Having made my bargain I set myself to fulfil the conditions of it. I
had faithfully promised to try to love my husband and I prepared to do
so.
Did not love require that a wife should look up to and respect and even
reverence the man she had married? I made up my mind to do that by
shutting my eyes to my husband's obvious faults and seeing only his
better qualities.
What disappointments were in store for me! What crushing and humiliating
disillusionments!
On the night of our arrival in London we put up at a fashionable hotel
in a quiet but well-known part of the West-end, which is inhabited
chiefly by consulting physicians and celebrated surgeons. Here, to my
surprise, we were immediately discovered, and lines of visitors waited
upon my husband the following morning.
I thought they were his friends, and a ridiculous little spurt of pride
came to me from heaven knows where with the idea that my husband must be
a man of some importance in the metropolis.
But I discovered they were his creditors, money-lenders and bookmakers,
to whom he owed debts of "honour" which he had been unable or unwilling
to disclose to my father and his advocate.
One of my husband's visitors was a pertinacious little man who came
early and stayed late. He was a solicitor, and my husband was obviously
in some fear of him. The interviews between them, while they were
closeted together morning after morning in one of our two sitting-rooms,
were long and apparently unpleasant, for more than once I caught the
sound of angry words on both sides, with oaths and heavy blows upon the
table.
But towards the end of the week, my husband's lawyer arrived in London,
and after that the conversations became more pacific.
One morning, as I sat writing a letter in the adjoining room, I heard
laughter, the popping of corks, the jingling of glasses, and the
drinking of healths, and I judged that the, difficult and disagreeable
business had been concluded.
At the close of the interview I heard the door opened and my husband
going into the outer corridor to see his visitors to the lift, and then
something prompted me--God alone knows what--to step into the room they
had just vacated.
It was thick with tobacco smoke. An empty bottle of champagne (with
three empty wine glasses) was on the table, and on a desk by the window
were various papers, including a sheet of foolscap which bore a seal and
several signatures, and a thick packet of old letters bound together
with a piece of purple ribbon.
Hardly had I had time to recognise these documents when my husband
returned to the room, and by the dark expression of his face I saw
instantly that he thought I had looked at them.
"No matter!" he said, without any preamble. "I might as well tell you at
once and have done with it."
He told me. The letters were his. They had been written to a woman whom
he had promised to marry, and he had had to buy them back from her.
Although for three years he had spent a fortune on the creature she had
shown him no mercy. Through her solicitor, who was a scoundrel, she had
threatened him, saying in plain words that if he married anybody else
she would take proceedings against him immediately. That was why, in
spite of the storm, we had to come up to London on the day after our
wedding.
"Now you know," said my husband. "Look here" (holding out the sheet of
foolscap), "five thousand pounds--that's the price I've had to pay for
marrying."
I can give no idea of the proud imperiousness and the impression of
injury with which my husband told his brutal story. But neither can I
convey a sense of the crushing shame with which I listened to it. There
was not a hint of any consciousness on his part of my side of the case.
Not a suggestion of the clear fact that the woman he had promised to
marry had been paid off by money which had come through me. Not a
thought of the humiliation he had imposed upon his wife in dragging her
up to London at the demand of his cast-off mistress.
When my husband had finished speaking I could not utter a word. I was
afraid that my voice would betray the anger that was boiling in me. But
I was also degraded to the very dust in my own eyes, and to prevent an
outburst of hysterical tears I ran back to my room and hid my face in my
pillow.
What was the good of trying to make myself in love with a man who was
separated from me by a moral chasm that could never be passed? What was
the good? What was the good?