Madam Sapphira by Edgar Saltus

Like a lethargic snake disturbed, winter dragged itself away. April came, and with it an eager glitter, the surprise of violets, skies of silk, wadded with films of white cotton, all the caresses and surrenders of spring.

Upper Fifth Avenue was well in the movement, alive with smart traps, Piccadilly accents, gems of bonnets, and grooms, the arms folded, impassible, correct. In all the world prettier women there are not than in that parade which circles through the Park, and descends again just in time to intercept the dusk. No, nor daintier either.

And pretty and dainty as the prettiest and daintiest, Mrs. Carol Nevius looked that spring. On her lips was the pink of the seashell, and in the depths of her sultry blue eyes the faintest petition for that sympathy which imaginary wrongs deserve. Ah, it was a pleasure to see her.

That pleasure was not enjoyed by her husband. But in those days his pleasures were few. Women, whom he had known all his life, forgot to remember him. Men, with whom he had lived on terms of offhand familiarity, had become punctiliously polite.

These things were nothing in comparison to others. The letter which he had sent rather blurred to his wife had been returned through Tooth and Tooth, with the intimation that he was persecuting her. The letter which he had sent to Miss Adulam had been answered by her mother; the girl was lying at the house of her uncle, Erastus Wilberforce, too ill to hold a pen. From Tredegar no answer came, a rumor merely that the boy was drinking himself to death.

Then, too, the divorce required in such haste that service by publication was necessary, languished, moribund and mute. And not at all because of the calendar. On motion it could have gone before a referee at once. But the Snaiths had other matters to attend to, though a girl was dying because of them, and a lad was throwing his life away.

Nevius ceased to be seen. His office was closed. The Canal Company, with perfect civility, dispensed with his services; other corporations for whom he had acted withdrew their business from his hands. That Mr. Snaith had been at work he understood, but it was long before he understood that that gentleman's object was to attack the sinews of war, and thereby, the law's delays continuing, to force him to capitulate. When the understanding did come to him, he reflected with some satisfaction that while skies were still fair he had cut that gentleman in the street.

Meanwhile, he stalked, uncompanioned, through the untellable loneliness of that ghastly house, seeking a clue to the mystery that was devastating three lives.

That Hilda had cared for him he had to believe, or else to regard her as an actress more consummate even than Rachel. For where was the actress who could assume a role and hold it, impeccably, not for a season alone, not so many nights a week, but every minute of seven years? That she knew her accusations to be false he was now convinced. With these for premises what conclusion could he draw? It could not be that after years of tenderness she had left him, because there were moments when he was irritable and perverse. No, surely that was not the cause. Nor could it be that she had left him because her father had threatened disinheritance. Judas, indeed, had been bribed, yet, while in the present instance the bribe was greater, still, though times had changed and living become more expensive, Nevius was unable to accept any solution such as that. Beside, not being a bit more heroic than the rest of us, a conclusion of that kind diminished him in his own esteem.

In the night of his perplexity a single ray had come. Jones had enjoyed a second conversation with this lady, in which Mrs. Nevius, after stating that the man whose name she had taken, was heedless beyond the power of words, that he had constantly borrowed her buttonhook, added, by way of summing up, that she had married him uniquely to go into society, and as he had refused to take her, he should bear the consequences without complaint.

That was the ray of light, tremulous and thin no doubt, but which, by reason of the darkness in which he groped, led him ultimately to what he regarded as the day. As stepping-stones he had two facts, one pathological, the other psychological. The pathological fact was this: Women who at recurrent intervals suffer greatly, are afflicted not only physically, but mentally as well. Their minds become the haunt of vagaries, of illusions, sometimes of madness, too. For these sufferings, for these vagaries and illusions, there is but one cure, one to which nature prompts -- motherhood. The psychological fact hung like a corollary to the first. When a woman has lived seven years with a man and borne him no child, unintentionally it may be, yet instinctively that man she hates.

At the intervals alluded to, Hilda, he was aware, had suffered for days with an intensity of agony which was pitiful to behold. Moreover, as the years accumulated, the union had remained unblessed. Such maternal affection as she possessed had been given to him, to the cat; but Nature, who is not to be balked, was there and watching, and this was the revenge.

Such was the solution to which at last he arrived. The accusations which she had made had been hatched in the distemper of her brain, and the venomous hatred which she had abruptly displayed was but the working of a natural law.

Logical as it was, this solution did not by any means come at once. Winter had gone, spring was going, and still he groped until, aided by the ray which Jones had intercepted, suddenly he divined the truth. She is insane, he decided, and told himself that of that insanity he would cure her yet.