Idols

It was Irene Merriam’s hour of greatest content when she looked into her heart for a fugitive desire and smiled at finding none. And this was a source of all the more comfort, because she was a woman who gave unsparingly of herself to life, and made large claims upon life in return. She sat in a leathern armchair by the fireplace, listening to the talk of her two companions, who were sitting by the dinner table over their coffee. Now and then she interposed a remark, but lazily, preferring to watch the play of expression on their faces, to dream dreams about them, and to realise her own happiness. This after-dinner scene was a familiar one; familiarity had made it dearer. She had grown to regard it as an essential in her scheme of life, like sleep and food and raiment.

Of the two men, one was her husband, Gerard Merriam; the other, his life-long, intimate friend. They had chummed together at school, at the University; had joined the same Inn of Court, and had been called to the bar together; and in spite of wide divergence of taste and character, had remained in close relationship to the present day.

It was on the homeward voyage, after a Long Vacation trip to India, that they had met Irene, a lonely girl returning from the grave of a father whose deathbed she had gone out too late to witness. Both men fell in love with her. The rivalry becoming mutually obvious, each gave the other a fair field. The wooing continued in London till success fell upon Gerard. On his meeting with Irene after her marriage, the other, Hugh Colman, bowed low over her hand, kissed it and put a loyal friendship at her service. A proud bearing, emphasised by steel-blue eyes and a supercilious up-sweep of a heavy auburn moustache, gave distinction to the action. He had rather a courtly way of doing things. The tears started to her eyes. She had been greatly drawn to him before, and pitied him out of her girlish heart for having lost in his rivalry; but from that moment she loved him with a pure friendship, and made it a dear object of her life to intensify the brotherly affection between the two men. In fact she had raised her conception of this Orestes and Pylades relationship to a kind of cult, of which she herself was the devoted and impassioned priestess. During the six years of her married life Hugh had dined with them at least once a week. Lately he had taken a flat in their immediate neighbourhood, and his visits had grown more frequent. Gerard, being a man of few words, had not said much to evince his gratification, but Irene had sounded the note of welcome loud enough for the two.

As she lay back in her chair watching them, a spice of admiration flavoured her thoughts. Both were men of fine physique. Gerard was six feet two, of huge frame, with deep, sloping shoulders indicative of great strength. Hugh, of somewhat slighter build, better proportioned, holding his head erect on square shoulders; finer, too, of face than Gerard, who had heavy features, eyes of uncertain blue and a reddish moustache cut short at the ends. The one face gave the impression of a man proudly scornful, quick in quarrel, with a Celtic strain of sensitiveness; the other that of a man slow in method, determined of purpose, shy of demonstration—one suggesting rather than revealing strength—a dangerous face to trust. Of the two, Hugh was pre-eminently the man more likely, on first sight, to win a woman’s heart in a joint contest. Even Gerard himself had wondered at his success. When he questioned his wife, she answered, lifting glorious eyes of faith, “Because you are you.” And that was an end of the matter. But perhaps it was the suggestion of reserved strength in the man that had influenced her from the first in his favour, and an intuition, such as so many women have trusted like a divine revelation, that in a great crisis of life the one would be living rock and the other shifting sand.