CONJUGALITY.
Mr. Tremenheere came home that evening at seven o’clock. It was not his
custom to be quite so early. He went late in the morning, and was not
unwilling to stay late, and to get all the evening’s news before he went
home, so that the dinners generally were very late in Hyde Park Square.
Mrs. Tremenheere, who was a busy woman with many occupations of her own,
did not object to this--indeed she was (as he remembered on his way
home) on the whole a very easy woman to live with, and disposed to use
mutual toleration in respect to a great many things which women in
general are inclined to make unnecessary fusses about. Oddly enough,
when he came to think of it, there were a great many things in respect
to which she was very easy. It was ideas that she fought about, but of
all things that make a woman disagreeable, ideas, it must be allowed,
are among the worst.
However, he dressed and made himself particularly pleasant at dinner.
They were people who took pleasure in the table after a more refined
fashion than that generally understood by these words. Mr. Tremenheere
indeed liked a good dinner with that _naive_ devotion which is common
among men of his age, but Mrs. Tremenheere considered cookery one of the
fine arts, and studied it in an elevated and elevating way. Mr.
Tremenheere had made up his mind when he married, with a certain rueful
submission, that it would be madness to expect in an imperfect and
newly-constituted establishment under the charge of a lady whom he knew
to be much too enlightened on other subjects, and consequently expected
little from on this, the carefully-regulated cuisine, the excellent
cookery which to a man of many clubs, with a tolerable income, had
become second nature. He had even had jokes made upon him on the
subject, and had made jokes of a melancholy nature in return. But to his
great and delightful surprise he had been able to turn the tables upon
his sympathizers by giving them dinners which the best _chef_ could not
have surpassed. “I don’t suppose you want banquets,” Mrs. Tremenheere
had said, “but I think we are capable of dinners of eight--or even of
ten, if you please;” and she had kept her word in the most noble way. To
such a philosophical artist as she had proved herself, it need not be
said that a dinner for two--a delicate composition which answers to a
copy of verses from a poet, or a short story from a novelist--was a
special triumph of art; but on this particular evening, when Mr.
Tremenheere came home, trembling with suppressed anxiety, from his
office, and not very sure as to whether Fate and his offended wife would
allow him any dinner at all, the _ménu_ of the little repast was
unusually exquisite. He took this, deluded man, for a good sign. He
thought if she had been going to take those idle words of his at their
full value and act upon them, that it was not female nature (of which,
like many men, he thought he knew much) to have taken so much trouble
about what he ate. He believed that she would have been spiteful, and
refused him such a meal as he could sit down to with any pleasure. But
on the contrary--! Mr. Tremenheere’s courage rose. It is impossible to
describe how genial he was. He praised every dish; the fish was a wonder
of freshness--the _entrêes_ were perfect--the birds were cooked as one
scarcely ever saw them out of Scotland. He glowed and beamed over the
well-spread table. Was it not a promise, a foretaste of years of good
dinners and friendly conjugalities--all the better, perhaps, for this
sudden and alarming cloud--to come?
And he was equally genial to the children, whose introduction at dessert
did not always please him. To-night he was the politest and most amiable
of fathers. Vera, taking advantage of the opportunity, though most
inopportunely, so far as his feelings were concerned, plunged
immediately into comment upon the transactions of the morning.
“We have never been out all day, not one little bit,” she said. “Why
mustn’t we go out when its a fog? We have been ever so often before, and
no one found fault. Papa, you know it was because you were cross you
turned us back; and we were going to the Bazaar to see all the things
for Christmas. Naughty papa!”
“Vera, I must send you to bed,” said Mrs. Tremenheere.
“Let her talk--let her talk,” said the conciliating father. “Going to
the Bazaar, were you! I will take you myself when it is a fine day and
buy you something.”
“You!” Vera’s delight was great. “Do you hear, Eddy? Papa himself! But
you never did it before.”
“I am always so busy, my dear.”
“Are you busy? I should like to go with you; shouldn’t you, Eddy? better
than with nurse--better than with mamma.”
“Vera, that is very ungrateful,” said Mr. Tremenheere, secretly
flattered by the preference, “and, besides, I don’t believe it. You
would rather go with mamma.”
“No; she would come any time. I should like you because you never, never
did it before. I like everything that is new,” cried Vera, clapping her
hands; “and then you would be stupid--you would not know where to go, or
anything. You would not know which was the place for the dolls, nor
where those funny Japan things are. Will you come to-morrow, papa?”
“That is abrupt,” he said. “Yes, perhaps, Vera, if nothing happens to
interfere I will go to-morrow. Will that please you? and then I shall be
made, I suppose, to buy half the dolls in the Bazaar.”
“Vera, it is your hour for bed,” said her mother; and the remonstrances
which were on the child’s lips were hushed by the fact that just then
nurse came in solemnly and took her place at the door. As is usual in
well-regulated families, mothers and fathers may yield, but nurse is
inexorable. The children did not even attempt by any unnecessary
blandishments to work upon the feelings of that Rhadamantha. They
yielded at once. Eddy rose from his oranges without much reluctance, and
Vera slid down unwillingly from her father’s knee. At the same moment
Mrs. Tremenheere rose. “You will find me in the drawing-room if you want
me, Charles,” she said quietly. Alas, he felt there was more in these
words than met the ear.
And then an interval ensued which was not delightful for either of them.
Mr. Tremenheere was long of making his appearance that night--which was
not even to be explained by the fact that he took a glass of wine more
than usual to strengthen him for the evening trial--not even that; he
did it on purpose, poor man, thinking that her courage would ooze out at
her fingers’ end, when she saw how late it was and how little time there
was for talk. He strolled in at length in a careless way.
“Give me a cup of tea, my dear,” he said, with ostentatious
friendliness. “I have brought some work home with me from the office,
and I want to have all my wits about me. In such cases there is nothing
so good as a cup of your tea----”
“I am sorry, Charles, that you have work to-night.”
“Yes?--well, so am I. I don’t like it much, I assure you--but the
country’s business must be attended to,” he said, rubbing his hands with
premature delight over the success of his scheme.
“I don’t doubt it; still our own life is sometimes more important to us
than even the country’s business--though I have never, that I know of,
interfered with that.”
“Never, Ada, never,” he answered, briskly, “--of course, you are a
sensible woman and know the importance of it as well as I do.”
“And I have never wasted your time or kept you from your work for my own
pleasure----”
“Never, my dear, never!” He interrupted her more nervously this time,
feeling that so strenuous a self-defence must mean something more.
“Then I need the less excuse for now occupying your time, Charles. I
must speak to you. Things are involved of more consequence to us than
there can be in your office papers for the country. The country is not
in mortal peril, that I know of, but our house is----”
“My dear, you astonish me----”
“No indeed, I don’t astonish you. You know very well what I mean. You
cannot have passed the day without thinking of it. I do not think it is
worthy of you to suppose that we can get over this by simply ignoring
the whole matter. Something was said this morning----”
“Yes, yes! I knew you would come back to that,” he said, pettishly.
“Well, it was a foolish speech on my part. I said it in the heat of
discussion, not meaning it. Will that satisfy you? When a man is very
much provoked he is not always master of what he says. There, Ada! I did
think that to ignore the whole business was the best--but since you
insist upon it, I apologize, and I hope now you are content.”
“The view you take of this is not the same as mine,” said Mrs.
Tremenheere. “You laugh: you are accustomed to hear such words from me.
But don’t laugh, I beg of you, for this is far more serious than any
disagreement we have ever had. Charles, you said it would be best for us
to separate. I have thought of little else since.”
“Nor I, for that matter,--if that will be any consolation to you,” he
muttered between his teeth.
“Why should it be a consolation to me? It is not that I want to get the
better of you, to be apologized to, or think myself the wiser. Again,”
cried Mrs. Tremenheere, “it is the old difficulty. You will not go to
the heart of the matter. You will think only of the outside.”
“It has no heart that I know of,” he said, with a sullen acceptance of
the new controversy, placing himself once more in that citadel of
argument, the front of the fire. “The whole affair lies in a nutshell.
In one of our continual and apparently inevitable quarrels, I said some
inadvertent words which I am sorry for. They were struck out of me in
the heat of quarrel, and I tell you I am sorry for them; what more is to
be done? I have said all a man can say.”
“But yet you have not touched the heart of the subject. If, indeed, our
quarrels are continual and apparently inevitable, that gives double
force to your words. Charles, I have been thinking it over all day, and
I think perhaps you are right. It will make a wonderful change in our
lives, and it is not a thing to be done lightly--but yet I think you are
right. We do quarrel a great deal. I don’t know whose fault it is, but
it is very undignified and unseemly. We will do our duty better and fill
our place in the world better--apart.”
“Apart?”
She said the last word so low that he stooped to hear what it was.
“Yes--apart!” Mrs. Tremenheere spoke tremulously, but firmly. Never was
woman stronger in her own opinion, and, perhaps, in all her life she
had never formed a more decided opinion than now.
“You speak like a fool, Ada,” he said, with a rudeness quite unusual to
him. “This is carrying matters ridiculously far. And yet you are not a
silly woman to leap to conclusions. You know, as well as I do, that
there is a great deal more involved than mere agreement or disagreement.
We can always wash our dirty linen at home, at all events. If we
quarrel, there is no occasion to publish it to all the world. And this
must be done if we separate; nonsense; separate! for one ill-advised and
hasty word! Expose ourselves, break up our house, put a stigma on our
children! You cannot think of such a thing. One can surely trust to your
good sense to see that.”
“I have thought of it all,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, “and painfully
enough. That is the outside view of the question--but the other aspect
of it is this. Which is best? To undergo what you have described once
for all: or to go on quarrelling, never taking the same view of
anything, bringing up our children without any feeling of household
sanctity, to see their father and mother in a perpetual struggle, to
take sides, perhaps, and fight too, after our fashion, and think of us
as of antagonistic powers? Apparently, so far as I can make out, one or
the other of these must be.”
“Folly! utterly far-fetched, and unlike your good sense. Why should
either of them be?”
“Do not you see why? Charles, Vera came to me this morning, quite ready
to enter on the fray. You had turned them back when they were ready to
go out, unreasonably. Yes, I cannot deny it was unreasonably. You were
angry, and you made them turn back, saying it was the fog, and they came
to me to complain. Of course, I had to maintain your authority; but I
did so simply as a matter of duty. And children are very quick to notice
this, Mr. Tremenheere.”
“Oh! confound the children!” he cried. “This question surely may be
allowed to be between us; it does not affect the children. Why should
they be brought into it? Surely nothing can be more distinctly between
you and me.”
“It was you who brought in the children first, not I,” she said.
“So! so!” cried Mr. Tremenheere, rubbing his hands together with growing
rage, “and thus the whole old business commences again. It was not I but
you--it is not one incidental question or another, but the entire matter
between us, how we are to get on at all, what is to become of the
family! I take heaven to witness it is not my fault. I said a few hasty
unintentional words. I have withdrawn them--I have begged you pardon,
which is a great deal for a man in my circumstances to do. If you are
determined to go on, well! do it on your own responsibility. It is
true,” he continued, growing in excitement as he went on, “that this
house is a perfect hell upon earth, that one is never safe from argument
even at the moment one is least inclined for it. That is what comes of
your educated women,” cried the unlucky man. “This is the Attic salt
they season their husband’s daily fare with! Give me the old domestic
drudge, the one that suckled fools, and gave her family a little
peace.--This new edition of a wife is not the thing for me.”
Mrs. Tremenheere grew red and then pale, but with that ridge of color on
her nose of which she was always so unpleasantly conscious. She could
bear (she thought) a great deal of individual abuse, but general abuse
addressed to her as a woman cut her to the heart. But she did not show
anger as he did. She waited until he came to a pause, and then said,
deliberately:
“It is unnecessary, Mr. Tremenheere, to assail all women on my account.
There are women enough in the world of the kind you like, who might have
married you perhaps had you asked them, so in that matter at least you
have only yourself to blame. The question is strictly between
individuals, not between the sexes--and I must remind you that you
yourself said it lay in a nutshell. We cannot agree. Therefore you think
it is best we should separate--and so do I.”
“That is putting it in a nutshell, indeed,” he cried. “I never made any
such cut-and-dry statement. I spoke inadvertently in a moment of
excitement.--No doubt it was true enough, if you come to that--but I
have withdrawn it. I do withdraw it----”
“How can you withdraw it,” she said, quietly, “if still it is true?”
“Ada, you will drive me mad!” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead
violently. She looked at him with a slight shrug of her shoulders, and
no visible sign of her corresponding excitement except that red line
down the high ridge of her handsome nose.
“Mr. Tremenheere,” she said, “you withdraw everything and then you
repeat it. Be logical. If I drive you mad--if our house is hell upon
earth--why then it is unquestionable that to separate is the only
possible thing for us to do----”
[Illustration]