Nevertheless next day I found myself taking my husband's side against
myself.
If he had sacrificed anything in order to marry me it was my duty to
make it up to him.
I resolved that I _should_ make it up to him. I would study my husband's
likes and dislikes in every little thing. I would share in his pleasures
and enter into his life. I would show him that a wife was something
other and better than any hired woman in the world, and that when she
cast in her lot with her husband it was for his own sake only and not
for any fortune he could spend on her.
"Yes, yes, that's what I'll do," I thought, and I became more solicitous
of my husband's happiness than if I had really and truly loved him.
A woman would smile at the efforts which I made in my inexperience to
make my husband forget his cast-off mistress, and indeed some of them
were very childish.
The first was a ridiculous failure.
My husband's birthday was approaching and I wished to make him a
present. It was difficult to know what to select, for I knew little or
nothing of his tastes or wants; but walking one day in a street off
Oxford Street I saw, in the window of a shop for the sale of objects of
ecclesiastical _vertu_, among crosses and crucifixes and rosaries, a
little ivory ink-stand and paper-holder, which was surmounted by a
figure of the Virgin.
I cannot for the life of me conceive why I thought this would be a
suitable present for my husband, except that the face of Our Lady was so
young, so sweet, so beautiful, and so exquisitely feminine that it
seemed impossible that any man in the world should not love her. But
however that might be I bought her, and carrying her home in a cab, I
set her on my husband's desk without a word, and then stood by, like the
mother of Moses, to watch the result.
There was no result--at first at all events. My husband was several
hours in the room with my treasure without appearing to be aware of its
presence. But towards evening his two principal friends came to play
bridge with him, and then, from the ambush of my own apartments, I heard
the screechy voice of Mr. Vivian saying:
"Dash it all, Jimmy, you don't say you're going to be a Pape?"
"Don't fret yourself, old fellow," replied my husband. "That's my wife's
little flutter. Dare say the poor fool has had to promise her priest to
make me a 'vert.'"
My next experiment was perhaps equally childish but certainly more
successful.
Seeing that my husband was fond of flowers, and was rarely without a
rose in his buttonhole, I conceived the idea of filling his room with
them in honour of his birthday. With this view I got up very early,
before anybody in the hotel was stirring, and hurried off to Covent
Garden, through the empty and echoing streets, while the air of London
was fresh with the breath of morning and the big city within its
high-built walls seemed to dream of the green fields beyond.
I arrived at the busy and noisy square just as the waggons were rolling
in from the country with huge crates of red and white roses, bright with
the sunshine and sparkling with the dew. Then buying the largest and
loveliest and costliest bunch of them (a great armful, as much as I
could hold), I hurried back to the hotel and set them in vases and
glasses in every part of my husband's room--his desk, his sideboard, his
mantelpiece, and above all his table, which a waiter was laying for
breakfast--until the whole place was like a bridal bower.
"Ah, this is something like," I heard my husband say as he came out of
his bedroom an hour or two afterwards with his vicious terrier at his
heels.
I heard no more until he had finished breakfast, and then, while drawing
on his gloves for his morning walk, he said to the waiter, who was
clearing the table,
"Tell your Manageress I am much obliged to her for the charming flowers
with which she has decorated my room this morning."
"But it wasn't the manageress, my lord," said the waiter.
"Then who was it?"
"It was her . . . her ladyship," said the waiter.
"O-oh!" said my husband in a softer, if more insinuating tone, and a few
minutes afterwards he went out whistling.
God knows that was small reward for the trouble I had taken, but I was
so uplifted by the success of my experiment that I determined to go
farther, and when towards evening of the same day a group of my
husband's friends came to tell him that they had booked a box at a
well-known musical comedy theatre, I begged to be permitted to join
them.
"Nonsense, my dear! Brompton Oratory would suit you better," said my
husband, chucking me under the chin.
But I persisted in my importunities, and at length Mr. Eastcliff said:
"Let her come. Why shouldn't she?"
"Very well," said my husband, pinching my cheek. "As you please. But if
you don't like it don't blame _me_."
It did not escape me that as a result of my change of front my husband
had risen in his own esteem, and that he was behaving towards me as one
who thought he had conquered my first repugnance, or perhaps
triumphantly ridden over it. But in my simplicity I was so fixed in my
determination to make my husband forget the loss of his mistress that I
had no fear of his familiarities and no misgivings about his mistakes.
All that was to come later, with a fresh access of revulsion and
disgust.