MAN AND WIFE.
“However it goes,” said Mr. Russell Penton, “I don’t think you can help
taking some notice of the young people. In the first place it is right,
but that I allow does not count much in social matters; and next it is
becoming and expedient, and what the world will expect of you, which is
of course much more important.”
“Gerald,” said his wife, “what have I done to make you speak to me like
that?”
“I don’t know that you have done anything, Alicia. It is of course your
affair rather than mine. But I think it is hard upon your cousins. It is
like that business about the birthright, you know--you have got the mess
of pottage, and they--the other thing, half sentimental, half real.”
“I wonder at you, Gerald,” cried Mrs. Penton. “What true sentiment can
they have in the matter? They never lived here; their immediate
ancestors never lived here. False sentiment, if you like, as much of
that as you like, but nothing else; and the real advantage will be
immediate, as you know.”
“Yes, I know. I never said it was the sentiment of acquisition; it is
the sentiment of personal importance, which perhaps is even more
telling. Apart from Penton they will feel themselves nobodies.”
“As they are, as they have always been.”
“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Russell Penton, with a shrug of his shoulders,
“I have always said it was your affair and not mine.”
“You never said that you disapproved. You have heard all the
conversation that has gone on about it, and yet you have never said a
word. How was I to know that you disapproved?”
“I don’t disapprove. It is a question between you and Sir Walter and
your relations. It would not become me to thrust in my opinion one way
or the other.”
Tears came into Mrs. Penton’s eyes. “When you say such things, Gerald,
you make me feel as if I were no true wife to you.”
“Yes, you are my true wife, and a very dear one,” he said, after a
momentary pause, without effusion, but with serious kindness. “But we
knew, Alicia, when we married, that the position was different from that
of most husbands and wives. I am a sort of Prince Consort, to advise and
stand by you when I can; but it is my best policy, for my own
self-respect as well as your comfort, not to interfere.”
“The Prince Consort was not like that,” she said; “he was the
inspiration of everything. It was not in the nature of things that
anything could be done or thought of without him.”
“I have not that self-abnegation,” he said; “there is but one like that
in a generation; besides, my dear, you are not the queen. You must defer
to another’s guidance. What is settled between Sir Walter and you is for
me sacred. I make any little observations that occur to me, but not in
the way of advice. For example, I permit myself to say that it is hard
on your cousin, because I think you don’t quite appreciate the hardship
on his side--not to prevent you carrying out your own purpose, which I
don’t doubt is good and very likely the best.”
She shook her head doubtfully. “You are very kind and very tolerant,
Gerald, but all you say makes me see that you would not have done this
had you been in my place.”
He paused a little before he replied.
“It is very difficult for me to imagine myself in your place, Alicia. A
man can not realize what it would be to be a woman, I suppose. But I’ll
tell you what I should have done had I been in Sir Walter’s place, with
one dear daughter and an heir of entail--I should have moved heaven and
earth to kick him out or buy him out. There can be no doubt as to what I
should have done in that case.”
Alicia took his hand and held it in both hers. She looked gratefully
into his face, and said, “Dear Gerald!” but yet she turned away
unsatisfied, with a haunting suspicion. Being Sir Walter, that was what
he would have done. But he thought the woman who was his wife should not
have done it. In no way had Russell Penton intimated this to be the
case. He had never said that a woman should have a different standard of
duty set up for her. But Alicia had intuitions which were keener than
her intelligence, just as she had longings for approval and sympathy
which went far beyond her power of communicating the same. He would have
liked her better if she had not grasped at Penton. Without any aid of
words this was what she divined. The blank of the doubt which was in her
made her heart sore. She wanted to carry his sympathy with her, at any
cost. She called after him as he was going away,
“As you are so much concerned about those young people, I will ask them.
I will ask them, to please you; if you like, next week, when the Bromley
Russells are here.”
He looked at her for a moment with something like a stare of surprise;
then his countenance relaxed; a smile came over his face.
“Why not?” he said.
“Why not? There can be no reason against it if you wish it.”
This time Russell Penton laughed out.
“No,” he said, “no reason; the other way. Let the young fellow have his
chance.”
“What chance?” Alicia stiffened in spite of herself. His laugh offended
her, but she would not show her offense, nor inquire what he meant, in
case that offense might be increased. “I was not thinking,” she added,
“of any young fellow. I was thinking of the girls.”
“If my wish has weight with you, let the boy come, too. The sisters will
want a chaperon, don’t you know?”
“The sisters?” said Mrs. Penton. An inexpressible sense of dislike, of
displeasure, of repugnance came over her, as if some passing wind had
carried it. “Not that sharp girl,” she said, with a look of fastidious
dissatisfaction--something that moved the lines of her nostrils as if it
offended a sense.
“Not the sharp girl, and not the boy,” said Russell Penton. “But then
who is left?”
“My godchild is left, Alicia, the one I like best; or, rather, whom
I--”
“Dislike least,” said her husband, with his laugh. “I can not see, now
that everything is likely to be settled to your satisfaction, what
possible reason there can be for disliking them at all.”
“There is none,” she said, with an effort. “I am the victim of a state
of affairs which is over; I can not get my feelings into accordance with
the new circumstances. You can not blame me, Gerald, more than I blame
myself.”
He said nothing at all in reply to this, but turned away as he had done
with the intention of going out, when she called him back. Once more she
recalled him, with the same dull sense of his disapproval aching at her
heart.
“Gerald, after all, you see I do not even wait till things are settled
to ask the children. Give me a little credit for that.”
“You said, Alicia, that it was to please me.”
“And so it is! and so are many things--more, a great many more, than you
think.”
He put his hands upon her shoulders and looked into her face. “You are
always very good, very kind, and ready to please me. Is it for that I am
to give you credit? or for generosity toward your young cousins? You are
not very logical, you see.”
“Women are not supposed to be logical,” she said.
He gave a grave smile as he took his hands away. “Women are more logical
than they acknowledge,” he said. “It is a convenient plea.”
And this time there was no recall. He went out without any further
hinderance, not much pleased with himself, and perhaps less with her. He
was not, as she divined, satisfied at all. Rich Mrs. Penton’s husband
had as little devotion to Penton as had poor Mr. Penton’s wife. He felt
that he would have been more at his ease in any other house, and a
subtle sort of rivalry with Penton, antagonism partly irrational, and
disappointment in the thought that Sir Walter’s death, when it came,
would bring him no enfranchisement, filled his mind with an irritation
which it was not always possible to keep under. He did not want her to
do this scanty justice to her young relations, her only relations, in
order to please him. They had done no harm; why should it be an offense
to her that they had in their veins a certain number of drops of kindred
blood? Presently, however, this irritation turned into displeasure with
himself. He had been hard upon Alicia; he had asked that the young
Pentons should be invited, vaguely, without any particular meaning; and
she had said she would ask them at once, along with the heiress, the
great prize for whom so many were contending. It had jarred upon her
when he laughed, and it now occurred to him that his laugh had been
ill-timed and out of place; yet all alone as he was, when it came back
to his mind he laughed again. Why not? he had said--and why not? he
repeated with a gleam of humor lighting up thoughts which were not
particularly pleasant in themselves. He, a poor scion of the Russells,
had carried off the Penton heiress; why should not young Penton, the
poor and disinherited, have a try at the other, the Russell heiress? But
if Alicia saw the reason of his merriment, no wonder that it had jarred
upon her. It was in bad taste, he said to himself. To compare her with
the little Russell girl was a thing which even in thought was offensive.
He did not wonder that she was offended by his laugh, that it made her
stiff and cold. He sighed a little as all inclination to laugh died out
of him. It would have suited him better to have had a mate of a lighter
nature, one who would have let him laugh, who would have been less
easily jarred, less serious, less full of dignity; but this was a thing
that Russell Penton was too loyal even to say to himself. It might touch
the surface of his thoughts, but only to be banished. It was because of
this inevitable jar, this little difference, which was so little yet was
fundamental, that he sighed.
And she sighed, too, she who did so many things to please him--more, far
more than he had any idea of. She was ready to do almost anything to
please him; almost, yet with a great reserve. Instinctively she was
aware that Penton stood between them--that the bondage of the great
house which was not his, and the burden of representing a family of
which he was only, so to speak, an accidental member, lay very heavy
upon the easy mind and cheerful, humorous nature of her husband. He was
not born to be the head of a house. What he liked was the case of a life
without responsibilities, without any representative character. A
cheerful little place with all its windows open to the sun, where he
could do what he liked, where no man could demand more of him than to be
friendly and agreeable which he could leave when he chose and come back
to as he pleased; that would have been his ideal home. She said to
herself that the wife whom he had taken to such a little house would
have been very happy, and sometimes, in the days when she still indulged
in dreams (which women do in the strangest way, long after the
legitimate age for it), she had seen that tiny place in a vision with
children about it and no cares (as if that were possible!) and Gerald’s
countenance always beaming with genial content. But the woman who was so
happy, who was at her ease, whom no troubles touched, who was Gerald’s
other self, was not Alicia. She had to sigh and turn away, feeling that
this could never be. Her life had been already settled when she married.
There was no change or escape for her; indeed, what was stranger still,
though she perceived the happier possibilities in the other lot, she
knew that it had never been possible to her. The ease would have
wearied, perhaps even disgusted her. Attending that vision of happiness
would come revelations of the slipshod, glimpses of what ease and
happiness so often come to when they grow to overluxuriance. No, the
difference was very slight, but it was fundamental. And in this, as in
so many other contradictions of life, the woman had the worst of it.
Russell Penton was tolerant by nature, and he had trained himself to
still greater tolerance. He made an observation, as he said, now and
then, but it was possible to him to stand by and look on, without
worrying himself about that which he could not change. He would say to
himself that it was no business of his; he could even refrain from
criticism except in so far as we have seen, when he made a good-natured
protest in defense of some one wronged, or avenged another’s injury by a
laugh. But Alicia, on her side, was not so easily satisfied. She wanted
him to approve; his acquiescence, his plea that it was not his affair,
his declaration that he would not interfere, were to her gall and
bitterness. She could not adopt his light ways, nor take things easily
as he did. Following her own course, acting upon her own principles, his
concurrence, his approval, were the things she longed for before all
others. When he said “You are quite right” she was happy, though even
then never without a sense that he must have added within himself,
“right from your own point of view.” The curious thing, however, and one
which she was also aware of with a strange double consciousness, was
that she never thought of adopting his point of view, or attempting even
any compromise between his and hers. She had placed herself so
completely in her own groove that she could not get out of it, and had
no wish to get out of it. But yet she wanted his approval, all the same.
She wanted it passionately, with an insistence which even her own
complete enlightenment as to the difference between them never affected.
Having her own way, even in the supreme question which now at the last
had been opened only to promise the most satisfactory solution, she yet
would have no real pleasure in it unless he approved. And his mode of
passing it over, his assent which meant no approval, took the pleasure
out of everything. What could she do to please him more than she was
doing? But she never had it, that satisfaction of the heart.