Men and Wives Page 6

  “Ah, Jermyn, I have not been treating you with due respect. But, Jermyn, you will let an old friend say it? You must remember that to that position many are called, but few chosen.”

  “Yes, that is so indeed,” said Jermyn, taken aback by this soundness.

  Dominic rose as if his message were delivered.

  “Lady Haslam, I have appreciated an hour that has brought home to me that family peace and unity still exist, in a world that I must not misjudge because it is emptied of them for me. I thank you.”

  “Now, Spong, give a thought to us sometimes,” said Godfrey. “Come and spend a few hours at any moment, if you find your spirits sinking. We should take it as a kindness to us from you. We ask you to do us that kindness.”

  “Sir Godfrey, I have already done it to you. Miss Griselda, I thank you for enough in thanking you for your presence. And, Matthew, I hope you did not misunderstand me in my attitude towards your work. I have the greatest reverence for the things of the intellect. But pride of intellect is a different thing, and leads into many stony ways. Thank you, Matthew, for your hospitality this afternoon.” Dominic’s manner recognised Matthew as the eldest son. “And, Jermyn, I hope some day to join you in your ramblings, and enrich my own notebook with the reflections that come to us in our communion with Nature. And, Gregory, my boy, if I may still call you a boy, I will say to you that it is a pleasure still to have a boy to say good-bye to.”

  He went to the door, his back somehow conveying a feeling that he had shown himself rather conversible for his situation.

  “Don’t be in a hurry, Spong; we will have the carriage in a minute,” said Godfrey.

  “I have yet to respond, Sir Godfrey,” said Dominic, turning mechanically, “to another offer of kindness. Mrs. Calkin prevailed upon me to spend an hour at her house, and the distance is too short for me to be dependent upon your consideration.”

  “Well, we will send the carriage to wait for you at her gate. Then we need not keep you at the moment, as her house is only half a mile away.”

  Dominic paused in a dazed manner, and passed from the house. When out of sight he steadied his gait, but imperceptibly, as if in deference to himself.

  Agatha Calkin came to her door to welcome him. “We have a great appreciation of your feeling you could come to us this afternoon. I hope you found it fitted in with your visit to the Haslams. You have been spending a little while with them, have you not?”

  “Mrs. Calkin, I am moved by the willingness, nay, the eagerness, shown by my friends to bear with my company to-day. I was touched by your word, appreciation, as I came in.”

  “Well, come into the drawing-room and make yourself quite at home. My sisters are waiting for you, but I felt I must come and let you in myself.”

  “Mrs. Calkin, I trust I shall not discover myself ungrateful.”

  “I hope you will. Gratitude is a strain at any time, and just now would surely be your end,” said Kate.

  “You must expect us all to be grateful to you for not making yourself a burden,” said Geraldine. “I have always been the most! impossible burden at my times of stress, utterly unable to raise myself from the depths.”

  “Miss Dabis, it has no doubt been much for a woman’s strength.”

  “I have been saying that I felt I must go to the door to him myself,” said Agatha.

  Geraldine raised her eyebrows in perplexity over this advantage.

  “I feel sure you could do with a second cup of tea, Mr. Spong,” Agatha went on. “You will have to eat in the next few days by being taken unawares.” She paused at his side after taking him his cup. “I can feel so especially for you in your great loss. It is not so many years since I had to face the same myself.”

  “Mrs. Calkin, I can only emulate your courage.”

  “I cannot offer any courage as an example,” said Geraldine. “I can only remember writhing in darkness.”

  “There is the loss that no one knows who has not suffered it,” said Agatha.

  “All our troubles have been as nothing!” said Geraldine.

  “No, no,” said Agatha, “indeed not that. But not the one loss of all losses.”

  “It makes one more and more thankful one has not married,” said Geraldine. “I have not realised quite how much reason I had for gratitude.”

  “Miss Dabis, it is not a reason for gratitude for someone else,” said Dominic.

  “As we are talking of marriage, can’t we talk of the break-up of the Bellamys’ marriage?” said Kate. “We are supposed to behave in a natural way with people in trouble, and it is very unnatural not to be talking of it.”

  “Miss Kate, do not let me prevent you,” said Dominic earnestly.

  “That is putting it in a much safer way. Agatha and Geraldine, do not let Mr. Spong and me prevent you.”

  “It is so strange to me,” said Agatha, embarking simply on her own treatment of the subject, “that people who have had the great experience of coming together, and sharing the first deep events of married life, can break it all up as if it were a trivial, passing relationship. I have nothing in me that helps me to understand it.”

  “You can look at the things without you,” said Geraldine. “There are plenty of illuminating illustrations about.”

  “Miss Dabis, I do not think there are plenty,” said Dominic in a grieved and dubious tone.

  “I was only thinking casually of the instances that rose to my mind,” said Geraldine, her voice as casual as her thought.

  “Was Lady Haslam upset by the news from the rectory?” said Agatha.

  “I can hardly say,” said Dominic. “I was not present at the breaking of it to her. She can scarcely not have been aware of it, but we did not carry on conversation on that line. I rose to go very soon. With your permission, Mrs. Calkin, I will now take my leave of you, with thanks to you for the words we have exchanged. Miss Dabis, Miss Kate, you will allow me to make my adieux.” He seemed to find a fitness in the frivolous phrase. “I hope that when things are easier with me, I shall have the pleasure of welcoming you all under my roof, if you will tolerate my being, as I shall be, forced to dispense my hospitality myself.”

  “Can we tolerate it?” said Kate. “By himself he will not allow gossip; and how can we cope with circumstances we have never met? Most people insist on it.”

  “You will soon come up to Lady Hardisty, if you go on persevering in her line!” said Geraldine, with her eyebrows raised.

  Kate looked kindly and uncomprehending, not ready to be drawn upon her emulation of Rachel, which had struck her as in its nature imperceptible.

  “Poor man, he feels it very deeply,” said Agatha, coming back into the room.

  “He thought I did not feel it enough,” said Kate.

  “Well, anyhow he said so!” said Geraldine.

  “We must not expect everyone to enter into everything,” said Agatha. “That would not be possible. If Mr. Spong expects it, he is wrong. We must get to know that, those of us whose lives hold the Chapter not common to all. It is the price we pay for fuller experience. We must be content to pay it.”

  “We can be more content not to pay it,” said Geraldine.

  “I shall never get over being thought to behave with a want of taste and feeling,” said Kate. “I shall harbour towards Mr. Spong the peculiar aversion we have towards those we have wronged.” She glanced at her sister as she ended.

  “Well, we can talk about the Bellamys now,” said Geraldine, with a faint air of hardly finding her sister’s propensity worth considering. “I daresay Mr. Spong would have joined us, if we had persevered.”

  “No!” said Agatha. “No! There are some things that some of us can only bear a certain touch upon.”

  “I wonder how soon Mr. Spong will be looking about him for another partner,” said Geraldine, reaching for a book. “I thought he already tended to a wandering eye.”

  “No. Not in this case. No!” said Agatha. “This is a case where devotion has gathered, risen to its height, a
nd will hold to the end. He will go on his way alone. There are some of us for whom that path is laid out. Poor man! My thoughts will be with him to-night in his lonely home. They are with him now, as he goes his way towards it.”

  Dominic was going his way in the Haslams’ carriage to the house of Sir Percy Hardisty.

  “Ah, now, Spong, I take it as a kindness that you will try to feel at home with us to-night.”

  “Sir Percy, I can only thank you.”

  “You are saving us from feeling that our touch cannot be borne in trouble,” said Rachel. “That would strike at the very foundations of our union. Will you not have something to drink, Mr. Spong? It is half an hour before dinner.”

  “It would strike, Lady Hardisty, at the foundation of our faith in many things,” said Dominic, stretching backwards to a table in compliance with the degree of his interest. “The touch of certain people is the only thing that can be borne.”

  “Ah, now, forget it for the moment, Spong,” said Sir Percy. “Don’t be dwelling on it, my boy, to-night. I mean, dwell only on the bright side of it, on all of it; but don’t be feeling alone among old friends.”

  “You may listen to Percy. He knows what can be done from experience,” said Rachel.

  “Sir Percy, I cannot feel alone amid so much kindness. I will simply feel that she who has left me is with me in spirit.”

  “Then you both will feel alike,” said Rachel.

  “You will not misunderstand me, Lady Hardisty,” said Dominic, with a look of perplexity and a resonant utterance of the name, as if granting her full right to bear it, “when I say that to me any thought of a successor to my wife is sacrilege.”

  “Well, now, Spong,” said Sir Percy, as if any subject were to bel preferred to the one that obtained, “how about this about the young Bellamys and Dufferin? Because we won’t try you now by going on to ground that is your own. But that is one sort of business.”

  “Sir Percy, as family lawyer to all of them, I have been brought much into contact with the affair,” said Dominic with an air of grave distaste. “I have done my best to advise each party for his or her individual good, but the upshot is, they are to all intents and purposes of one mind.” He sank into dubious amusement.

  “It is nice of them to agree under such a test,” said Rachel. “We should never know people in ordinary life. Of course the whole of my life is a test. It is quite the best moment in Mr. Spong’s life for us to have him with us, Percy.”

  “I am sorry for that poor woman, Mrs. Christy,” said Dominic, with the dilation of his eyes that mention of a woman produced. “It is hard for her to have this trouble with her daughter. I have done all I can to show my sympathy towards her.”

  “Percy, we must see about showing sympathy,” said Rachel, “if Mr. Spong doesn’t mind our copying him.”

  “Lady Hardisty, indeed no,” said Dominic.

  “But the girl will divorce Bellamy, of course,” said Sir Percy.

  “No,” said Dominic in a judicial tone, “apparently not. The fault is entirely on her side, and Bellamy appears to be anxious to keep any slur off himself. It would go hard with him in his profession to take any other course. And another point seems to be that he may marry again. And no breath of scandal has ever touched him, Sir Percy.”

  “I appreciate his taking thought for the successor,” said Rachel.

  “But would a woman like that sort of thing to be done about another woman?” said Sir Percy.

  “Sir Percy, I am afraid you have very little idea of the attitude of the ladies to one another,” said Dominic, with heaving shoulders.

  “He only knows that of one lady to another,” said Rachel, “and it has misled him.”

  “Well, but now, about Dufferin?” resumed Sir Percy. “A nice fellow, an able fellow, a man of family. What is he about, getting into muddles fitter for other people than for him? What does he get from making parsons afraid of slurs and all of it?”

  “We are not able to limit our dealing to a world constituted just as we should like it, Sir Percy. We lawyers have to find that out.”

  “Well, well, but Bellamy’s wife?” said Sir Percy. “Why shouldn’t some other woman do for him?”

  “Well, perhaps he thinks himself the judge of that,” said Dominic, again with doubtful laughter. “Or, conceivably the lady constituted herself the judge. I shall be seeing Dufferin to-night, but possibly I could hardly venture to put that question to him!”

  “To-night? Oh, to-night? You are to be with him to-night, Spong, about some of it? Well, now, wouldn’t any other night have done for him?”

  “Sir Percy,” said Dominic, a flush creeping over his face, “the truth is, I could not bear the prospect of my own empty fireside. His being my neighbour in the town enables me to direct my steps homewards, without immediately taking the plunge that looms ahead of me.” He ended with a considerate smile.

  “Nor the prospect of our fireside either,” said Rachel. “Of course the horror of the thought leaks out, Percy and me sitting opposite each other, with the shadows gathering and no memories in common, since old people live in their youth.”

  “You would be justified on your side, Lady Hardisty, in allowing a horror to leak out of any more of my company. I am conscious of showing the effort with which I respond to the kindness I would not be without. And such inconsistency demands banishment.”

  He rose smiling, and held out his hand, seeming to summon self-control to achieve a conventional bearing.

  “Here is Polly, come in time to say good-bye,” said Rachel. “Polly, you did not know that Dominic was here, did you?”

  “I think, Lady Hardisty,” said Dominic with a conscious smile, “that Miss Polly would be taken aback by the idea of such an elderly person as I must appear to her, being possessed of a Christian name, much more being called by it.”

  “Polly does not expect older people not to have names, or not to be called by them,” said Rachel. “She knows they do not give up everything. And I thought you and Polly were the same age. That is the stage I have got to.”

  Dominic took his leave of Polly with a smile that did not comment on this, in deference to her point of view.

  Sir Percy returned from attending him to the door.

  “Well, now the poor fellow, Rachel! Does he have to be chasing about after everybody to-day?”

  “I suppose he does; the urge of our natures is strong.”

  “Because I should have thought any kind of fireside was better than none.”

  “All kinds may be better still,” said his wife.

  Dominic was approaching the fourth fireside afforded him since his wife’s burial.

  “Well, Dufferin,” he said, sinking down into a chair, “I have found my old friends very warm-hearted to a man in his first desolation. I have been deeply touched. I have had it brought home to me what kind hearts there are in the world.”

  “That is sometimes brought home. What would have been brought home to me, if I had been your shadow? They must have talked about something even to you.”

  “They spoke of you, Dufferin, with great respect and affection, and with deep concern for the position in which you find yourself. That is all I can say.”

  “You might have had better entertainment. You may have it soon. Camilla will be here in a moment, and you can see the play at first hand.”

  Dominic made a movement back into his chair, and his cigar wavered in his grasp.

  “She won’t hurt you,” said Dufferin, giving him a glance. “You came, knowing that her mother’s house was a hundred yards away. You may have come because you knew it. You wouldn’t have been the first. And it is as good a reason as my being your wife’s third cousin. There is her voice on the stairs.”

  Dominic flushed and laid his cigar aside.

  “Antony, Mother thought it undignified of me to come. She can’t understand that if we had relied upon her supervision, we could not have arrived where we are. If she had known Mr. Spong was to be our chaperon,
she would have sped me with a light heart.”

  Dominic had drawn himself to his feet, offering this homage to womanhood in any condition.

  “I believe Mr. Spong would insult me if I were a man.”

  “Mrs. Bellamy, you are not a man.”

  “The exactitude of the lawyer! No, keep your easy chair, Mr. Spong; you must be tired to death to-day. I will take my seat on Antony’s knee.”

  Dominic glanced at Dufferin’s position of hand and limb, just allowing himself to follow his experience.

  “I don’t believe Mr. Spong hates me after all,” said Camilla, regarding him. “He can hate the sin but love the sinner.”

  “I hope, Mrs. Bellamy, that that is a true word spoken in jest.”

  Camilla leaned back and laughed.

  “I think, Dufferin,” said Dominic, gathering himself together as if he bethought himself, “that my presence here can be dispensed with during Mrs. Bellamy’s visit.”

  “Oh, you think?” said Camilla. “Well, I should not act until you are sure. A lawyer knows it does not do to go on guess-work.”

  “What am I to understand from that?” said Dominic, smiling at Dufferin.

  “That you are indispensable,” said Camilla.

  “Dufferin, am I to yield to pressure?” said Dominic.

  “Oh, sit down, Spong,” said Dufferin.

  Dominic sat down.

  Chapter VII

  “Well, My Dear Matthew, so you have given your support to our little service this morning. It isn’t often that you hear your father doing what is in him to start the day for you all. I might be a cipher in the house in the morning for all you know of me. I was glad indeed to see you there. It gave me heart for what I was doing. I felt I did it better. Well, did you think anything of my way of getting along?”

  “I can hardly give an opinion, Father. I am not present often enough to have a standard.”

  “Well, I hope you will be in the future. I trust it is the beginning of an era for your mother and me, when we see all our sons before us at the altar we raise in our house. For it is a right and seemly thing——”