He raised his clenched hands and saw that they were trembling and dropped them. “Clem was a dangerous man, a menace, or might have been if he had been successful. He worked at the very roots of our nation to destroy us. I don’t like to say this, Henrietta — I don’t forget you are my sister — but now that he’s dead, you had better know the truth.”
Henrietta remained calm. “Well, William, we don’t understand each other. We never did. But someday it will be proved that Clem was right. That is my faith. And when he is proved right, William, you will be defeated, you and with you the Old Tiger and his beautiful wife and all the rest of your kind. How wrong that Old Empress was whom Mother continues to worship!”
“Henrietta, you’re talking very wickedly.”
“I daresay.”
She was so calm, so immovably stubborn, that for a moment he felt quite sick with rage, exactly as he had so often felt when they were children together in China. But he managed to follow her into the hall and help her on with her wrap, a black wool cape. For she was determined to leave him and, so far as he could see, to leave them all. She would not allow him to tell the others that she was going.
“No use disturbing them,” she said in her short fashion.
So he let her out of the door himself and then stood at a window watching her. She did not call a cab. Instead she began to walk down the street, her bare head held very high, and the wind blowing hard and her cape flying out behind her. It was a clear night, and he could see a strip of stars above. At the far corner she stopped for a bus. He could still see her waiting there, and he would have continued to watch her except that one of those miserable creatures came shambling up to her. Under the light of the street lamp William saw her open her handbag and take out money and give it to the beggar, thereby encouraging, he thought bitterly, all such persons everywhere. He pulled the curtains together across the window and trembled with anger. He had been angry with Henrietta all his life, and with that fellow Clem!
He stood behind the curtains, thick and velvet, and summoned his old arrogant spirit. He would not suffer fools! He closed his eyes, and waited. No reassurance rose to meet his soul’s demands. He wished he had not thought of Clem. He saw him again now. Inside his brain, inside his closed eyelids, he saw Clem, that boy, intrepid in the Chinese street, ready to fight, Clem marching unbidden into his office. The fellow had no breeding, never knew his place. Dead, luckily! He had the world to himself, now that Clem was dead.
He opened his eyes and heard faintly the music that Emory made and mingled with it the soft movement of dancing feet. He turned away from the window. Then he felt the familiar chill upon his heart. The old childish doubt of himself, the profound eternal doubt that had haunted him from his earliest memory, fell upon him again, this time so heavily that he felt too tired to shake it off.
What if he had always been wrong? The vague shape of victory — was it he? Or was it Clem? His imagination, diseased and tortured by his soul’s perpetual uncertainty, lifted Clem from the grave, brought him back to life, clothed him in the dark garments of doubt and fear.
Could Clem be right? If so, then he himself was wrong and being wrong was doomed. But was Clem right? How could he ever know?