“Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred—I haven’t counted. There may be more….”
“Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”
“I don’t know—that is—they corresponded for years. What’s the odds?” He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
“It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “A long correspondence—one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time—is obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written within a year. At any rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a book, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”
“Not love-letters, you say?”
“Why?” flashed from Glennard.
“Oh, nothing—only the big public is sentimental, and if they WERE—why, you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”
Glennard was silent.
“Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the association with her name?”
“I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel—you won’t mention this to anyone?”
“Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was smiling at him from the hearth.
Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he questioned with loitering indifference—“Financially, eh?”
“Rather; I should say so.”
Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much—should you say? You know about such things.”
“Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say—well, if you’ve got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book is brought out at the right time—say ten thousand down from the publisher, and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I’m talking in the dark.”
“Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the Persian rug beneath his feet.
“I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.
“Of course—you’d have to see them….” Glennard stammered; and, without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by….”
V
The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random—amid laughing counter-charges of incompetence—had shot up in fragrant defiance of their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried. A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the veranda-rail.
The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have grown opaque.
“Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
“Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a visitor?” he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
“Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
“Flamel? Again?”
She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over here.”
Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him next Sunday.”
Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do you want to?”
“Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
“Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her tea, she returned the feminine answer—“I thought you did.”
“I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would be rather jolly; let’s go.”
She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his eye down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest awaited his sickle.
He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap.”
She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall be almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house… she’ll let us have it for almost nothing….”
“Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
“‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’ Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR….”
He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of hostile watchers…. His wife still smiled; and her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her beyond the reach of rescue….
He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her—she had become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for himself was likely to know how to turn over other people’s money.