Gonfallon. And as he sprang from his seat he remembered a bit of gossip that had been brought him, an anecdote culled in the vestibule of the church, a conversation overheard and apposite to the infatuation of his parishioners, in which the first speaker was reported to have said something about Dr. Gonfallon’s congregation, while the second, interrupting, had interjected a remark unreportable here.

But now, as he stood again before the glass, it was as though it pictured not the present alone but the past as well. He saw a lithe, dark-eyed lad, clear of feature and of mind, hurrying to some distant goal, arrested by a mirror that showed him back not youth, but age.

Through the window a moon luminous as sulphur shone. Beyond, the spires of Gethsemane pierced the night. The street was quiet. From afar came the accent of the Elevated, rushing, dragon-wise, in midair, lulling the neighborhood with the strain of its incessant surge. After a dusk in dead rose, the sky had become visibly blue.

And as he stood, interviewing the night, determining that the pulses should subside with years, from the hall came the rustle of a dress. For a second’s space he clutched at the wainscot. The glass gave him forty years, his blood nineteen. Then at once he was at the door, drawing the curtain on its rings aside.

“H’m,”⁠—he affected a little cough, and held himself as though an accident had brought him there⁠—“h’m, Claire, is that you? I thought you had gone to bed.”

“Going,” the girl answered, negligently, and yawned as she spoke. “One has to come to New York to go to bed early.”

Then, something that he could not afterwards explain, some one of those unanalyzed causes that transform the gentle to the brute, claimed him as its own. His cloth, his vows, the rectory itself, everything, even to the presence of Ruth on the floor above, vanished as had they never been. With a spring his arm was about her neck, his lips were on hers, the odor of her hair, of her face, the moisture of her mouth, were his, and just as he strove to clasp her closer yet, with an undulant movement the girl slipped from his embrace.

“There, don’t hurt a fellow,” she exclaimed; and as she retreated, smiling yet breathless, to a step beyond his reach, she added, with her faun-like ripple, “I say, Chris, you seem to like the breed.”

From strength to weakness there is but a kiss. During the moments that followed, Gonfallon felt as were he astride a runaway horse. At first, as he plunged through unimagined thickets, striving as best he could with knee and curb to stay the flight, a stirrup went, then another; the beast had got its head, and as with ever-increasing speed it bore him over quagmires, obstacles, and intervales, at last his own brain caught fire, and he urged with incitements of spur and of whip. In the distance was everything he had held most dear, the route was strewn with his illusions, gone were his unprompted vows, the truths that had been savors of life unto life fell from him undetained, the white assumptions of conscience at rest vanished with retiring landmarks. And, still in fancy propelled, suddenly he discerned a sense of that freedom which is the synonyme of joy. It was good to feel one’s self untrammelled, delivered of the compunctions of the herd; with every breath he drew came a foretaste of larger life, his lungs expanded with fresh odors, beyond was a new horizon, brutally beautiful, wholly solid, dreamless and real, and in it, fairer than the desire of a fallen god, was Claire, her arms outstretched.