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Updated: May 12, 2025
She had come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her own malleability and endurance; she had done so much with herself that she had come to think that there was nothing which she could not do; like swimmers, overbold, who reckon upon their strength and their power to hoard it, forgetting the ever-changing moods of their adversary, the sea. And d'Esquerre was a man to reckon with.
It was a famous spot, and Noble was very proud of it. "What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down and putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big rustic affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?" he asked. "The lodge?" repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. "Why, that seems almost a shame, doesn't it, after d'Esquerre has used it?"
It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of him which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she had reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to so much that she had never really doubted she would be equal to this.
When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerre was to spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his engagement for the London opera season, they considered it another striking instance of the perversity of things.
What he had was that, in his mere personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something without which to women life is no better than sawdust, and to the desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly poor bargains are due. D'Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the Metropolitan had become the temple of a cult.
She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the seriousness of work. One evening two weeks after d'Esquerre had sailed, Caroline was in the library giving her husband an account of the work she had laid out for the gardeners. She superintended the care of the grounds herself. Her garden, indeed, had become quite a part of her; a sort of beautiful adjunct, like gowns or jewels.
She had gone there for a quiet hour every day during the two weeks since d'Esquerre had left them. It was the sheerest sentiment she had ever permitted herself. She was ashamed of it, but she was childishly unwilling to let it go. Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not able to sleep. The night was close and warm, presaging storm.
Only as the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the thing have been loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with her; so heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was crushed down into darkness. The fact that d'Esquerre happened to be on the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been here, beside her, it could scarcely have hurt her self-respect so much.
It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerre first came into the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of life. The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless.
Then she relaxed a little, feeling that there was a barrier to be counted upon between her and that world of visions and quagmires and failure. Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond d'Esquerre came to stay with them.
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