SOCIAL SUICIDE.
When Giles Saltren had left town to return to Orleigh his uncle remained
with Arminell. The girl asked Mr. Welsh to leave her for half an hour to
collect her thoughts and resolve on what she would do; and he went off
to the British Museum to look at the marbles till he considered she had
been allowed sufficient time to decide her course, and then he returned
to the inn. She was ready for him, composed, seated on the sofa, pale,
and dark under the eyes.
“Well, Miss Inglett,” said Welsh, “I’ve been studying the busts of the
Roman Emperors and their wives, and imagining them dressed in our
nineteenth-century costume; and, upon my word, I believe they would pass
for ordinary English men and women. I believe dress has much to do with
the determination of character. Conceive of Domitian in a light, modern
summer suit—in that he could not be bloodthirsty and a tyrant. Imagine
me in a toga, and you may imagine me committing any monstrosity. Dress
does it. How about your affairs? Are you going to Aunt Hermione?”
“To Lady Hermione Woodhead?” corrected Arminell, with a touch of
haughtiness. “No.”
“Then what will you do? I’ll take the liberty of a chair.” He seated
himself. “I can’t get their busts out of my head—however, go on.”
“Mr. Welsh, I wish to state to you exactly what I have done, and let you
see how I am circumstanced. I have formed my own opinion as to what I
must do, and I shall be glad afterwards to hear what you think of my
determination. You have shown me kindness in coming here, and offering
your help, and I am not so ungracious as to refuse to accept, to some
extent, the help so readily offered.”
“I shall be proud, young lady.”
“Let me then proceed to tell you how stands the case, and then you will
comprehend why I have taken my resolution. I ran away from home with
your nephew, moved by a vague romantic dream, which, when I try to
recall, partly escapes me, and appears to me now altogether absurd.”
“You were not dressed for the part,” threw in Welsh. “You could no more
be the heroine in modern vest and the now fashionable hat, than I could
commit the crimes of Cæsar in this suit.”
“In the first place,” pursued Arminell, disregarding the interruption,
“I was filled with the spirit of unrest and discontent, which made me
undervalue everything I had, and crave for and over-estimate everything
I had not. With my mind ill at ease, I was ready to catch at whatever
chance offered of escape from the vulgar round of daily life, and plunge
into a new, heroic and exciting career. The chance came. Your nephew
believed that he was my half-brother.”
“Young Jack-an-apes!” intercalated Welsh.
“That he was my dear father’s son by a former fictitious marriage with
your sister Mrs. Saltren, I believed, as firmly as your nephew believed
it; and I was extremely indignant with my poor father for what I thought
was his dishonourable conduct in the matter, and for the hypocrisy of
his after life. I thought that, if I ran away with your nephew, I would
force him—I mean my lord—to acknowledge the tie, and so do an act of
tardy justice to his son. Then, in the next place, I was filled with
exalted ideas of what we ought to do in this world, that we were to be
social knights errant, rambling about at our own free will, redressing
wrongs, and I despised the sober virtues of my father, and the ordinary
social duties, with the execution of which my step-mother filled up her
life. I thought that a brilliant career was open to your nephew, and
that I might take a share in it, that we would make ourselves names, and
effect great things for the social regeneration of the age. It was all
nonsense and moonshine. I see that clearly enough now. My wonder is that
I did not see it before. But the step has been taken and cannot be
recalled. I have broken with my family and with my class, I cannot ask
to have links rewelded which I wilfully snapped, to be reinstalled in a
place I deliberately vacated. Nemesis has overtaken me, and even the
gods bow to Nemesis.”
“You are exaggerating,” interrupted Welsh; “you have, I admit, acted
like a donkey—excuse the expression, no other is as forcible and as
true—but I find no such irretrievable mischief done as you suppose.
Fortunately the mistake has been corrected at once. If you will go home,
or to Lady Woodhead—”
“Lady Hermione Woodhead,” corrected Arminell.
“Or to Lady Hermione Woodhead—all will be well. What might have been a
catastrophe is averted.”
“No,” answered Arminell, “all will not be well. Excuse me if I flatly
contradict you. There is something else you have not reckoned on, but
which I must take into my calculations. I shall never forget what I have
done, never forgive myself for having embittered the last moments of my
dear father’s life, never for having thought unworthily of him, and let
him see that he had lost my esteem. If I were to return home, now or
later from my aunt’s house, I could not shake off the sense of
self-reproach, of self-loathing which I now feel. There is one way, and
one way only, in which I can recover my self-respect and peace of mind.”
“And that is—?”
“By not going home.”
“Well—go to your aunt’s.”
“I should be there for a month, and after that must return to Orleigh.
No—that is not possible. Do you not see that several reasons conspire
against my taking that course?”
“Pray let me know them.”
“In the first place, it is certain to have leaked out that I ran away
from home. My conduct will be talked about and commented on in Orleigh,
in the county. It will become part of the scandal published in the
society papers, and be read and laughed over by the clerks and
shop-girls who take in these papers, whose diet it is. Everywhere, in
all classes, the story will be told how the Honourable Arminell Inglett,
only daughter of Giles, tenth Baron Lamerton of Orleigh, and his first
wife, the Lady Lucy Hele, daughter of the Earl of Anstey, had eloped
with the son of a mining captain, the tutor to her half-brother, and how
that they were discovered together in a little inn in Bloomsbury.”
“No,” said Welsh, impatiently. “If you will act as Jingles has
suggested, this will never be known. He is back at Orleigh, or will be
there this afternoon, and you will be at Portland Place, where your maid
will find you. What more natural than that you should return to-morrow
home, on account of your father’s death? As for the society papers—if
they get an inkling of the real facts—I am connected with the press. I
can snuff the light out. There are ways and means. Leave that to me.”
“But, Mr. Welsh, suppose that suspicion has been roused at Orleigh—Mrs.
Cribbage has to be considered. That woman will not leave a stone
unturned till she has routed out everything. I used to say that was why
the finger ends were always out of her gloves. I would have to
equivocate, and perhaps to lie, when asked point-blank questions which
if answered would betray the truth. I would be putting my dear
step-mother to the same inconvenience and humiliation.”
“Trust her wit and knowledge of the world to evade Mrs. Cribbage.”
“But I cannot. I have not the wit.”
Mr. Welsh was vexed, he stamped impatiently.
“I can’t follow you in this,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Welsh, then perhaps you may in what I give you as my next
reason. I feel bound morally to take the consequences of my act. When a
wretched girl flings herself over London Bridge, perhaps she feels a
spasm of regret for the life she is throwing away, as the water closes
over her, but she drowns all the same.”
“Not at all, when there are boats put forth to the rescue, and hands
extended to haul her in.”
“To rescue her for what?—To be brought before a magistrate, and to have
her miserable story published in the daily penny papers. Why, Mr. Welsh,
her friends regret that her body was not rolled down into the deep sea,
or smothered under a bed of Thames mud; that were better than the
publication of her infamy.”
“What will you have?”
“I have made the plunge; I must go down.”
“Not if I can pull you out.”
“You cannot pull me out. I made my leap out of my social order. What I
have done has been to commit social suicide. There is no recovery for me
save at a cost which I refuse to pay. I have heard that those who have
been half drowned suffer infinite agonies on the return of vitality. I
shrink from these pains. I know what it would be were I fished up and
thrown on my own shore again. I would tingle and smart in every fibre of
my consciousness, and cry out to be cast in again. No, Mr. Welsh,
through youthful impetuosity and wrong-headedness I have jumped out of
my social world, and I must abide by the consequences. As the Honourable
Arminell Inglett I have ceased to exist. I die out of the peerage, die
out of my order, die out of the recognition, though not the memory of my
relatives. But I live on as plain Miss Inglett, one of the countless
members of the great Middle Class.”
James Welsh looked at the girl with puzzlement in his face. Spots of
flame had come into her pale cheeks, and to the temples, as she spoke,
and she moved her slender fingers on her lap in her eagerness to make
herself explicit and her difficulties intelligible.
“I don’t understand you, Miss Inglett. That is, I do not see what is
your intention.”
“I mean that I have committed social suicide, and I do not wish to be
saved either for my friends’ sake or for my own. I ask you kindly to get
my death inserted in the _Times_ and the other daily papers.”
“Your actual death?”
“A statement that on such a day died the Honourable Arminell Inglett,
only daughter of the late Lord Lamerton. That will suffice; it proclaims
to society that I have ceased to belong to it. Of course my dear
step-mother and my aunt and the family solicitors shall know the truth.
I have money that comes to me from my mother. A statement of my death in
the _Times_ will not constitute legal death, but it will suffice to
establish my social death.”
“You are taking an extraordinary and unwarrantable course.”
“Extraordinary it may be, but not unwarranted. I have the justification
within, in my conscience. When one has done that which is wrong, one is
called to suffer for it, and the conscience is never cleansed and
restored without expiating pains. If I were to return to Orleigh I would
die morally, of that I am sure, because it would be a shirking of the
consequences which my foolish act has brought down on me.”
“There may be something in that,” said Welsh.
“I will write to Lady Lamerton and tell her everything and assure her
that my decision is irrevocable. I have caused her so much pain, I have
behaved so badly to my father, I have been so ungrateful for all the
happy days and pleasant comforts of dear, dear Orleigh”—her eyes filled
with tears, and she was unable to finish her sentence.
Mr. Welsh said nothing.
“No,” she said, after a pause—“No, Mr. Welsh, I cannot in conscience go
home, there to dissemble and lie to Mrs. Cribbage and to neighbours; and
never to be able to shake off the sense of self-reproach for not having
frankly accepted the results of my own misconduct. Do you know, Mr.
Welsh, I was angry with my father because I thought he was evading his
retribution?”
Mr. Welsh, usually a talkative man, felt no inclination now to say a
word.
“Mr. Welsh,” said Arminell, “I ask you to go to Portland Place, call on
Lady Hermione Woodhead, she is a practical woman of the world; lay the
entire case before her, and see if she does not say, ‘Throw her in
again, for Heaven’s sake, so as to keep the story out of the papers.’”
“And if her ladyship does not say so?”
“She will say it.”
“If she does not, but asks me to bring you to her, will you go to
Portland Place?”
“No; my resolution is taken.”
Welsh stood up and paced the room.
“What the deuce will you do?” he asked. “You are quite a girl, and a
pretty girl, and confoundedly inexperienced. You cannot, you must not
live alone. My Tryphœna is a good soul; it is true that we are without a
cook, but if you do not object to rissoles I shall be happy to offer you
such hospitality as my house affords. Shepherd’s Bush is not the most
aristocratic quarter of the town, but Poplar is worse; it is not near
the theatres and the parks, but you’re welcome to it. Your idea is
startling. I’ll go into that _cul-de-sac_, Queen’s Square, where runs no
cab, no ’bus does rumble, and consider it there.”
“Will you see my aunt, Lady Hermione? It will save me writing, and you
can explain the circumstances by word better than I can tell them with a
pen.”
“Bless me! I have a mind to do so.” He stopped, went to the window, came
back, and said abruptly, “Yes, I will. God bless me! To think that I—I
of all men, a raging Democrat, should be hansoming to and fro between my
Ladies and Honourables.”
“You can do what will give you pleasure,” said the girl with a faint
smile—“with a stroke of the pen convert the Honourable Arminell into
plain Miss Inglett.”
He did not laugh at the sally. He came in front of her, and stood
contemplating her, with his hands behind his back.
“God bless me!” he said, “one can be heroic after all in modern costume.
I didn’t think it. Well, I will go, but write me a line to ensure her
receiving me in the morning.”
Arminell did as required.
When she had finished the note and was folding it, she looked up at
Welsh, and asked, “Have you read the Hecuba?”
“The Hecuba? Classic? Not even in Bohn’s translation.”
“Then the saying of Hecuba to Polyxenes will not occur to you: ‘I am
dead before my death, through my ills.’”
“I will go,” he said, and held out his hand. “Give me a shake—it will do
me good.”
“But, Mr. Welsh, you will return to me?”
“Yes.” His mouth and eyes were twitching.
“Deuce take it! an aristocrat can do an heroic thing even with a vest
and toupee.”
Two hours later the journalist returned.
“Confound these aristocrats,” he said, as he entered, hot and puffing.
“They live in daily, hourly terror of public opinion. I wouldn’t be one
of them, existing in such a state of quivering terror, not for anything
you could offer me. They are like a man I knew who spent all his
energies in fighting against draughts. He put sandbags to the bottom of
his doors, stuffed cotton-wool into the crevices of his windows, papered
over the joints of his flooring, corked up the key-holes, and yet was
always catching catarrh from draughts that came from—no one knows where.
What they fear is breath—the breath of public opinion.”
“What did my aunt say?” asked Arminell.
“Say? In the most elegant and roundabout way what may be summarized in
four words—‘Chuck her in again.’”
“I said as much.”
“Come, Miss Inglett. I have telegraphed to Tryphœna to do two extra
rissoles. We shall pass the stores, and I’ll buy a tin of prawns and a
bottle of Noyeau jelly. Pack up your traps. The cab is at the door.
Sorry to-day is Monday, or you should have had something better than
rissoles.”