The Penitent
By Don Marquis
“You, who are not married,” said the penitent, “cannot know—can never realize——”
He hesitated, his glance wandering over the evidences of luxury, the hints of Oriental artistry, the esthetic effectiveness of Dr. Eustace Beaulieu’s studio.
“Proceed,” said Dr. Beaulieu, suavely. “What I may know is not the important thing. You do not address yourself to me, but through me to that principle of Harmony in the Cosmos which is Spirit—Ultimate Spirit—which we call God. All that I can do is assist you to get into Accord with the Infinite again, help you to vibrate in unison with the Cosmic All.”
“You are right; I do not look to you,” said the penitent, “for ease of mind or spirit.” And a fleeting half-smile showed in his eyes, as if some ulterior thought gave a certain gusto to the manner in which he stressed the pronoun you. But the rest of his scarred and twisted face was expressionless, beneath the thick mask of a heavy gray-streaked beard that grew almost to his eyes.
* Author’s Note: “The Penitent” was suggested by two poems,
“A Forgiveness,” by Browning, and “The Portrait,” by Owen
Meredith.
Dr. Eustace Beaulieu was the leader—nay, the founder—of one of the many, many cults that have sprung up in New York City and elsewhere in America during the past three or four decades. An extraordinary number of idle, well-to-do women gathered at his studio two or three times a week, and listened to his expositions of ethics de luxe, served with just the proper dash of Oriental mysticism and European pseudoscience. He was forty, he was handsome, with magnetic brown eyes and the long sensitive fingers of a musician; he was eloquent, he was persuasive, he was prosperous.
When he talked of the Zend-Avesta, when he spoke of the Vedantic writings, when he touched upon the Shinto worship of the Nipponese, when he descanted upon the likeness of the Christian teachings to the tenets of Buddhism, when he revealed the secrets of the Yogi philosophy, when he hinted his knowledge of the priestly craft of older Egypt and of later Eleusis, his feminine followers thrilled in their seats as a garden of flowers that is breathed upon by a Summer wind—they vibrated to his words and his manner and his restrained fervor with a faint rustling of silken garments and a delicate fragrance of perfume.
Men were not, as a rule, so enthusiastic concerning Dr. Eustace Beaulieu and his cult; there were few of them at his lectures, there were few of them enrolled in the classes where he inducted his followers into the more subtle phases of ethics, where he led them to the higher planes of occultism, for a monetary consideration; few of them submitted themselves to him for the psychic healing that was one of his major claims to fame. And this scarred and bearded stranger, who limped, was one of the very few men who had ever intimated a desire to bare his soul to Dr. Beaulieu, to tell his story and receive spiritual ministration, in the manner of the confessional. These confessionals, after the public lectures, had been recently introduced by Dr. Beaulieu, and they were giving him, he felt, a firmer grip upon his flock—his disciples, he did not hesitate to call them.
“I repeat,” said the penitent—if he was a repentant man, indeed—“no bachelor can know what love really is. He cannot conceive of what the daily habit of association with a woman who seems made for him, and for him alone, may mean to a man. My love for my wife was almost worship. She was my wife indeed, I told myself, and she it was for whom I worked.
“For I did work, worked well and unselfishly. Every man must have some work. Some do it from necessity, but I did it because I loved the work—and the woman—and thus I gained a double reward. I was a politician, and something more. I think I may say that I was a patriot, too. The inheritor of wealth and position, I undertook to clear the city in which I lived, and which my forefathers had helped to build, of the ring of grafters who were making the name of the town a byword throughout the nation. The details of that long and hard strife are not pertinent. I fought with something more than boldness and determination; I fought with a joy in every struggle, because I fought for something more than the world knew. The world could not see that my inspiration was in my home; that in the hours of battle my blood sang joyously with the thought of—her! Was it any wonder that I worked well?
“One day, as I sat in my office downtown, the thought of her drew me so strongly that I determined to surprise her by coming home unexpectedly early. It was summer, and we were living in our country home, an old-fashioned stone residence a couple of miles from the outskirts of the city. The house was situated at the edge of a park that was, indeed, almost virgin forest, for the whole estate had been in my family for nearly a hundred years.
“I determined to surprise my wife, and at the same time to take the rare relaxation of a suburban walk. I was soon outside the city limits, and through the zone where vacant lots broaden into fields; and then I left the road, cutting across the fields and finally plunging into the woods on my own place. Thus it was that I approached the house from the rear and came suddenly out of the timber into my own orchard. I seldom walked from town, and it was a good long hour before my usual time of arrival, although in that sheltered and woody place the dusk was already gathering in.
“As I entered the orchard a man made a hurried exit from a vine-wreathed pergola where my wife often sat to read, cast one look at me, cleared the orchard fence, and made off through the woods, disappearing at once among the boles of the trees.
“He had not turned his full face toward me at any time, but had shielded it with an upflung arm; from the moment he broke cover until his disappearance there had passed less time than it takes to tell it, and I was scarcely to be blamed if I was left guessing as to his identity, for the moment. For the moment, I say.
“There had been so much fright in his manner that I stood and looked after him. The thought came to me that perhaps here was a man who had had an affair with one of my servants. I turned toward the pergola and met—my wife!
“She was a beautiful woman, always more beautiful in her moments of excitement. She confronted me now with a manner which I could not help but admire. I trusted her so that she might readily have passed off a much more anomalous situation with an easy explanation. But in her face I read a deliberate wish to make me feel the truth.
“I looked at her long, and she returned the gaze unflinchingly. And I recognized her look for what it was. She had cast off the chains of deceit. Her glance was a sword of hatred, and the first open thrust of the blade was an intense pleasure to her. We both knew all without a word.
“I might have killed her then. But I did not. I turned and walked toward the house; she followed me, and I opened the door; she preceded me inside. She paused again, as if gathering all her forces for a struggle; but I passed her in silence, and went upstairs to my own room.
“And then began a strange period in my life. Shortly after this episode came a partial triumph of the reform element in my city; the grafters were ousted, and I found myself with more than a local reputation, and thrust into an office. My life was now even more of a public matter than before. We entertained largely. We were always in the public eye. Before our guests and in public we were always all that should be. But when the occasion was past, we would drop the mask, turn from each other with dumb faces, and go each our severed ways.
“For a year this sort of life kept up. I still worked; but now I worked to forget. When I allowed myself to think of her at all, it was always as of some one who was dead. Or so I told myself, over and over again, until I believed it.
“One day there was a close election. I was the successful candidate. I was to go to Congress. All evening and far into the night my wife and I played our parts well. But when the last congratulation had been received, and the last speech made, and the last friend had gone, and we were alone with each other once more, she turned to me with a look something like the one she had met me with on that summer evening a year before.
“‘I want to speak with you,’ she said.
“‘Yes?’
“They were the first words we had exchanged in that year, when not compelled by the necessities.
“‘What do you wish to speak about?’ I asked her.
“‘You know,’ she said, briefly. And I did know. There was little use trying to deny it.
“‘Why have you asked me no questions?’ she said.
“I would have made another attempt to pass the situation over without going into it, but I saw that that would be impossible. She had reached the place where she must speak. I read all this in her face. And looking at her closely with the first candid glance I had given her in that year, I saw that she had changed greatly, but she was still beautiful.
“‘I did not choose to open the subject with you,’ I said; ‘I thought that you would explain when you could stand it no longer. Evidently that time has come. You were to me like a dead person. If the dead have any messages for me, they must bring them to me unsolicited. It was not my place to hunt among the tombs.’
“‘No,’ she said, ‘let us be honest, since it is the last talk we may ever have together. Let us be frank with each other, and with ourselves. I was not like a dead person to you. The dead are dead, and I am not. You asked me no questions because you disdained me so. You despised me so—and it was sweet to you to make me feel the full weight of your scorn through this silence. It was better than killing me. Is that not the real reason?’
“‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘that is it. That is the truth.’ “‘Listen,’ she said, ‘it would surprise you—would it not—to learn that I still love you—that I have loved you all along—that you are the only man I have ever really loved—that I love you now? All that is incredible to you, is it not?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is. You must pardon me, but—it is incredible to me.’
“‘Well, it is true,’ she said, and paused a moment. ‘And I can tell you why it is true, and why—why—the—the other was true, too. You—you do not understand women,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think if you were a smaller man, in some ways, you would understand them better. Sometimes I think that you are too—too big, somehow—ever to make a woman happy. Not too self-centered; you are not consciously selfish; you never mean to be. But you give, give, give the riches of your nature to people—to the world at large—instead of to those who should share them.
“‘Oh, I know—the fault is all mine! Another kind of woman—the right kind for you—the kind you thought I was—would not have asked for all that was a necessity for me; would have been big enough to have done without it; would have lost herself in your love for all humanity. That is the kind of woman you thought I was. And I tried to be. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t that big.
“‘I did sympathize with your work; I could understand it; I loved to hear you tell about it. But I loved it because it was you that told me about it. You didn’t see that! You thought I was a goddess. It was enough for your nature to worship me; to set me upon a pedestal and to call me your inspiration; oh, you treated me well—you were faithful to me—you were generous! But you neglected me in a way that men do not understand; that some men will never understand. While you were giving your days and your nights, and every fiber of your brain and body, to what you called the cause of the people, you more and more forgot you had a wife. Again and again and again I tried to win you back to what you were when I married you—to the time when your cause was not all—but you wouldn’t see; I couldn’t make you feel.
“‘Then I thought I would show you that other men were not such fools as to overlook what was wasted on you. But you never noticed; you trusted me too much; you were too much engrossed. And then I began to hate you. I loved you more than I ever did before, and at the same time I hated you. Can you understand that? Do you see how women can hate and love at the same time? Well, they can.
“‘At last—for I was a fool—I took a lover!”
“‘What was his name?’ I broke in.
“‘His name?’ she cried; ‘that does not matter! What matter if there was one of them, or two of them. That is nothing!—the name is nothing—they were nothing—nothing but tools; the symbols of my rage, of my hatred for you; whether I loved or hated you, you were all—always.’
“‘They were merely convenient clubs with which to murder my honor in the dark—is that it?’ I said.
“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is it, if you choose to put it so.’ And she spoke with a humility foreign to her nature.
“‘And what now?’ I asked.
“‘Now,’ she said, ‘now that I have spoken; now that I have told you everything; now that I have told you that I have gone on loving you more and more and more—now—I am going to die.’
“‘You have not asked me to forgive you,’ I said.
“‘No,’ she replied. ‘For what is forgiveness? I do not know exactly what that word means. It is supposed to wipe out something that has happened, is it not?—to make things the same as they were before! But it does not do that. That which has happened, has happened; and you and I know it.’
“‘You had better live,’ I said; ‘I no longer consider you worthless. I feel that you are worthy of my anger now.’
“Her face cleared almost into something like joy.
“‘I have told the truth, and I raise myself from the depths of your scorn to the place where you can feel a hot rage against me?’ she asked.
“‘Yes,’ I said. And the light on her face was like that of which some women are capable when they are told that they are beloved.
“‘And if I die?’ she asked.
“‘Who knows but that you might climb by it?’ I said. ‘Who knows but what your death might turn my anger to love again?’ And with that I turned and left her there.
“That night I sat all night in my study, and in the morning they brought me the news that she was dead. She must have used some poison. What, I do not know; and the physicians called it heart-failure. But what is the matter, Doctor?”
“Nothing, nothing!” said Dr. Beaulieu. And he motioned for the narrator to proceed. But there were beads of perspiration upon the healer’s forehead, and a pallor overspread his face.
“I had condemned her to death,” the penitent went on, “and she had been her own executioner. She had loved me; she had sinned against me; but she had always loved me; she had hated the flesh that sinned, and scorned it as much as I; her life was intolerable and she had been her own executioner.
“The revulsion of feeling came. I loved her again; now that I had lost her. All that day I shut myself up, seeing no one; refusing to look at the dozens of telegrams that came pouring in from friends and acquaintances, thinking—thinking—thinking——
“Night came again; and with it the word that the best friend I had was in the house; a friend of my college days, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me in many a fight, then and since. He had come to be under the same roof with me in the hour of my bitterest bereavement, was the word he sent—how bitter now, he did not know. But he did not intrude upon the privacy of my grief. And I sat thinking—thinking—thinking—
“Suddenly the idea came to me that I would go upstairs to the chamber where she was, and look at her once more. Quietly I stole up the stairs, and through the hushed, dim house, on into the gloomy room, lighted only by the candles at the head and foot of the curtained couch on which she lay.
“In the room beyond, the watchers sat. I stole softly across the floor so as not to attract their attention; there was no one in the room with the body. I approached the couch, and with my hand put by the curtain——
“Then I dropped it suddenly. I remembered a locket which she had formerly worn that had always had my picture in it, in the early days of our married life; a locket that had never left her neck, waking or sleeping. And I wondered——
“I wondered something about women which no one has ever been able to tell me; not even a woman. I wondered if any light o’ love had ever been able to make her feel anything like real love, after all! I wondered if she had ever hugged the thought of her sin to her bosom, even as she had at first hugged the thought of our real love—hers and mine. I wondered if she had ever carried about with her a sentimental reminder of her lover, of any lover, as she had once done of her husband—and how long ago! I wondered how important a thing it had seemed to her, after all! She had reconciled herself to herself, with her death, and made me love her again. And I wondered to how great an extent she had ever fooled a lover into thinking she loved him! There are depths and contradictions and cross-currents in the souls of women that even women do not know, far less men—I wondered whose picture was in that locket!
“I thrust my hand through the curtains of the bed again, and then jumped back.
“I had felt something warm there.
“Did she live, after all?
“At the same instant I heard a movement on the other side of the bed. I went around.
“My best friend was removing his hand from the curtains on the other side, and in his hand was the locket. It was his hand that I had felt.
“We stared at each other. I spoke first, and in a whisper, so that the others in the next room, who had come to watch, should not hear.
“‘I came for that,’ I said.
“‘The locket? So did I,” he said. And then added quite simply, ‘My picture is in it.’
“‘You lie!’ I whispered, shaken by a wind of fury. And yet I knew that perhaps he did not lie, that what he said might well be true. Perhaps that was the cause of my fury.
“His face was lined with a grief and weariness terrible to behold. To look at him you would have thought that there was nothing else in the world for him except grief. It was a great grief that made him careless of everything else.
“‘It is my picture,’ he said. ‘She loved me.’
“‘I say that you lie,’ I repeated. ‘She may have played with you—but she never loved any one but me—in her heart she never did!’
“‘You!’ And because he whispered, hissing out the words, they seemed to gain in intensity of scorn. ‘You! She hated you! You who neglected her, you with your damned eternal politics, you who could never understand her—love? You who could never give her the things a woman needs and must have—the warmth—the color—the romance—the poetry of life! You!—with your cold-blooded humanitarianism! I tell you, she loved me! Why should I hesitate to avow it to you? It is the sweetest thing on earth to me, that she loved me! She turned from you to me because——’
“‘Don’t go into all that,’ I said. ‘I heard all about that last night—from her! Open the locket, and let us see whose face is there!’
“He opened it, and dropped the locket. He reeled against the wall, with his hands over his face, as if he had been struck a physical blow.
“I picked the toy up and looked at it.
“The face in the locket was neither his face nor mine. It was the face of—of the man who ran from the pergola and vaulted over the orchard wall into the woods that summer night a year earlier; the man whom I had not, for the moment, recognized.
“We stood there, this man who had been my best friend and I, with the locket between us, and I debated whether to strike him down——”
The narrator paused. And then he said, fixing Dr. Beaulieu with an intent gaze:
“Should I have struck him down? You, who are a teacher of ethics, who set yourself up to be, after a fashion, a preacher, a priest, a spiritual director, tell me, would I have been justified if I had killed him?”
Dr. Beaulieu seemed to shrink, seemed to contract and grow smaller, physically, under the other man’s look. He opened his mouth as if to articulate, but for a second or two no word came. And then, regaining something of his usual poise, he said, although his voice was a bit husky:
“No! It is for the Creator of life to take life, and no other. Hatred and strife are disharmony, and bring their own punishment by throwing the soul out of unity with the spirit of love which rules the universe.”
It sounded stereotyped and emotionless, even in Dr. Beaulieu’s own ears, as he said it; there was a mocking gleam in the eyes of the other man that spoke of a far more vital and genuine emotion. Dr. Beaulieu licked his lips and there came a knot in his forehead; beads of perspiration stood out upon his brow.
“You were right,” said Dr. Beaulieu, “in not striking him down. You were right in sparing him.”
The bearded man laughed. “I did not say that I spared him,” he said.
Dr. Beaulieu looked a question; a question that, perhaps, he dared not utter; or at least that he did not care to utter. He had dropped completely his rôle of spiritual counselor; he regarded his visitor with an emotion that might have been horror and might have been terror, or might have been a mixture of the two. The visitor replied to the unspoken interrogation in the healer’s manner.
“I did not strike him down. Neither did I spare him. I waited and I—I used him. I know how to wait; I am of the nature that can wait. It was years before fate drew all things together for my purpose, and gave him into my hands—fate, assisted by myself.
“I waited, and I used him. The details are not pertinent for it is not his story that I am telling. I piloted him to the brink of destruction, and then—then, I saved him.”
“You saved him?” Dr. Beaulieu was puzzled; but his fear, if fear it was, had not abated. There was a frank menace, now, in his visitor’s air. And the healer seemed to be struggling, as he listened to the tale, to force some reluctant brain-cell to unlock and give its stored memories to his conscious mind.
“I saved him. I saved him to be my creature. I broke him, and I saved him. I made him my slave, my dog, my—my anything I choose to have him. I have work for him to do.”
Again the man paused, looking about the rich profusion of Dr. Beaulieu’s studio. There was a table in the room which contained a number of curios from Eastern lands. The visitor suddenly rose from his chair and picked from among them a thin, keen-bladed dagger. It was a beautiful weapon, of some Oriental make; beautiful in its lines; beautiful with the sullen fire of many jewels blazing in its hilt—an evil levin that got into the mind and led the thoughts astray even as the dainty deadliness of the whole tool seduced the hand to grasp and strike. As his visitor, strangely breaking the flow of his narrative, examined and handled the thing, Dr. Beaulieu shuddered.
“The man is as much my tool,” said the visitor slowly, “as this dagger would be your tool, Dr. Beaulieu, if you chose to thrust it into my breast—or into your own.”
He laid the dagger down on the table, and resumed his seat. Dr. Beaulieu said nothing, but he found it difficult to withdraw his eyes from his visitor’s steady stare. Slumped and sagged within his chair, he said nothing. Presently the visitor went on.
“I had a fancy, Dr. Beaulieu; I had a fancy! It suited me to make my revenge a less obvious thing than striking down the old friend who had betrayed my love and confidence, a less obvious thing than striking down the other man—the man whose face was in the locket.”
As he spoke he took from his pocket a locket. He opened it, and gazed upon the face. The healer half rose from his chair, and then sank back, with a hoarse, inarticulate murmur. His face had turned livid, and he trembled in every limb. It was evident that the missing scene which he had sought before had suddenly been flashed upon the cinema screen of his recollection. He remembered, now——
“It was my fancy, Dr. Beaulieu, to make one of them take revenge upon the other, that I might thus be revenged upon them both.”
He suddenly rose, and forced the locket into the healer’s nerveless grasp.
“That face—look at it!” he cried, towering over the collapsed figure before him.
Compelled by a will stronger than his own, Dr. Beaulieu looked. It was the counterfeit presentment of himself within. It fell from his trembling fingers and rolled upon the floor. The cultist buried his face in his hands.
The other man stepped back and regarded him sardonically for a moment or two.
“I should not wonder,” he said, “if the man who used to be my best friend would pay you a visit before long—perhaps in an hour, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month.”
He picked up the dagger again, and toyed with it.
“This thing,” he said, impersonally, trying the point upon his finger, “is sharp. It would give a quick death, a sure death, an almost painless death, if one used it against another man—or against one’s self.”
And without another word he turned and left the room.
Dr. Beaulieu sat and listened to his retreating footsteps. And, long after they had ceased to sound, Dr. Beaulieu still sat and listened. Perhaps he was listening for some one to come, now that the bearded man had left. He sat and listened, and presently he reached over to the table and picked up the dagger that the visitor had laid down with its handle toward him. He pressed its point against his finger, as the other man had done. It was sharp. It would give, as the fellow had said, “a quick death, a sure death, an almost painless death.”
And as he whispered these words he was still listening—listening—waiting for some one to come——
