THE INTERPELLATION

She stood behind the centre table in the reception-room, fingering, with rather a pathetic effort to appear at ease, the leaves of an open pamphlet that lay near the call-bell on the table before her. Under the electric light of the old-fashioned chandelier above, her hat partly shading her face bent down, and with her gloves in one hand, Louise’s eyes saw nothing of what they looked at. She could not have named one word of the printed pages passing slowly under her sensitive fingers; she could not even call to mind the words she was soon to speak, so intently were her ears keyed to listening for the familiar stride of her husband’s feet; it was a sound that had too often brought her unhappiness to be at any time lightly awaited. When at last she heard it, she suffered acutely, nor would she look up even when she knew he had halted in the open doorway, for she was determined he should speak first.

Durand entered the room, carrying his overcoat on his arm and with his hat in his hand; the hat he laid, with something of an air, on the table as he reached it, and faced Louise. And he was too preoccupied to notice that the servant who conducted him to the reception-room had closed the door as he withdrew.

“I understand you want to see me?” he said, speaking as if to a stranger on business.

The grating quality of his voice seemed not particularly harsh in the words, but Louise so dreaded and detested all of its qualities that any words would have served as a challenge.

She stiffened defensively, apprehension took wings, her mind cleared. “I have a question to ask, Robert,” she said, looking up at him from across the table.

“What’s your question?” he inquired coolly.

“Since I saw you last I have become a Catholic. Will you accept baptism, that you may live with me again?”

“What!” His exclamation, weighted with contempt, sufficiently rejected the thought, but he added a definite, emphatic word: “No!”

“I won’t try to tell you how it happened--” she continued.

“Don’t!”

“--nor why. And what I have further to say will seem very strange to you.”

He stood with one hand on the back of a chair that faced her. “A good many of your ideas have seemed strange to me,” he retorted harshly.

“My religion,” she continued, not heeding his contemptuous tone, “imposes a duty on me; it has become necessary for me to offer, under certain conditions, to live with you again as your wife.”

Of all the possibilities he had anticipated, none were within the slightest range of what he now heard. “Well!” he exclaimed, sparring for breath. “This _is_ a go!” He eyed her intently--as if, with her will or against it, to read her mind. But for the first time, looking into her face, he realized he could not do that which he had once done. Something new in her eyes, some impalpable barrier, seemed now to screen her thoughts. “What do you mean by ‘certain conditions’?” he finished by asking suspiciously.

She was ready. “That I be free,” she answered quietly, “at all times to practise my religion without hindrance of any kind; and that you do not compel me to do anything against my conscience.”

Durand threw out a little smoke-mask of his own. His eyes, dwelling instinctively on her erect figure, and noting the rounded cheeks, flushed under her lifted veil, had impressed her comeliness anew on his senses. She looked very pretty. Maymie, he had complained to Simms, though still sprightly, was already close to fat; and when once he had told her she was eating too much, swore at him--being of a sensitive temperament--and slapped his face.

“Look here, Louise,” he said, coming back patronizingly to the present situation, “you’ve always suffered from enlargement of the conscience. That’s what used to be the matter with you.”

She made an involuntary gesture of disdain. Unhappily, it served only to attract him. Durand, in his dealings both with men and women, loved about the same degree of active protest from them that a cat enjoys in the struggles of a mouse.

“I suppose you know we’ve been divorced lately,” he continued. “Catholics don’t believe in divorce, do they?”

“Certainly,” returned Louise collectedly, “not in divorce as you understand it.”

“After they’re divorced they can’t marry anybody else, can they?”

She met each thrust evenly. “Not,” she answered, “if they have been validly married.”

The suspicion of a grin crossed Durand’s face. “So you’d like your wicked husband back.”

“It is my duty,” she repeated in a frosty monotone, though with rising uneasiness, “to offer to live again with you as your wife, under the conditions I have named. But only under those conditions.”

It seemed as if her very aloofness added to her present danger. Durand stepped closer to the table in front of her. “Look here, Louise,” he repeated--and she almost shuddered at the thawing in his tone--“this is the first time I’ve talked business with you since we quarrelled that night in your room; maybe we’ve both learned something since. You got me hot; I guess I talked pretty rough. But I never really had anything against you. You were foolish to fuss about my little riots. A red-blooded man has got to be free to live his life. If you’d be a sport once in a while yourself you wouldn’t mind my fun. You’ve got the sparkle in you for a good time, if you’d warm up a little. That’s all that ever made trouble between us--you’re too frosty. You could outdance and outsing, and, for that matter, outdrink any chicken in the coop--if you’d _do_ it.”

All her latent hatred of the man before her glowed at his words. Indeed, she had never detested him so much, because fear was not now uppermost as it had long been in her submerged years. So intense was her feeling that restraint became difficult. If she controlled herself it was only by thinking of another man, one waiting, and for whom she was making her desperate fight for liberty. She looked at Durand steadily. “Never expect me to dance as you want drunken women to dance. Never expect me to sing, half drunk, the songs your friends sing; never expect me to drink as they drink. I hate it!” She threw her aversion into her tones. Durand, looking at her with increasing interest, laughed. This sort of a spirit was new in Louise.

“Well,” he asked lazily, “you could drink with me once in a while all by your lonesome, couldn’t you, kitten?” He laughed again. “Remember the night you wouldn’t drink whiskey straight, and I put the gin in it when you asked for water? You had the Follies put to sleep that night!”

Her face flushed painfully. She reddened to her neck, and for an instant stared past him, in humiliation. Then she fixed her eyes steadily on his. “I didn’t know, that night,” she said quietly, “what whiskey was.”

“That wasn’t my fault. I was full of it when I married you.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well,” he persisted, “didn’t I always do everything I could for you? Did I ever refuse you money?”

“Yes.”

“Not often,” he exclaimed, not quite pleased. “Maybe sometimes when you wanted to give it away. Louise, if you’d brace up--just be a good pal once in a while and meet my friends like friends, you and I could waddle along like two ducks. This is a gay old world; but if you want to be happy, you’ve got to give it a chance to make you happy.”

She instinctively drew back her head. “I can’t dance through life with friends without homes, women without names, men without decency. I tried to make a home for you; I loved it--you loved every place else. I loved children--you abominated them.”

“We want to live while we live, don’t we? Not mould in a nursery. Come! Meet me half-way. I’ll be reasonable; you’ve been badly advised. That man Janeway, not content with playing traitor to me and secretly fanning my trouble with my men, has stung me for a big settlement on you in this divorce suit--cripples me, with the worst time ahead in the steel business since 1893.”

She almost started with the fear of what Janeway’s persistence in the settlement might now do.

“Together,” he went on, speaking fast now, “we can make a go of the thing, much better than if we split our resources. You’re a good business woman--as Gertrude never gets tired of reminding me. I’m not stuck on marrying Montgomery; it’s she that’s keen for that. What do you want in a reconciliation?”

It was the cruelest of all the moments. She felt the ground slipping from under her feet. While he spoke, she was praying desperately for help to know what to say. All she could think of she mechanically uttered. “I will do my duty toward you as a wife. But”--and then came the inspiration she had asked for--“do not expect me ever again to merge my means with yours. As long as we live, my estate must always be separate. Nor will I ever again live with you such a life as you have lived, Robert.”

She, who knew its lines so well, could perceive in his face the blow her decision to retain control of her estate had been. A sneering changed his expression. “There you go again,” he said with a snap. “More conscience--you’ve always had that after the first cocktail.”

“I can’t be the chum of the companions who came between us before,” she said composedly, though both knew they were not talking of the real blow to his pretensions.

“Look here, Louise,” he began, with his favorite opening; but there was a harder note in his voice, “this thing looks a little queer to me. I’ll ask you a question: Do you come to me of your own free will?”

She paused slightly. “Yes,” she said at length.

“No one told you to, eh? Why don’t you answer? Are Christians supposed to tell the truth?”

“Yes.”

“And to answer questions?”

“If one has the right to ask them.”

“Am I your husband, or not?”

“I suppose you are, in one sense.”

“Then if a husband has the right to ask the truth of his wife”--he was enjoying his high rôle--“I ask you, who told you to come to me in this way?”

She welcomed the question. “Bishop Marion,” she answered, quite unafraid.

He flew into a rage. “He thinks if I take you back, he’ll get all my money some day, eh?”

“Bishop Marion told me it was my duty to ask you what I have asked to-night.”

“So that’s the wrinkle! This meddlesome Bishop tries to run you back on _me_!”

“Do you wish time, Robert, to think over what I have asked you?”

He raised his head defiantly. “No! Not on your life!”

“Then,” she exclaimed swiftly, “we have debated enough. You do not wish to accept my proposal.”

“And have this rascally Bishop running to my house to see you?” She was restfully silent. “And have his sneaking priests,” stormed Durand, “spying around among my men?”

She turned her face half away. “Don’t conjure up foolish things,” she said, lifting her shoulders.

“See here,” flamed Durand--a new and angry thought crossed his mind--“has Henry Janeway had a hand in this scheme?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, quite sure now of her ground.

“Did he help put you up to this?” demanded Durand.

“Mr. Janeway advised me strongly not to do what I have just done.”

“Of course not,” retorted Durand. “A bird to pluck in hand is worth a dozen in the bush. Janeway wants his fifty-per-cent fee right now out of the money you’re getting from me!”

Her attitude, her involuntary shrinking with cold impatience, expressed her indifference to his temper and threats. She looked at him without an effort. “What have I to do with all this?” she asked coldly. “You will not take me under the conditions I have named.”

“Conditions be damned! Will you live with me and play the dutiful chicken as you never would play it before?”

“No!”

“No!”

Turning, with a quick breath, from his presence, Louise waited for nothing more. As if to escape the air, she hastened to the door of the antechamber from which she had come. With her hand on the knob, and with the door ajar, she turned toward him for the last time. “Good night!” she murmured swiftly and, passing out, closed the door behind her.