Stacey let himself in with a latch-key, then hurried up the stairs to his own rooms. Once in his study, he threw himself down upon a couch and lay there for a long time, motionless, his hands thrown back and clasped beneath his head. But there was no relaxation in his stillness. His body was tense, and now and then a spasm contracted the taut muscles of his face. The late western sunlight poured in through the windows and flickered brightly across the wall, and the shrill distant voices of children at play were audible. At last Stacey turned his head slowly to look at a small travelling clock on a stand near the couch. The hands pointed to six-thirty. He got up with an effort, pressed the button of a bell, then sat down at his desk, rested his head in his hands, and stared blindly out of the window.
“If Mrs. Blair is in,” he said, without moving, when Parker entered the room, “please ask her if she will be so kind as to come up here for a few minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man, and went out.
Presently Catherine tapped at the door, and Stacey rose wearily. “Come in!” he called.
She looked fresh and very young to him who felt so old. “You wanted to see me?” she began, then broke off to gaze at him in alarm. “Stacey!” she cried, “what’s the matter?”
“Catherine,” he said in a monotonous voice, “do me a favor, please. Tell my father I won’t be down to dinner—and why. Marian Latimer shot herself this morning. She is dying. I have just been there. It has rather knocked me out.”
Catherine had turned pale, and her eyes were wide with horror. “Oh!” she gasped, then suddenly went closer to him. “Stacey,” she said gently, “sit down.”
He obeyed and resumed his former pose, staring again out of the window. “Don’t let the servants hear what you say,” he went on, in the same dead tone. “It’s to be kept secret. And don’t let father come up to see me. He would be kind, but I can’t see him now.”
She drew in her breath sharply, but said nothing,—only laid her hand on his shoulder.
At this he swung about, as though the touch had loosened something within him. “It’s the ghastly—waste that gets me—so hard!” he cried, his face set with pain. “Death itself—that’s nothing! An episode! But to see so much loveliness, so much fineness, all go wrong—obliquely—to futile death as to—a climax! It’s unbearable!”
“Stacey! Stacey!” Catherine whispered.
“And it’s all my fault—”
“No! No! you mustn’t!”
“But yes! My fault! If I could only have gone on loving her, or if, not loving her, I had married her, things might have been different. Not so—complete a mess! We’d have become adjusted—somehow.”
Catherine drew up a chair swiftly and sat down close to him. “Stacey,” she cried unsteadily, her eyes shining with tears, “I beg of you—you mustn’t! The truth is bad enough,—ah, please don’t go beyond the truth! It was not your fault—only in as much as what happens to any one in the whole world is one’s fault. Poor lovely Marian!—there was something—I don’t know—something twisted in her.”
At this and at the soft compassion of her voice Stacey looked toward Catherine differently. “Twisted—it was what she called herself only half an hour ago,” he said in a gentler tone.
They were silent for a time. Something in the young woman’s clear presence comforted him.
“She looked like a little girl, Catherine,” he said at last, only sorrowfully. “You would not have known her. And so beautiful! Oh, wicked!” Again his face contracted.
And, indeed, though he did not see it at the moment, as poignant an emotion for him as any in all the tragedy lay in the destruction of so much sheer beauty. Afterward, weeks afterward, he perceived this, and recognized with pain that Marian herself had understood it, even tenderly at the last.
The bell of the telephone on Stacey’s desk rang, and he reached slowly for the receiver. Catherine gazed at him apprehensively, but he spoke quietly enough, just a few words, in reply to the message, then hung up the receiver and turned to Catherine.
“She is dead,” he murmured. “She died in her sleep. She never waked after I left her.”
There was nothing to say. The two sat there in silence for some minutes.
“You must go down, Catherine,” Stacey said finally. “It is almost seven. Thank you.”
She rose reluctantly. “You’ll let me have something sent up to you?”
“No! No! I can’t eat!” he exclaimed with revulsion. “I have to think,” he added, “of what to say to Mrs. Latimer. I must go to see her after a while. What can I say?”
Catherine gave him a look in which there was something like pride. But all that she answered was that he must eat something; then went out.
He sat there, reflecting painfully. He felt tired, hopeless, alive in a dead empty world, but he was less tense now.
After a while—in half an hour, perhaps—the door opened and Catherine herself came in with a tray.
He smiled faintly at this. “You will have your way, won’t you?” he remarked; but he ate a little while she sat watching him.
“Stacey,” she asked diffidently, when he had finished, “should you like me to go with you?”
“To Mrs. Latimer’s?” he exclaimed. “Oh, would you? But no,” he added impatiently, “why should I lay things on you?”
“You won’t be doing that. If I could, perhaps, share a little, I should be glad. You’ve had—nearly enough, I think.”
“You’re kind,” he said gruffly. “All right. Come.”
“Now?”
He nodded.
“Then I’ll go for a wrap and come back at once.”
“Oh!” he said, with a start, when she returned, “I must order the car brought around.” And he reached for the telephone.
“It’s at the door,” she replied simply.
And when they went down the stairs they met nobody either there or in the hall. That, too, was Catherine’s work, he thought with a softening touch of gratitude.
He sat silent during the ride, trying to think what he should say to Mrs. Latimer. But he could find nothing; he could only trust to the moment. It was a horrible task. Yet he was not undertaking it as a duty; he was going only because he was overwhelmingly sorry for his old friend and concerned about her. At any rate, Catherine’s quiet presence was of some help. He felt her as not weak in her compassion but strong.
It demanded a real effort for him to ring the bell of the Latimers’ house, but he did so, and after a little while a maid opened the door.
“Has Mrs. Latimer got back yet?” Stacey asked in a low tone.
“Yes, sir, but—she said—”
“I know. That she could not see any one. But she will want to see me, I think. Just let me go quietly in. She is in the drawing-room?”
“Yes, sir,—with Mr. Latimer.”
Stacey winced. This made it harder. But he went quietly through the hall and into the familiar room; and Catherine followed him, a step or two behind. Just across the threshold he paused.
Only a single shaded reading-lamp was burning, and that at the farthest corner of the long room; so that the part nearest Stacey was all in darkness. At first the only person in the room appeared to be Mr. Latimer, who, his hands clasped behind his back, was pacing up and down across the far end of it, from lamp to window and from window to lamp. When he approached the lamp and turned, his face was illuminated from below, so that the chin and the delicate selfish mouth showed clearly, while the eyes and forehead remained shadowy. Stacey could not conquer his feeling of bitter hardness. The man was suffering, no doubt, in his own way, but he was not generous enough—so Stacey thought—to suffer deeply. He looked proud even now, when it was no time for pride; he should have been comforting his wife. And what had he done? What had he done? Could he not understand?
But Stacey gave him only a moment of thought. His eyes were searching the room for Mrs. Latimer. And presently he found her—a wrecked huddled figure on a couch just opposite him. Her face was hidden among the cushions; only her hair, her dark dress, and one clenched hand were visible.
Stacey took a step forward. “Mrs. Latimer,” he said.
She sat up with a gasp; but it was her husband who spoke. “Who is there?” he called sharply, pausing and gazing toward Stacey.
“It is Stacey Carroll, sir.”
Mr. Latimer stiffened. “This is no time for you to come to this house,” he said coldly. “You should know that. I do not wish to see you.”
“No,” Stacey replied. “But I came to see Mrs. Latimer—unless she would prefer not to have me.”
The woman on the couch leaned forward. “Oh, yes, Stacey!” she cried, in a tone that went to his heart. He was sure of himself now; he was indifferent to what Mr. Latimer might say.
The older man stood there, erect in the lamplight, handsome, implacable, but to Stacey non-existent. “Either you or I, Carroll, must leave this house,” he said haughtily. “Both of us—”
But at this Mrs. Latimer had sprung to her feet, tottering a little. “Then,” she cried, in a tense voice that told Stacey much, “it must be you, Herbert! I wish to see Stacey. Oh,” she murmured weakly, but with relief, “and Catherine—you’ve come! How—good!” And she sank down again upon the couch.
As Stacey moved toward her he, too, for a moment thought of Catherine. He knew well how shy, how retiring, even how shrinking she was by nature; yet all through this brief u............