第12章

He reached the fourth house quickly, and as quickly ran up the steps; his hand was upon the bell when his eye suddenly caught sight of his wife's pass-key still in the lock.She had evidently forgotten it.Here was a chance to mischievously banter that habitually careful little woman! He slipped it into his pocket and quietly entered the dark but perfectly familiar hall.He reached the staircase without a stumble and began to ascend softly.

Halfway up he heard the sound of his wife's hurried voice and another that startled him.He ascended hastily two steps, which brought him to the level of the half-opened transom of the kitchen.

A candle was burning on the kitchen table; he could see everything that passed in the room; he could hear distinctly every word that was uttered.

He did not utter a cry or sound; he did not even tremble.He remained so rigid and motionless, clutching the banisters with his stiffened fingers, that when he did attempt to move, all life, as well as all that had made life possible to him, seemed to have died from him for ever.There was no nervous illusion, no dimming of his senses; he saw everything with a hideous clarity of perception.

By some diabolical instantaneous photography of the brain, little actions, peculiarities, touches of gesture, expression and attitude never before noted by him in his wife, were clearly fixed and bitten in his consciousness.He saw the color of his friend's overcoat, the reddish tinge of his wife's brown hair, till then unnoticed; in that supreme moment he was aware of a sudden likeness to her mother; but more terrible than all, there seemed to be a nameless sympathetic resemblance that the guilty pair had to each other in gesture and movement as of some unhallowed relationship beyond his ken.He knew not how long he stood there without breath, without reflection, without one connected thought.He saw her suddenly put her hand on the handle of the door.He knew that in another moment they would pass almost before him.He made a convulsive effort to move, with an inward cry to God for support, and succeeded in staggering with outstretched palms against the wall, down the staircase, and blindly forward through the hall to the front door.As yet he had been able to formulate only one idea--to escape before them, for it seemed to him that their contact meant the ruin of them both, of that house, of all that was near to him--a catastrophe that struck blindly at his whole visible world.He had reached the door and opened it at the moment that the handle of the kitchen-door was turned.He mechanically fell back behind the open door that hid him, while it let the cruel light glimmer for a moment on their clasped figures.The door slipped from his nerveless fingers and swung to with a dull sound.

Crouching still in the corner, he heard the quick rush of hurrying feet in the darkness, saw the door open and Demorest glide out--saw her glance hurriedly after him, close the door, and involve herself and him in the blackness of the hall.Her dress almost touched him in his corner; he could feel the near scent of her clothes, and the air stirred by her figure retreating towards the stairs; could hear the unlocking of a door above and the voice of her mother from the landing, his wife's reply, the slow fading of her footsteps on the stairs and overhead, the closing of a door, and all was quiet again.Still stooping, he groped for the handle of the door, opened it, and the next moment reeled like a drunken man down the steps into the street.

It was well for him that a fierce onset of wind and sleet at that instant caught him savagely--stirred his stagnated blood into action, and beat thought once more into his brain.He had mechanically turned towards his own home; his first effort of recovering will hurried him furiously past it and into a side street.He walked rapidly, but undeviatingly on to escape observation and secure some solitude for his returning thoughts.

Almost before he knew it he was in the open fields.

The idea of vengeance had never crossed his mind.He was neither a physical nor a moral coward, but he had never felt the merely animal fury of disputed animal possession which the world has chosen to recognize as a proof of outraged sentiment, nor had North Liberty accepted the ethics that an exchange of shots equalized a transferred affection.His love had been too pure and too real to be moved like the beasts of the field, to seek in one brutal passion compensation for another.Killing--what was there to kill?

All that he had to live for had been already slain.With the love that was in him--in them--already dead at his feet, what was it to him whether these two hollow lives moved on and passed him, or mingled their emptiness elsewhere? Only let them henceforth keep out of his way!

For in his first feverish flow of thought--the reaction to his benumbed will within and the beating sleet without--he believed Demorest as treacherous as his wife.He recalled his sudden and unexpected intrusion into the buggy only a few hours before, his mysterious confidences, his assurance of Joan's favorable reception of his secret, and her consent to the Californian trip.What had all this meant if not that Demorest was using him, the husband, to assist his intrigue, and carry the news of his presence in the town to her? And this boldness, this assurance, this audacity of conception was like Demorest! While only certain passages of the guilty meeting he had just seen and overheard were distinctly impressed on his mind, he remembered now, with hideous and terrible clearness, all that had gone before.It was part of the disturbed and unequal exaltation of his faculties that he dwelt more upon this and his wife's previous deceit and manifest hypocrisy, than upon the actual evidence he had witnessed of her unfaithfulness.