SUBURBAN
_L'amour fait tout excuser, mais il faut être bien sûr qu'il y a de i
amour._
Miss Anna Hethbridge loved Seymour Michael with as great a love as her
nature could compass.
When the news of his death reached her, at the profusely laden
breakfast-table at Jaggery House, Clapham Common, her first feeling was
one of scornful anger towards a Providence which could be so careless.
Life had always been prosperous for her, in a bourgeois, solidly wealthy
way, entirely suited to her turn of mind. She had always had servants at
her beck and call, whom she could abuse illogically and treat with an
utter inconsequence inherent in her nature. She had been the spoilt child
of a ponderous, thick-skinned father and a very suburban mother, who, out
of her unexpected prosperity, could deny her daughter nothing.
Three months after the receipt of the news Anna Hethbridge went down into
Hertfordshire, where, in the course of a visit at Stagholme Rectory, she
met and became engaged to the Squire of Stagholme, James Edward Agar.
A month later she became the second wife of the simple-minded old country
gentleman. It would be hard to say what motives prompted her to this
apparently heartless action. Some women are heartless--we know that. But
Anna Hethbridge was too impulsive, too excitable, and too much given to
pleasure to be devoid of heart. Behind her action there must have been
some strange, illogical, feminine motive, for there was a deliberation in
every move--one of those motives which are quite beyond the masculine
comprehension. One notices that when a woman takes action in this
incomprehensible way her lady friends are never surprised; they seem to
have some subtle sympathy with her. It is only the men who look puzzled,
as if the ground beneath their feet were unstable. Therefore there must
be some influence at work, probably the same influence, under different
forms, which urges women to those strange, inconsequent actions by which
their lives are rendered miserable. Men have not found it out yet.
Anna Hethbridge was at this time twenty-four years of age, rather pretty,
with a vivacity of manner which only seemed frivolous to the more
thoughtful of her acquaintances. The idea of her marrying old Squire Agar
within six months of the untimely death of her clever lover, Seymour
Michael, seemed so preposterous that her hostess, good, sentimental Mrs.
Glynde, never dreamt of such a possibility until, in the form of a fact,
it was confided to her by Miss Hethbridge, one afternoon soon after her
arrival at the rectory.
“Confound it, Maria,” exclaimed the Rector testily, when the information
was passed on to him later in the evening. “Why could you not have
foreseen such an absurd event?”
Poor Mrs. Glynde looked distressed. She was a thin little woman, with an
unsteady head, physically and morally speaking; full of kindness of
heart, sentimentality, high-flown principles, and other bygone ladylike
commodities. Her small, eager face, of a ruddy and weather-worn
complexion--as if she had, at some early period of her existence, been
left out all night in an east wind--was puckered up with a sense of her
own negligence.
She tried hard, poor little woman, to take a deep and Christian interest
in the welfare of her neighbours; but all the while she was conscious of
failure. She knew that even at that moment, when she was sitting in her
small arm-chair with clasped, guilty hands, her whole heart and soul were
absorbed beyond retrieval in a small bundle of white flannel and pink
humanity in a cradle upstairs.
The Rector had dropped his weekly review upon his knees and was staring
at her angrily.
“I really can't tell,” he continued, “what you can have been thinking
about to let such a ridiculous thing come to pass. What are you thinking
about now?”
“Well, dear,” confessed the little woman shamedly, “I was thinking of
Baby--of Dora.”
“Thought so,” he snapped, with a little laugh, returning to his paper
with a keen interest. But he did not seem to be following the printed
lines.
“I suppose she was all right when you were up just now!” he said
carelessly after a moment, and without lowering his paper.
“Yes, dear,” the lady replied. “She was asleep.”
And this young mother of forty smiled softly to herself as if at some
recollection.
This happiness had come late, as happiness must for us to value it fully,
and Mrs. Glynde's somewhat old-fashioned Christianity was of that school
which seeks to depreciate by hook or by crook the enjoyment of those
sparse goods that the gods send us. The stone in her path at this time
was an exaggerated sense of her own unworthiness--a matter which she
might safely have left to another and wiser judgment.
Presently the Rector laid aside the newspaper, and rose slowly from his
chair.
“Are you going upstairs, dear?” inquired his tactless spouse.
“Um--er. Yes! I am just going up to get--a pocket-handkerchief.”
Mrs. Glynde said nothing; but as she knew the creak of every board
in the room overhead she became aware shortly afterwards that the
Rector had either diverged slightly from the path of which he was the
ordained finger-post, or that he had suddenly taken to keeping his
pocket-handkerchiefs in the far corner of the room where the cradle
stood.
It will be readily understood that in a household ruled, as this rectory
was, by a sleepy little morsel of humanity, Anna Hethbridge was in no way
hindered in the furtherance of her own personal purposes--one might
almost add periodical purposes, for she never held to one for long.
The Squire was very lonely. His boy Jem, aged four, would certainly be
the happier for a mother's care. Above all, Miss Hethbridge seemed to
want the marriage, and so it came about.
If Anna Hethbridge had been asked at that time why she wanted it, she
would probably have told an untruth. She was rather given, by the way, to
telling untruths. Had she, in fact, given a reason at all, she would
perforce have left the straight path, because she had no reason in her
mind.
The real motive was probably a love of excitement; and Miss Anna
Hethbridge is not the only woman, by many thousands, who has married for
that same reason.
The wedding was celebrated quietly at the Clapham parish church. A
humiliating day for the stiff-necked old Squire of Stagholme; for he was
introduced to many new relatives, who, if they could have bought up
Stagholme and its master, were but poorly equipped with the letter “h.”
The bourgeois ostentation and would-be high-toned graciousness of the
ladies, jarred on his nerves as harshly as did the personal appearance of
their respective husbands.
Altogether it was just possible that Squire Agar began to realise the
extent of his own foolishness before the effervescence had left the
champagne that flowed freely to the health of bride and bride-groom.
The event was duly announced in the leading newspapers, and in the course
of a few days a copy of the _Times_ containing the insertion started
eastward to meet Seymour Michael on his way home from India.
Anna Agar came home to Stagholme to begin her new life; for which
peaceful groove of existence she was by the way totally unfitted; for she
had breathed the fatal air of Clapham since her birth. This atmosphere is
terribly impregnated with the microbe of bourgeoisie.
But the novelty of the great house had that all-absorbing fascination
exercised over shallow minds by anything that is new. At first she
maintained excitedly that there was no life like a country life--no
centre more suited for such an ideal existence than Stagholme. For a time
she forgot Seymour Michael; but love is eminently deceitful. It lies in a
comatose silence for many years and then suddenly springs to life.
Sometimes the long period of rest has strengthened it--sometimes the time
has been passed in a chrysalis stage from which Love awakens to find
itself changed into Hatred.
Little Jem, her stepson--sturdy, fair, silent--was her first failure.
“Come to your mother, dear,” she said, with unguarded enthusiasm one
afternoon when there were callers in the room.
“I cannot go to my mother,” replied the youthful James, with his mouth
full of cake, “because she is dead.”
There was an uncompromising matter-of-factness about this simple
statement, made in all good faith and honesty, which warned the second
Mrs. Agar to press the matter no farther just then. But she was so intent
upon exhibiting to her neighbours the maternal affection which she
persuaded herself that she felt for the plain-spoken heir to Stagholme,
that she took him to task afterwards. With great care and an utter lack
of logic she devoted some hours to the instruction of Jem in the somewhat
crooked ways of her social creed.
“And when,” she added, “I tell you to come to your mother, you must come
and kiss me.”
This last item she further impressed upon him by the gift of an orange,
and then asked him if he understood.
After scratching his head meditatively for some moments, he looked into
her comely face with very steady blue eyes and said:
“I don't think so--not quite.”
“Then,” replied his stepmother angrily, “you are a very stupid little
boy--and you must go up to the nursery at once.”
This puzzled Jem still more, and he walked upstairs reflecting deeply.
Years afterwards, when he was a man, the sunlight falling on the wall
through the skylight over the staircase had the power of bringing back
that moment to him--a moment when the world first began to open itself
before him and to puzzle him.
It happened that at that precise time when Mrs. Agar was endeavouring
To teach her little stepson the usages of polite society, a small,
keen-faced man was standing near the table in the smoking-room in the
Hotel Wagstaff at Suez. He was idly turning over the newspapers lying
there in the hopes of finding something comparatively recent in date.
Presently he came upon a copy of the _Times_, with which he repaired to
one of the long chairs on that verandah overlooking the desert which some
of us know only too well.
After idly conning the general news he glanced at the births, deaths, and
marriages, and there he read of the recent ceremony in the parish church
of Clapham.
“D----n it!” he muttered, with that racial love of an expletive which
makes a Jew a profane man.
In addition to a strong feeling of wounded vanity that Anna Hethbridge
should so soon have forgotten him, Seymour Michael was distinctly
disappointed that this heiress should no longer be within his reach. The
truth was, that the young lady in India had transferred her valuable
affections, with all solid appurtenances attaching thereto, to a young
officer in the Navy who had been invalided at Calcutta.
To men who intend, despite all and at any cost, to get on in the world
the first failures are usually very bitter. It is only those who press
stolidly forward without expecting much, who profit from a check. Seymour
Michael was just the man to fail by being too acute, too unscrupulous. He
was usually in such a hurry to help himself that he never allowed another
the very fruitful pleasure of giving.
In India his zeal had led him into one or two small mistakes to which he
himself attached no importance, but they were remembered against him. He
had cruelly thrown aside Anna Hethbridge when a richer marriage offered
itself. Now he had missed both bone and reflection, and he sat with a
smile on his dark face, looking out over the dreary desert.