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THE ARBITER
A NOVEL
BY
LADY F. E. E. BELL
AUTHOR OF THE "STORY OF URSULA," "MISS TOD AND THE PROPHETS,"
"FAIRY-TALE PLAYS," ETC., ETC.
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
37 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
1901
* * * * *
THE ARBITER
CHAPTER I
"It is a great mistake," said Miss Martin emphatically, "for any
sensible woman to show a husband she adores him."
"Even her own, Aunt Anna?" said Lady Gore, with a contented smile which
Aunt Anna felt to be ignoble.
"Of course I meant her own," she said stiffly. "I should hardly have
thought, Elinor, that after being married so many years you would have
made jokes of that sort."
"That is just it," said Lady Gore, still annoyingly pleased with
herself. "After adoring my husband for twenty-four years, it seems to me
that I am an authority on the subject."
"Well, it is a great mistake," repeated Miss Martin firmly, as she got
up, feeling that the repetition notably strengthened her position. "As I
said before, no sensible woman should do it."
Lady Gore began to feel a little annoyed. It is fatiguing to hear one's
aunt say the same thing twice. The burden of conversation is unequally
distributed if one has to think of two answers to each one remark of
one's interlocutor.
"And you are bringing up Rachel to do the same thing, you know," the old
lady went on, roused to fresh indignation at the thought of her
great-niece, and she pulled her little cloth jacket down, and generally
shook herself together. Crabbed age and jackets should not live
together. Age should be wrapped in the ample and tolerant cloak, hider
of frailties. It was not Aunt Anna's fault, however, if her garments
were uncompromising and scanty of outline. Predestination reigns nowhere
more strongly than in clothes, and it would have been inconceivable that
either Miss Martin's body or her mind should have assimilated the
harmonious fluid adaptability of the draperies that framed and
surrounded Lady Gore as she lay on her couch.
"I don't think it does her much harm," said Lady Gore, a good deal
understating her conviction of her daughter's perfections.
"That's as may be," said Miss Martin encouragingly. "Where is she
to-day, by the way?" she said, stopping on her way to the door.
"For a wonder she is not at home," Lady Gore said. "She has gone to stay
away from me for the first time in her life; she is at Mrs. Feversham's,
at Maidenhead, for the night."
"How girls do gad nowadays, to be sure!" said Miss Martin.
"I hardly think that can be said of Rachel," said Lady Gore.
"Whether Rachel does or not, my dear Elinor, girls do gad--there is no
doubt about that. I'm sorry I have not seen William. He is too busy, I
suppose," with a slightly ironical intonation. "Goodbye!"
"Can you find your way out?" said Lady Gore, ringing a hand-bell.
"Oh dear, yes," said Miss Martin. "Goodbye," and out she went.
Lady Gore leant back with a sigh of relief. A companion like Miss Martin
makes a most excellent foil to solitude, and after she had departed,
Lady Gore lay for a while in a state of pleasant quiescence. Why, she
wondered, even supposing she herself did think too well of her husband,
should Miss Martin object? Why do onlookers appear to resent the
spectacle of a too united family? There is, no doubt, something
exasperating in an excess of indiscriminating kindliness. But it is an
amiable fault after all; and, besides, more discrimination may sometimes
be required to discover the hidden good lurking in a fellow-creature
than to perceive and deride his more obvious absurdities and defects. It
would no doubt be a very great misfortune to see our belongings as they
appear to the world at large, and the fay who should "gie us that
giftie" ought indeed to be banished from every christening. Let us
console ourselves: she commonly is.
But poor Miss Martin had no adoring belongings to shed the genial light
of affection on her doings, to give her even mistaken admiration,
better than none at all. Life had dealt but bleakly with her; she had
always been in the shadow: small wonder then if her nature was blighted
and her view of life soured. Lady Gore smiled to herself, a little
wistfully perhaps, as she tried to put herself in Miss Martin's
place--of all mental operations one of the most difficult to achieve
successfully. Lady Gore's sheer power of sympathy might enable her to
get nearer to it than many people, but still she inevitably reckoned up
the balance, after the fashion of our kind, seeing only one side of the
scale and not knowing what was in the other, and as she did so, it
seemed to her still possible that Miss Martin might have the best of it,
or at any rate might not fall so short of the best as at first appeared.
For in spite of her age she still had the great inestimable boon of
health; she was well, she was independent, she could, when it seemed
good to her, get up and go out and join in the life of other people.
While as for herself ... and again the feeling of impotent misery, of
rebellion against her own destiny, came over Lady Gore like a wave whose
strength she was powerless to resist. For since the rheumatic fever
which five years ago had left her practically an incurable invalid, the
effort to accept her fate still needed to be constantly renewed; an
effort that had to be made alone, for the acceptance of such a fate by
those who surround the sufferer is generally made, more or less, once
for all in a moment of emotion, and then gradually becomes part of the
habitual circumstance of daily life. Mercifully she did not realise all
at once the thing that had happened to her. In the first days when she
was returning to health--she who up to the time of her illness had been
so full of life and energy--the mere pleasure in existence, the mere joy
of the summer's day in which she could lie near an open window, look out
on the world and the people in it, was enough; she was too languid to
want to do more. Then her strength slowly returned, and with it the
desire to resume her ordinary life. But weeks passed in which she still
remained at the same stage, they lengthened into months, and brought her
gradually a horrible misgiving. Then, at last, despairingly she faced
the truth, and knew that from all she had been in the habit of doing,
from all that she had meant to do, she was cut off for ever. She began
to realise then, as people do who, unable to carry their treasures with
them, look over them despairingly before they cast them away one by one,
all that her ambitions had been. She smiled bitterly to herself during
the hours in which she lay there looking her fate in the face and trying
to encounter it with becoming courage, as she realised how, with more
than half of her life, at the best, behind her, she had up to this
moment been spending the rest of it still looking onward, still living
in the future. She had dreamt of the time when, helped by her, her
husband should go forward in his career, when, steered under her
guidance, Rachel would go along the smiling path to happiness. And now,
instead, she was to be to husband and daughter but the constant object
of care and solicitude and pity. Yes, pity--that was the worst of it.
"An invalid," she repeated to herself, and felt that at last she knew
what that word meant that she had heard all her life, that she had
applied unconcernedly to one fellow-creature or another without
realising all that it means of tragedy, of startled, growing dread,
followed by hopeless and despairing acceptance. Then there came a day
when, calling all her courage to her help, she made up her mind bravely
to begin life afresh, to sketch her destiny from another point of view,
and yet to make a success of the picture. The battle had to be fought
out alone. Sir William, after the agony of thinking he was going to lose
her, after the rapture of joy at knowing that the parting was not to be
yet, had insensibly become accustomed, as one does become accustomed to
the trials of another, to the altered conditions of their lives, and it
was even unconsciously a sort of agreeable certainty that whatever the
weather, whatever the claims of the day, she would every afternoon be
found in the same place, never away, never occupied about the house,
always ready to listen, to sympathise. She had made up her mind that
since now she was debarred from active participation in the lives of her
husband and daughter, she would by unceasing, strenuous daily effort
keep abreast of their daily interests, and be by her sympathy as much a
part of their existence as though she had been, as before, their
constant companion.
The smallness of such a family circle may act in two ways: it may either
send the members of it in different directions, or it may draw them
together in an intense concentration of interests and sympathy. This
latter was happily the condition of the Gores. The varying degrees of
their strength and weaknesses had been so mercifully adjusted by destiny
that each could find in the other some support--whether real or fancied
does not matter. For illusions, if they last, form as good a working
basis for life as reality, and in the Gore household, whether by
imagination or not, the equipoise of life had been most skilfully
adjusted. The amount of shining phantasies that had interwoven
themselves into the woof of the family destiny had become so much a part
of the real fabric that they were indistinguishable from it.
As far as Sir William's career, if we may give it that name, was
concerned, the calamity which had fallen upon his wife had in some
strange manner explained and justified it. The younger son of a country
gentleman of good family, he had, by the death of his elder brother,
come into the title, the estate, and the sufficient means bequeathed by
his father. Elinor Calthorpe, the daughter of a neighbouring squire, had
been ever since her childhood on terms of intimate friendship with the
Gore boys; as far back as she could remember, William Gore, big, strong,
full of life and spirits, a striking contrast to his delicate elder
brother, had been her ideal of everything that was manly and splendid:
and when after his brother's death he asked her to marry him, she felt
that life had nothing more to offer. In that belief she had never
wavered. Sir William, by nature estimable and from circumstances
irreproachable, made an excellent husband; that is to say, that during
nearly a quarter of a century of marriage he had never wavered either in
his allegiance to his wife or in his undivided acceptance of her
allegiance, and hers alone. She on her side had never once during all
those years realised that the light which shone round her idol came from
the lamp she herself kept alive before the shrine, nor even that it was
her more acute intelligence, blind in one direction only, which
suggested the opinion or course of action that he quite unconsciously
afterwards offered to the world as his own. It was she who infused into
his life every possibility beyond the obvious. It was her keenness, her
ardent interest in those possibilities, that urged him on. When she
finally persuaded him to stand for Parliament as member for their county
town, it was in a great measure her popularity that won him the seat.
He was in the House without making any special mark for two years, with
a comfortable sense, not clearly stated perhaps even to himself, that
there was time before him. Men go long in harness in these days; some
day for certain that mark would be made. Then his party went out, and in
spite of another unsuccessful attempt in his own constituency, and then
in one further afield, he was left by the roadside, while the tide of
politics swept on. His wife consoled herself by thinking that at the
next opportunity he would surely get in. But when the opportunity came,
she was so ill that he could not leave her, and the moment passed. Then
when they began to realise what her ultimate condition might be, and she
was recommended to take some special German waters which might work a
cure, he and Rachel went with her. Sir William, when the necessity of
going abroad first presented itself to him--a heroic necessity for the
ordinary stay-at-home Englishman--had felt the not unpleasant stimulus,
the tightening of the threads of life, which the need for a given
unexpected course of action presents to the not very much occupied
person. Then came those months away from his own country and his own
surroundings--months in which he acquired the habit of reading an
English newspaper two days old and being quite satisfied with it, when
everything else also had two days' less importance than it would at
home, and gradually he tasted the delights of the detached onlooker who
need do nothing but warn, criticise, prophesy, protest. With absolute
sincerity to himself he attributed this attitude which Fate had assigned
to him as entirely owing to his having had to leave England on his
wife's account. He had quite easily, quite calmly drifted into a
conviction that for his wife's sake he had chivalrously renounced his
chances of distinction. Lady Gore on her side--it was another bitterness
added to the rest--did not for a moment doubt that it was her condition
and the sacrifice that her husband had made of his life to her which had
ruined his political career. And they both of them gradually succeeded
in forgetting that the alternative had not been a certainty. They
believed, they knew, they even said openly, that if it had not been for
his incessant attendance on her he would have gone into the House, he
would have taken office, and eventually have been one of the shapers of
his country's destiny. The phraseology of their current talk to one
another and to outsiders reflected this belief. "If I had continued in
the House," Sir William would say, with a manner and inflection which
conveyed that he had left it of his own free will and not attempted to
return to it, "I should have----" or, "If I had taken office----" or
even sometimes, "If I were leading the Liberal party----" and no one,
indeed, was in a position to affirm that these things might not have
been. If a man's capacities are hinted at or even stated by himself to
his fellow-creatures with a certain amount of discretion, and if he does
not court failure by putting them to the proof, it does not occur to
most people to contradict him, and the possible truth of the
contradiction soon sinks out of sight. So Sir William sat on the brink
of the river and watched the others plunging into the waves, diving,
rising, breasting the current, and was agreeably supported by the
consciousness that if Fate had so ordained it, he himself would have
been capable of performing all these feats just as creditably. No need
now to stifle a misgiving that in the old days would occasionally
obtrude itself into the glowing views of the future, that he was
possibly not of a stature to play the great parts for which he might be
cast. On the contrary, what now remained was the blessed peace brought
by renunciation, the calm renunciation of prospects that in the light of
ceasing to try to attain them seemed absolutely certain. No one now
could ever say that he had failed. He had been prevented by
circumstances from achieving any success of a definite and conspicuous
kind, although the position he had attained, the consideration nearly
always accorded to the ordinary prosperous middle-aged Englishman of the
upper classes who has done nothing to forfeit his claim to it, and more
than all, the plenitude of assurance which he received of his deserts
from his immediate surroundings, might well have been considered success
enough. And on his return to England, after eighteen months of
wandering, although he was no longer in Parliament and had no actual
voice in deciding the politics of his country, it pleased him to think
that if he chose he could still take an active line, that he could
belong to the volunteer army of orators who make speeches at other
people's elections and who write letters to the newspaper that the world
may know their views on a given situation.
At the time of which we speak political parties in England were trying
in vain to re-adjust an equable balance. Conservatives and Unionists,
almost indistinguishable, were waving the Imperialist banner in the
face of the world. The Liberals, once the advanced and subversive party,
were now raising their voices in protest, tentatively advocating the
claims of what they considered the oppressed races. Derisive epithets
were hurled at them by their enemies; the Pro-Boers, the Little
Englanders took the place of the Home Rulers of the past. Sir William
was by tradition a Liberal. Inspired by that tradition he wrote an
article on the "Attitude of England," which appeared in a Liberal
Review. Thrilled by the sight of his utterances in print, he determined
in his secret soul to expand that article into a book. The secret was of
course shared by his wife, who fervently believed in the yet unwritten
masterpiece. The fact that in spite of the dearth of prominent men in
his party, of men who had in them the stuff of a leader, that party had
not turned to Gore in its need, aroused no surprise, no misgiving, in
either his mind or that of his wife. It was simply in their eyes another
step in that path of voluntary renunciation which he was treading for
her sake.
With this possible interpretation of all missed opportunities entirely
taken for granted, Sir William's existence flowed peacefully and
prosperously on. It was with an agreeable consciousness of his dignity
and prestige that he sat once or twice in the week at the board meetings
of one or two governing bodies to which he belonged. They figured in his
scheme of existence as his hours of work, the sterner, more serious
occupation which justified his hours of leisure. The rest of that
leisure was spent in happy, congenial uniformity: a morning ride,
followed by some time in his comfortable study, during which he might be
supposed to be writing his book; an hour or two at his club; a game or
two of chess, a pastime in which he excelled; and behind all this a
beautiful background, the deep and enduring affection of his wife, whose
companionship, and needs, and admiration for himself filled up all the
vacant spaces in his life. He would, however, have been genuinely
surprised if he had realised that it was by a constant, deliberate
intention that she succeeded in entertaining him, in amusing him, as
much as she did her friends and acquaintances; if he had thought that
she had made up her mind that never, while she had power to prevent it,
should he come into his own house and find it dull. And he never did.