Had this man got hold of his wife's secret?
But this merely sequacious thought was promptly routed. The young man,
who was undeniably good looking and was rumored to possess a certain cold
charm for women--although, to be sure, the wary San Francisco heiress had
so far been impervious to it--was now leaning over Mrs. Price Ruyler with
a coaxing possessive air, and the appeal left Helene's eyes as she smiled
coquettishly and began to talk with her usual animation; but still in a
tone that was little more than a murmur.
She moved her shoulder closer to the man she evidently was bent upon
fascinating, and her long eyelashes swept up and down while her black
eyes flashed and her pink color deepened.
There was a faint amusement mixed with Doremus' habitual air of amiable
deference, and somewhat more of assurance, but he was as absorbed as
Helene and had no eyes for Janet Maynard, on his left, whose fortune ran
into millions.
For a moment Ruyler, who had kept his nerve through several years of
racking strain which, even an American is seldom called upon to survive,
wondered if he were losing his mind. To business and all its fluctuations
and even abnormalities, he had been bred; there was probably no condition
possible in the world of finance and commerce which could shatter his
self-possession, cloud his mental processes. But his personal life had
been singularly free of storms. Even his emotional upheaval, when he had
fallen completely in love for the first time, had lacked that torment of
uncertainty which might have played a certain havoc, for a time, with
those quick unalterable decisions of the business hour; and even his
engagement had only lasted a month.
It was true that during the past six months he had worried off and on
about the shadow that had fallen upon his wife's spirits and affected his
own, but, when he had had time to think of it, before yesterday morning,
he had assumed it was due to some phase of feminine psychology which he
had never mastered. That she could be interested in another man never had
crossed his mind, in spite of his passing flare of jealousy. She was
still passionately in love with, him, for all her vagaries--or so he had
thought-Ruyler was conscious of a riotous confusion of mind that really made him
apprehensive. Had he witnessed that scene on the dummy--this
afternoon?--it seemed a long while ago--had he heard those portentous
words of his mother-in-law to his wife?--had they meant that she had
warned her daughter against the bad blood in her veins, extracted a
promise--broken!--to walk in the narrow way of the dutiful
wife--mercifully spared by a fortunate marriage the terrible temptations
of the older woman's youth? Had Helene confessed ... in desperate need of
help, advice? ... Doremus was just the bounder to compromise a woman and
then blackmail her.... Good God! What was it?