Men and Wives Read online

  “That is the worst of it,” said Gregory, with tears under his words. “She had nothing; she felt she had nothing. Her own courage was all she had. It gave way, and it meant the end.”

  “That is how I should wish my son to feel about me,” said Agatha, as though struck by this realisation, “if I could be in the same place. We will imagine it for a moment for your sake. Of course he would know I could not choose that way out. It is not quite what we all call courage. But if I were not as I am, and could do the same, I should wish him to feel as you do.”

  “Would you dare to do it?” said Gregory.

  “It is not a question of daring to do it,” said Agatha, lifting her head. “It is a question rather of daring not to do it. Ah, I remember when my husband died. It did take some daring.”

  “Are you speaking honestly?” said Gregory.

  “What did you say?” said Agatha.

  “I said, ‘Are you speaking honestly?’”

  “It is of no good to ask a question if you are not sure about that. The answer would mean nothing.”

  “I never think those answers do mean anything. You are right that it was a useless question. I know we all give the answers. I should not have said the things that lead to them. Of course my trouble should stay where it is.”

  “Surely not, when you are talking to an old friend. If I have made you feel that, I have failed you. That is how we must put it.”

  “No, you have been too forbearing. The person does not exist who would not fail me at the moment. I make too much demand. Rachel will be killed amongst us all.”

  “Lady Hardisty is staying with you?” said Agatha.

  “Yes, for a few days. Sir Percy is utterly kind to us.”

  “She is a very charming woman,” said Agatha.

  “Who is?” said Geraldine, entering the room with her sister. “Of the many women in the neighbourhood who is your choice?”

  “Charm is rarer than women,” said Kate.

  “That is the point,” said Geraldine.

  “Lady Hardisty,” said Agatha in an easy, open tone.

  “Yes, she is charming. I should say brilliant is more her word,” said Geraldine.

  “Fortunate creature, to offer such a choice of words!” said Kate. “She undoubtedly does offer it. I was going to say clever.”

  “She is certainly an effective talker,” said Agatha, moving with a soft rustle to the tea-table. “It gives one quite a thrill to see her come in and sight her victim. We are certainly indebted to her for a good deal of enlivening though perhaps we ought not always to enjoy it as we do.”

  “I did not know she made victims,” said Geraldine.

  “Didn’t you? Oh, yes,” said Agatha.

  “Another gift,” said Kate. “But I had not observed it. Her humour strikes me as so kind.”

  “True humour is always kind,” said Agatha. “And Lady Hardisty is not without the knowledge of it. By no means. But she takes a pleasure sometimes in getting her shafts home. Oh yes, she does. Haven’t you been struck by it? Oh yes.”

  “I believe I have noticed her getting them in at you, Agatha,” said Geraldine.

  “Well, it is no wonder if I have perceived it then,” said Agatha, laughing and looking round, as she stooped to offer something to Kate. “I don’t think it is anything to be surprised at, if it has not escaped me.”

  “You poor thing!” said Geraldine. “Ought we to have come to your rescue? I don’t remember more than half noticing it.”

  “I don’t remember noticing it at all,” said Agatha, laughing again, and motioning Gregory to keep his seat. “But it is no wonder, if it was so, that something came home. It would have been the last thing she was out for, to fail of that. I am glad I saved her effort from being quite wasted.”

  “Even though your perceptions were rather dim,” said Geraldine.

  “Yes, well, it is a thing I am hardly prepared for,” said Agatha, standing up and speaking with deliberate frankness. “It is a thing I should never do myself, and that does not predispose me to think it likely that anyone else should do it. But if I have afforded any satisfaction, I am delighted.”

  “Rather a sardonic kind of delight,” said Geraldine.

  “No,” said Agatha consideringly. “No, I do not think so. I should honestly have no objection to being the target for a little innocent fun, or the excuse for it, if you like. I think there is nothing we should rightly object to in that position.”

  “Then I should wrongly object,” said Geraldine. “Nobody would dare to use me for such purposes. It is no wonder Lady Hardisty settles on you. Perhaps she would not do it if she knew you.”

  “I am sure she would intend nothing that was really ill-natured or malicious,” said Agatha, glancing at Gregory. “I think I found her shafts rather flattering than otherwise, though she did not intend them to be so. Missiles often hit the mark better when they are not aimed.”

  “I thought you had not noticed them!” said Geraldine.

  “I must be going. Thank you very much for putting up with me. I said I would be home early,” said Gregory.

  “Now what I think you want, is a succession of long nights,” said Agatha. “You take my advice and see that you get them. If I were coming with you I should not leave it in your hands.”

  “Poor boy, he was very silent,” said Kate. “I am sure I don’t wonder.”

  “I wonder he came,” said Geraldine. “I should have felt too self-conscious in my sensitive youth.”

  “Oh, he had plenty to say when he first came in, before he had an audience,” said Agatha. “That might have made him self-conscious; I daresay it did. He came to get it all off his mind, I think.”

  “What did he say?” said Geraldine.

  “Oh, we had the whole gambit to run through,” said Agatha, standing with a pitying, tolerant smile. “I was not spared any of it. The poor boy felt he had to tell someone, I suppose. Well, I am only too glad that I could be of any relief to him.”

  “You were alone in being up to that,” said Kate.

  “I think there is not much in it,” said Agatha. “I think it was only that he wanted just the life-stamp, that drew out his boyish confidences, without making him feel there was anything unnatural in his pouring them forth. That was all it was, I believe.”

  “You can hardly regard it as not enough,” said Kate.

  “Well, whatever it is, I am glad to feel he won’t have to go home and face the rarefied atmosphere of Lady Hardisty, without the memory of something a little more human to leaven it with,” said Agatha, suddenly seeming to thrust out her words. “I can just imagine him working himself up to greet her. And I think it is so hard on him at this point of his young experience.”

  Gregory met Rachel without making any effort on her behalf, and she began to speak herself.

  “Gregory, Ernest and Griselda are in the library, and I can hear Griselda crying. And it is not the sort of crying that goes with to-day. She left that off when she heard he was coming. What is the good of his stopping one kind to start another? Can he be saying anything out of his own head about your mother?”

  “What makes you think that? Have you been listening at the door?”

  “I could not go quite up to the door. Buttermere might have come along.”

  “I should have been inclined to go in and interrupt them.”

  “But they would have known I had been listening, and I should not have heard the rest. I thought Ernest was wearing his own religious look when he came in.”

  Bellamy had arrived and greeted his betrothed, unaware of his betrayal of himself.

  “We are to have a time to ourselves, we two! That is perfect of everyone who has planned it. People always are perfect in times of stress, and they must have been especially so to you. This is what my heart was crying out for. I felt I could bear no one but you to-day. I am a little drained out after the service. I put the whole of myself into it. Did anyone tell you about it? I had almost thought you would be there,
as I was to give the address. I had half hoped it would comfort you. I thought of you in every word I wrote.”

  “I shall like to read it some time,” Griselda said.

  “You could not get an impression from my few rough notes. I jot down a word, and then get into the pulpit, and out it comes with a rush. I just want a hieroglyphic to start me off.”

  “Ernest, what made Mother go away alone and do it, go away alone? What did she feel when she did it, all by herself? All by herself, poor Mother, poor Mother, by herself!”

  “Oh, come, come now,” said Bellamy, “you must think of me, my Grisel. I cannot bear too much. You have not taken the strongest man for a husband: you must have a care for the man you have chosen. I have lived these last days in thought of you. I have thrown the whole of myself into my words of your mother, weighed every syllable I uttered, to give her only respect and compassion at this time which is a trial of our own strength. You know very little has gone well with me in my life; and now into this vista of hope and light there is come this shadow of darkness, the hint of hanging of the head; and it is getting to be much. You must remember I am a man and weak, and you are a woman and strong.”

  “Your share in this is nothing to mine,” said Griselda, lifting her eyes. “It is my family who has had a tragedy, not yours. You make me feel how apart our lives are. Of course all lives must be. There is nothing to hang the head over in my mother’s being ill and helpless, unless for people who are used to hanging the head.”

  “Ah, who is to be used to it, and who is not? It is not I who would say. Even her helplessness will be thrown at us. Family taints and what not will be bandied about our heads. But I am not to be the first to swirl the whispers about you. My part will be to stand on guard.”

  “It has all come to me beforehand through you,” said Griselda, breathing deeply.

  “Did not I tell you what my part would be? My whimperings were to throw my true self up in relief. Tell me you guessed their purpose. I am such a play-actor that I like the light and shade. Come, you are learning to know me. You must learn. Think how I have learned to know you.”

  Griselda stood with her head down, and Rachel and Gregory found it the moment to enter the room.

  “Lady Hardisty, Griselda has been trying to quarrel with me, and making such a gallant effort that she has almost succeeded. She cannot get used to my posing ways, and cannot teach me not to bring them out before her. But you will let me stay to dinner, and be one of the family, and her heart will be softened when she sees me making a personal sacrifice, and pronouncing grace as if it were a difficult and important duty.”

  “Yes, yes, my boy, stay and be with us on this first evening of our new life,” said Godfrey, crossing the room with a progressively widening step. “It still seems it can’t be much of a life to us; but we may pull up and get going as we did before, as my dear wife would wish. Now, do you know, here is a thing to be told! If there is any one of her children who feels this, it is Matthew. He is simply laid on the ground by it, he of all of them! I hadn’t an inkling he cared for his mother so much. It shows how blind we can be. Well, now the thing is, he is not coming down to dinner. He is to remain alone in his room. My heart rose and sank at the same time. I would give a good deal if his mother could have realised how he felt for her. There doesn’t seem any point in it now. Of course there is more point in it than ever. She looks down on us and knows more about us than we know ourselves, and for any mortal frailty makes more excuse than we should dare to make.”

  “That will be a great advantage for you,” said Rachel. “It is really very nice of Harriet. So many people in her place seem so different, from what people say, and expect too much. They are sometimes quite a strain. Making more excuse than we dare to make is superhuman, because all has been done that can be done. Of course Harriet is that now.”

  “Ah, yes, we shall appreciate our wife and mother as never before,” said Godfrey.

  Chapter XXIV

  Mrs. Christy, Sitting at a business interview with Dominic Spong, perceived from her window the sight familiar to her of a young man anxiously awaiting admission at her door.

  “Now, Matthew, it is a long time since you paid a visit to your future mother-in-law. It is a good thing that my love does not alter when it alteration finds, that in that respect I am at one with the poet. Now if I come to the door I must not shirk what the duty involves. You will have a woman quite without false pride for your wife’s mother. ‘Be proud of what you can do, not of what you can’t,’ is my motto. ‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘my dignity is safe.’ Not that practical matters take the whole of my attention. I have come from quite an abstruse discussion with Mr. Spong. My money matters make no very great demand, but he always accuses me of having quite a man’s mind. It is a most unfeminine thing to plead guilty to, but I must take my stand where he places me.”

  “Can I see Camilla,” said Matthew, in a quick, harsh voice.

  “If you will adjust your position a little, Matthew,” said Dominic from the background, his measured tone suggesting entertainment, “you will have no reason to find fault with the evidence of your senses.”

  Matthew turned and laid his hand on Camilla’s arm.

  “Any more than,” proceeded Dominic, “your betrothed appeared to have to find it with that of hers, when her ears informed her of your arrival. I think, Mrs. Christy, that you and I will discover ourselves Monsieur and Madame de Trop, unless we remove ourselves from the threat of that position.”

  “We will give the lovers the back room to themselves, and continue our researches into my financial mysteries in the large one, Mr. Spong.”

  “I suspect that, in spite of our advantage in the matter of the room, they are at a time when they are more to be envied than we are,” said Dominic in a moved tone, as he followed.

  “You don’t give any sign that supports Mr. Spong’s suspicions, Matthew,” said Camilla. “Your voice would break on a different note in touching on this moment. The sooner it passes, the sooner I shall leave behind my perilous youth. You and Gregory have the same tastes. Your father is the natural man, bless him. And I have left it farther behind than you. So give up glowering, and tell me why you have come to watch me keeping the home fires burning. Do you want to add to our romance by surveying me as the beggar-maid?”

  Matthew stood with his eyes, sunken and bright from sleeplessness, fixed on her face.

  “Matthew, don’t frighten me by that pose. Don’t begin to show me what you will be like when we are married. I warn you not to do it. It is dangerous.”

  Matthew stood silent.

  “Matthew, do you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Camilla. The question is, will you hear me? I have come to ask you one thing, and to have an answer, to know if I am the one man in the world to you, as you are to me the one woman. That is what I will be. And I live in doubt, I sleep in doubt, or I should if I could sleep. I am tormented by too many things for rest. I ask to be at peace about that one.”

  “You ask too much,” said Camilla. “Of course you are not the one man in the world to me. The world is too full of too many men for that, and I am the one woman to too many. The dear old world!” She sang the last words and clapped her hands.

  “Has any one of them ever done anything for you?”

  “Oh, yes, everything, all of them. Betrayed people, played their parents false, got into debt for me. Each one of them according to his lights.”

  “I suppose not one of them has put an end to his mother’s life for you?”

  “Put an end to his mother’s life! What are you talking of? Of course not. What a question!”

  “That is what I found you were worth.”

  “Matthew, you should not say things to coerce and scare me. It is a most unmanly way to behave. None of the others has done that. And it is in very bad taste to drag in your mother’s misfortunes. If you helped to drive her to what she did by harping on me, when she did not like me for your wife, it was cowardly and wrong
, when she had just returned from her illness; and I like you less for it; I do. And I believe you did. You worried her about me and drove her to it, and I shall always feel it was my fault that she died.”

  “It was your fault,” said Matthew. “You made me feel that your love for me would stand very little, and she might have given it much to stand. You see it was your fault.”

  Camilla stood staring at him.

  “You don’t mean anything?” she said.

  “I mean what I say.”

  “You don’t mean you did it?”

  “I mean I did it. I put the fatal tablet with those she took to make her sleep. I put it out for her with one of her own, that last night. I did it because of you, for fear she might take you from me. She was getting you into her power.”

  “Matthew, Matthew! My poor darling Matthew! My poor, helpless, driven boy! I will do all I can to make up to you. I will give myself to you, body and soul. You shall not have done it for nothing. And your poor, poor mother! We both loved her. We will go on loving her together. I will see it does not get on your mind. I will show you it was my fault. It was utterly mine. You shall never think it was yours. I will live to see that you can’t.”

  “Hush! There is your mother coming,” said Matthew, in a normal, gentle voice. “People must not hear. They must not know. It must never be found out. They would take me away from you.”

  “Camilla, why are you getting upset like this? We heard your voice through the wall. Matthew, you must be careful not to excite her. Poor children, this waiting time is a strain.”

  “Oh, all right, Mother, a last lover’s scene. We are not going to break it off or never speak again or do anything agitating. We were only vowing eternal faithfulness, and sealing our vows with tears. Our sentiments were much to our credit, especially mine. You would have got a different idea of me, if you had heard. Yes, I certainly think I came out best.”