A Transaction in Hearts

A Transaction in Hearts by Edgar Saltus

Christopher Gonfallon, rector of Gethsemane, meets Claire Bucholz, the younger sister of his wife Ruth, when she returns from four years abroad after her father has lost his fortune. Claire’s beauty, unconventional manner, and apparent innocence immediately disturb him. Gonfallon, once an earnest and ambitious clergyman who married Ruth in love, has grown inwardly dissatisfied with marriage, doubtful of faith, and conscious that his affection for his devoted, suffering wife has become habitual rather than passionate. Claire rapidly attracts fashionable visitors, including Trement Yarde, a wealthy young banker whom Gonfallon mistrusts and attempts to forbid her to receive. Claire treats his warnings with irony, while Gonfallon discovers in himself an increasingly violent desire for her. Though he reproaches himself as hypocritical and compares himself to Tartuffe, he kisses Claire and declares his love. She escapes his embraces, alternately mocking, resisting, and unsettling him. His religious convictions weaken further as he turns to skeptical books and questions whether virtue, heaven, and immortality are illusions. Meanwhile, Bucholz tells Gonfallon that he has forged Usselex’s name on a ten-thousand-dollar check after losing money in speculation. He insists that Gonfallon obtain the sum before the bank account is balanced, warning that exposure will destroy both Bucholz and the rector’s reputation. Gonfallon flees temporarily to Bronx when the Countess of Cinq-Cygne dies. There, with the countess’s nephew, Alphabet Jones, he finds and burns two chests that the countess had ordered destroyed. One chest breaks open, revealing the skull of her husband, Count Cinq-Cygne, whom she had apparently killed after he fled with her friend Mira Wheat. The episode horrifies Gonfallon but excites Jones as material for fiction. Jones then learns that his inheritance is only enough to maintain the countess’s estate. On returning, Gonfallon discovers that the forged sum has been anonymously repaid. At a dinner, Jones recounts a supposedly fictional tale about a young woman who visits a rejected suitor late at night and asks him for money. Claire faints while listening, and Gonfallon realizes that, after overhearing her father’s confession, she went to Yarde’s apartment and offered herself in exchange for money to save Bucholz. Yarde gave the money without exacting payment. Gonfallon admires Claire’s sacrifice and tries to prevent further contact between them, but she calls him unprincipled and exposes the weakness beneath his moral authority. Ruth witnesses Gonfallon kissing Claire. Before Gonfallon can explain, Claire announces that she is engaged to Yarde and claims to love him. Gonfallon, humiliated and enraged, imagines attacking Claire, but wakes from the violent vision to Ruth calling him upstairs. Claire later marries Yarde, with Gonfallon himself compelled to officiate. He performs the ceremony while consumed by jealousy and hatred, believing that Yarde understands his feelings. Afterward he asks Claire whether she loves him; she answers sadly that it is Ruth, not she, who loves him. Alone, Gonfallon finds a prayerbook that Claire had given Ruth as a girl, containing pressed flowers and a childish poem about waiting for a wished-for story. Remembering Ruth’s lifelong devotion, kindness, and faith in him, he recognizes that she is the one who has truly loved him. His anger and illusion fade, and in the darkness he leaves his study to seek Ruth.

By Edgar Saltus · First published 1889 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Romance · 11 chapters · 38,681 words

First lines

"Pour estre bien aimé, Il faut aimer bien peu. " Ronsard

The quiet of the morning was punctuated by a housemaid who, aware that the master was astir, was singing, for his benefit, "Jesus loves me," in a treble of irritating insistence. Already the carriage had arrived, and as Gonfallon drew on his gloves he wondered by what token he should recognize the sister of his wife. He had the vaguest memory of her, a slip of a girl who years before had sat opposite him at dinner, the eyes lowered, the hair in pendent plaits. And as his thoughts went back to earlier days, Ruth called to him from the floor above, "If you don't see her at once, ask the captain: she is in his charge."

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A Transaction in Hearts is listed on Textopian as a novella by Edgar Saltus, dated 1889 CE.

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Romance · Love · Relationships · Emotional drama · Psychological fiction · Decadent literature · Victorian era · Passion · Betrayal · Social commentary · Irony · Desire

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