Within the next few days the house-party arrived. There would be twenty
of them at least, not counting valets and ladies' maids, so that large
as Castle Raa was the house was full.
They were about equally divided as to sex and belonged chiefly to my
husband's class, but they included Mr. Eastcliff's beautiful wife,
Camilla, and Alma's mother, who, much to Alma's chagrin, had insisted
upon being invited.
My husband required me to receive them, and I did so, though I was only
their nominal hostess, and they knew it and treated me accordingly.
I should be ashamed to speak of the petty slights they put upon me, how
they consulted Alma in my presence and otherwise wounded my pride as a
woman by showing me that I had lost my own place in my husband's house.
I know there are people of the same class who are kind and considerate,
guileless and pure, the true nobility of their country--women who are
devoted to their homes and children, and men who spend their wealth and
strength for the public good--but my husband's friends were not of that
kind.
They were vain and proud, selfish, self-indulgent, thoroughly insincere,
utterly ill-mannered, shockingly ill-informed, astonishingly
ill-educated (capable of speaking several languages but incapable of
saying a sensible word in any of them), living and flourishing in the
world without religion, without morality, and (if it is not a cant
phrase to use) without God.
What their conduct was when out shooting, picnicking, driving, riding,
motoring, and yachting (for Mr. Eastcliff had arrived in his yacht,
which was lying at anchor in the port below the glen), I do not know,
for "doctor's orders" were Alma's excuse for not asking me to accompany
them.
But at night they played bridge (their most innocent amusement), gambled
and drank, banged the piano, danced "Grizzly Bears," sang duets from the
latest musical comedies, and then ransacked the empty houses of their
idle heads for other means of killing the one enemy of their
existence--Time.
Sometimes they would give entertainments in honour of their dogs, when
all the animals of all the guests (there seemed to be a whole kennel of
them) would be dressed up in coats of silk and satin with pockets and
pocket-handkerchiefs, and then led downstairs to the drawing-room, where
Alma's wheezy spaniel and my husband's peevish terrier were supposed to
receive them.
Sometimes they would give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves
would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the
male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female
the over-vowelled slang of the male, until, tiring of this foolishness,
they would end up by flinging the food at the pictures on the walls, the
usual pellet being softened bread and the favourite target the noses in
the family portraits, which, hit and covered with a sprawling mess,
looked so ridiculous as to provoke screams of laughter.
The talk at table was generally of horses and dogs, but sometimes it was
of love, courtship and marriage, including conjugal fidelity, which was
a favourite subject of ridicule, with both the women and the men.
Thus my husband would begin by saying (he often said it in my hearing)
that once upon a time men took their wives as they took their horses, on
trial for a year and a day, and "really with some women there was
something to say for the old custom."
Then Mr. Vivian would remark that it was "a jolly good idea, by Jove,"
and if he "ever married, by the Lord that's just what he would do."
Then Mr. Eastcliff would say that it was a ridiculous superstition that
a woman should have her husband all to herself, "as if he were a kind of
toothbrush which she could not share with anybody else," and somebody
would add that she might as reasonably want her dentist or her
hairdresser to be kept for her own use only.
After that the ladies, not to be left behind, would join in the off-hand
rattle, and one of them would give it as her opinion that a wife might
have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be well off.
"Ugh!" said Alma one night, shrugging her shoulders. "Think of a poor
woman being tied for life to an entirely faithful husband!"
"I adore the kind of man who goes to the deuce for a woman--Parnell, and
Gambetta and Boulanger and that sort," said a "smart" girl of three or
four-and-twenty, whereupon Camilla Eastcliff (she was a Russian) cried:
"That's vhy the co-respondents in your divorce courts are so sharming.
They're like the villayns in the plays--always so dee-lightfully
vicked."
Oh, the sickening horror of it all! Whether it was really moral
corruption or only affectation and pose, it seemed equally shocking, and
though I bore as much of it as I could with a cheerful face, I escaped
as often as possible to the clean atmosphere of my own room.
But even there I was not always allowed to be alone, for Alma's mother
frequently followed me. She was a plump little person in a profuse
ornamentation of diamond rings and brooches, with little or no
education, and a reputation for saying risky things in blundering French
whereof the principal humour lay in the uncertainty as to whether she
knew their meaning or not.
Nevertheless she was the only good-hearted woman in the house, and I
really believe she thought she was doing a kind act in keeping me
company. But oh, how I suffered from her long accounts of her former
"visits" to my house, whereby I learned, without wishing to, what her
origin had been (the daughter of a London postman); what position she
had held in Castle Raa in her winsome and reckless youth (one that need
not be defined); how she had met her husband in New York and he had
married her to save the reputation of his child; and finally how the
American ladies of society had refused to receive her, and she had vowed
to be revenged on them by marrying Alma to the highest title in Europe
that could be bought with money.
"I was just like your father, my dear. I never did no manner of harm to
those people. They used to think I thought myself better blood nor they
were, but I never thought no such thing, I assure you. Only when they
turned nasty after my marriage I made up my mind--just as your father
did--as Alma should marry a bigger husband nor any of them, even if he
wasn't worth a dime and 'adn't a 'air on 'is 'ead."
But even these revelations about herself were less humiliating than her
sympathy with me, which implied that I was not fitted to be mistress of
a noble house--how could it be expected of me?--whereas Alma was just as
if she had been born to it, and therefore it was lucky for me that I had
her there to show me how to do things.
"Alma's gotten such _ton!_ Such distangy manners!" she would say.
The effect of all this was to make me feel, as I had never felt before,
the intolerable nature of the yoke I was living under. When I looked
into the future and saw nothing before me but years of this ignoble
bondage, I told myself that nothing--no sacrament or contract, no law of
church or state--could make me endure it.
From day to day my maid came to me with insidious hints about Alma and
my husband. I found myself listening to them. I also found myself
refreshing my memory of the hideous scene in Paris, and wondering why I
had condoned the offence by staying an hour longer under my husband's
protection.
And then there was always another force at work within me--my own secret
passion. Though sometimes I felt myself to be a wretched sinner and
thought the burden I had to bear was heaven's punishment for my guilty
love, at other times my whole soul rose in revolt, and I cried out not
merely for separation from my husband but for absolute sundering.
Twice during the painful period of the house-party I heard from Martin.
His first letter was full of accounts of the far-reaching work of his
expedition--the engaging of engineers, electricians, geologists and
masons, and the shipping of great stores of wireless apparatus--for his
spirits seemed to be high, and life was full of good things for him.
His second letter told me that everything was finished, and he was to
visit the island the next week, going first to "the old folks" and
coming to me for a few days immediately before setting sail.
That brought matters to a head, and compelled me to take action.
It may have been weak of me, but not wanting a repetition of the scene
with Father Dan, (knowing well that Martin would not bear it with the
same patience) I sent the second letter to Alma, asking if the
arrangement would be agreeable. She returned it with the endorsement
(scribbled in pencil across the face), "Certainly; anything to please
_you_, dear."
I submitted even to that. Perhaps I was a poor-spirited thing, wanting
in proper pride, but I had a feeling that it was not worth while to
waste myself in little squibs of temper, because an eruption was coming
(I was sure of that) in which Martin would be concerned on my side, and
then everybody and everything would be swept out of the path of my life
for ever.
Martin came. In due course I read in the insular newspapers of his
arrival on the island--how the people had turned out in crowds to cheer
him at the pier, and how, on reaching our own village the neighbours (I
knew the names of all of them) had met him at the railway station and
taken him to his mother's house, and then lighted fires on the mountains
for his welcome home.
It cut me to the heart's core to think of Martin amid thrilling scenes
like those while I was here among degrading scenes like these. My love
for Martin was now like a wound and I resolved that, come what might,
before he reached Castle Raa I should liberate myself from the thraldom
of my false position.
Father Dan's counsels had faded away by this time. Though I had prayed
for strength to bear my burden there had been no result, and one
morning, standing before the figure of the Virgin in my bedroom, I felt
an impulse to blow out her lamp and never to light it again.
The end of it all was that I determined to see the Bishop and my
father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, and perhaps my father himself, that I
might know one way or the other where I was, and what was to become of
me. But how to do this I could not see, having a houseful of people who
were nominally my guests.
Fortune--ill-fortune--favoured me. News came that my father had suddenly
fallen ill of some ailment that puzzled the doctors, and making this my
reason and excuse I spoke to my husband, asking if I might go home for
two or three days.
"Why not?" he said, in the tone of one who meant, "Who's keeping you?"
Then in my weakness I spoke to Alma, who answered:
"Certainly, my sweet girl. We shall miss you _dreadfully_, but it's your
duty. And then you'll see that _dear_ Mr. . . . What d'ye callum?"
Finally, feeling myself a poor, pitiful hypocrite, I apologised for my
going away to the guests also, and they looked as if they might say:
"We'll survive it, perhaps."
The night before my departure my maid said:
"Perhaps your ladyship has forgotten that my time's up, but I'll stay
until you return if you want me to."