just how it was—Oh, Flavia, Flavia, we've found papa, we've found papa! Quick!"
She whirled away toward the stairs, but her father caught her by the arm. "Marcia!" he shouted, in his old raucous voice, "You've got to understand! This"—he hesitated, as if running over all terms of opprobrium in his mind, and he resumed as if he had found them each too feeble—"Bartley hasn't acted under any mistake."
He set the facts before her with merciless clearness, and she listened with an audible catching of the breath at times, while she softly smoothed her forehead with her left hand. "I don't believe it," she said when he had ended. "Write to him, tell him what I say, and you will see."
The old man uttered something between a groan and a curse. "Oh, you poor, crazy child! Can nothing make you understand that Bartley wants to get rid of you, and that he's just as ready for one lie as another? He thinks he can make out a case of abandonment with the least trouble, and so he accuses you of that, but he'd just as soon accuse you of anything else. Write to him? You've got to go to him! You've got to go out there and fight him in open court, with facts and witnesses. Do you suppose Bartley Hubbard wants any explanation from you? Do you think he's been waiting these two years to hear that you didn't really abandon him, but came back to this house an hour after you left it, and that you've waited for him here ever since? When he knows that, will he withdraw this suit of his and come home? He'll want the proof, and the way to do is to go out there and let him have it. If I had him on the stand for five minutes," said the old man between his set teeth,—"just five minutes,—I'd undertake to convince him from his own lips that he was wrong about you! But I am afraid he wouldn't mind a letter! You think I say so because I hate him; and you don't believe me. Well, ask either of these gentlemen here whether I'm telling you the truth."
She did not speak, but, with a glance at their averted faces, she sank into a chair, and passed one hand over the other, while she drew her breath in long, shuddering respirations, and stared at the floor with knit brows and starting eyes, like one stifling a deadly pang. She made several attempts to speak before she could utter any sound; then she lifted her eyes to her father's: "Let us—let us—go—home! Oh, let us go home! I will give him up. I had given him up already; I told you," she said, turning to Halleck, and speaking in a slow, gentle tone, "only an hour ago, that he was dead. And this—this that's happened, it makes no difference. Why did you bring the paper to me when you knew that I thought he was dead?"
"God knows I wished to keep it from you."
"Well, no matter now. Let him go free if he wants to. I can't help it."
"You can help it," interrupted her father. "You've got the facts on your side, and you've got the witnesses!"
"Would you go out with me, and tell him that I never meant to leave him?" she asked simply, turning to Halleck. "You—and Olive?"
"We would do anything for you, Marcia!"
She sat musing, and drawing her hands one over the other again, while her quivering breath came and went on the silence. She let her hands fall nervelessly on her lap. "I can't go; I'm too weak; I couldn't bear the journey. No!" She shook her head. "I can't go!"
"Marcia," began her father, "it's your duty to go!"
"Does it say in the law that I have to go, if I don't choose?" she asked of Halleck.
"No, you certainly need not go, if you don't choose!"
"Then I will stay. Do you think it's my duty to go?" she asked, referring her question first to Halleck and then to Atherton. She turned from the silence by which they tried to leave her free. "I don't care for my duty, any more. I don't want to keep him, if it's so that he—left me—and—and meant it—and he doesn't—care for me any—more."
"Care for you? He never cared for you, Marcia! And you may be sure he doesn't care for you now."
"Then let him go, and let us go home."
"Very well!" said the old man. "We will go home, then, and before the week's out Bartley Hubbard will be a perjured bigamist."
"Bigamist?" Marcia leaped to her feet.
"Yes, bigamist! Don't you suppose he had his eye on some other woman out there before he began this suit?"
The languor was gone from Marcia's limbs. As she confronted her father, the wonderful likeness in the outline of their faces appeared. His was dark and wrinkled with age, and hers was gray with the anger that drove the blood back to her heart, but one impulse animated those fierce profiles, and the hoarded hate in the old man's soul seemed to speak in Marcia's thick whisper, "I will go."
XXXVIII
The Athertons sat late over their breakfast in the luxurious dining-room where the April sun came in at the windows overlooking the Back Bay, and commanding at that stage of the tide a long stretch of shallow with a flight of white gulls settled upon it.
They had let Clara's house on the hill, and she had bought another on the new land; she insisted upon the change, not only because everybody was leaving the hill, but also because, as she said, it would seem too much like taking Mr. Atherton to board, if they went to housekeeping where she had always lived; she wished to give him the effect before the world of having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not to be deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. They lived a very tranquil life, and Clara had no grief of her own unless it was that there seemed to be no great things she could do for him. One day when she whimsically complained of this, he said: "I'm very glad of that. Let's try to be equal to the little sacrifices we must make for each other; they will be quite enough. Many a woman who would be ready to die for her husband makes him wretched because she won't live for him. Don't despise the day of small things."
"Yes, but when every day seems the day of small things!" she pouted.
"Every day is the day of small things," said Atherton, "with people who are happy. We're never so prosperous as when we can't remember what happened last Monday."
"Oh, but I can't bear to be always living in the present."
"It's not so spacious, I know, as either the past or the future, but it's all we have."
"There!" cried Clara. "That's fatalism! It's worse than fatalism!"
"And is fatalism so very bad?" asked her husband.
"It's Mahometanism!"
"Well, it isn't necessarily a plurality of wives," returned Atherton, in subtle anticipation of her next point. "And it's really only another name for resignation, which is certainly a good thing."
"Resignation? Oh, I don't know about that!"
Atherton laughed, and put his arm round her waist: an argument that no woman can answer in a man she loves; it seems to deprive her of her reasoning faculties. In the atmosphere of affection which she breathed,
