In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading. . . .
At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch. . . . At length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open. . . . It was a horrible sight. . . . A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He had not known it would be like this. . . .
He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
Chapter VII
A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”
The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me you were out and I came upstairs.”
The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
“Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he obstructed her vision of the books.
“I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”
“I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug; adding, uncontrollably–“I suppose Flamel was there?”
“No; he left on the yacht this morning.”
An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
“Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.
He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the most astounding exceptions!”
Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
“Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible for that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”
Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. “All about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of greatness.