THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER.
MRS. JERNINGHAM spent her autumn at Spa, where Mrs. Colton, the
amiable dragon, drank the waters with the patient regularity of a
valetudinarian, and wondered at the Continental toilettes with the
pious wonder of a well-bred provincial Englishwoman, to whom these
daring eccentricities of custom--these _bottes à mi-jambe, en cuir
de Russie_, these dainty braided jackets _à la Rigolboche_,
these robes _à queue-sans-fin_, and _chapeaux à l’infiniment
petit_--were all so much confusion, the climax of horror and infamy
foreshadowed by the Prophet, the abomination of desolation sitting in
the high places.
For Emily Jerningham, life at Spa seemed a very dull business. She
had no pet ailment to be subjugated by the mineral waters. The
pine-woods and stately avenues were very beautiful on fine summer
mornings, or beneath the broad glory of the harvest moon; but she had
seen them before. It seemed to her as if she knew every pine on the
steep hillside, every branch of the lofty oaks in the valley, every
hard, worldly face that was to be seen in the Kursaal. Was there not
something wanting in her life, a something for lack of which she must
needs be lonely and purposeless wherever she went?
All the pleasures and luxuries that wealth can buy; all the
consideration that a good old name can exact; all the respect that a
reputation which, despite an occasional shrug from some Rochefoucauld
of this generation, may fairly be called stainless, can command--were
at the disposal of this fortunate lady, and yet she was not happy. She
had too much, and too little. If she had been an utterly selfish and
narrow-minded woman, she might have found the perfection of bliss in
splendid toilettes and well-appointed equipages, an elegant house and
distinguished acquaintance; but something more than these was necessary
to complete the sum of Mrs. Jerningham’s happiness.
“Of what use am I in the world?” she asked herself, wearily, as she
drove her graceful pony-carriage through the crowd which admired and
envied her. “I am an expense to my husband; a burden and a restraint
for Laurence, who no doubt would have married before this, if it were
not for me; and a weariness to myself.”
Perhaps this unspoken lament might have been translated thus;
“I have been here a month, and Mr. Desmond has not found time to come
to me. He writes me a hurried letter once in ten days, in which, under
an unlimited amount of respect, I perceive the lurking poison of
indifference; and I am too proud to tell him how intensely I wish to
see him, too proud to confess even to myself the pain I suffer because
of his absence.”
In bidding adieu to Mrs. Jerningham and her companion at the London
Bridge station on the morning of their departure, the editor of the
_Areopagus_ had declared that, if he could give himself a holiday,
he would take that holiday at Spa; and the eyes of the younger lady had
said “Do!” and the proud line of her lips had softened into a grateful
smile.
“We shall expect to see you, Mr. Desmond,” she said, at the very last,
when he had brought her _Punch_ and a damp copy of the newly
issued _Areopagus_. Ah, how many a youthful scribbler’s ardour has
been damped by those cold clammy papers, deadly chill as the skin of
the cobra, and venomous as his sting!
“We shall expect to see you--soon,” repeated the lady, with that pretty
air of insistence which is so charming in an elegant woman.
“But, my dear Mrs. Jerningham, I did not say I would come. I said, I
will come, if I can get a holiday.”
“As if any one could refuse you a holiday! But I will not allow the
arrangement to be left in that vague manner. Shall we see you in a
week?”
“I fear not.”
“In a fortnight?”
“I scarcely like to promise anything till this month is over. There are
so many rows on the political _tapis_; and we are bound to go in
for an analysis of all the rows. And there is Cumberland’s fourteenth
volume of “Catharine II.;” that is a book I am pledged to review
myself.”
“Pledged to the author?”
“No; to the publisher. Do you think anyone on the _Areopagus_ ever
writes a review to oblige an author? I think, in three weeks, I may be
free; and if----”
“Oh, pray do not imperil the fortunes of the _Areopagus_ for
any caprice of mine! I am sure I should be immensely distressed if
my pleasure interfered with the prompt notice of Mr. Cumberland’s
‘Catharine,’” cried Mrs. Jerningham, with supreme hauteur, and with
the injured air of a woman who thinks your regard for her must be very
small, if at her behest you refuse to jeopardize a paltry newspaper
which cost only twenty thousand pounds or so to establish, or the
reputation of a trumpery author, who has only given the labour of a
lifetime to his absurd book.
The Dover express moved away before Mr. Desmond could reply to the
lady’s angry speech, and left him standing on the platform, with a
smile, that was half-sad, half-cynical, upon his face.
“They are all alike,” he said to himself; “beautiful, delightful,
unreasonable, and profoundly selfish. How well that tone of _grande
dame_ becomes her! How lovely she looked just now, with that
crimson flush of wounded pride, and that angry light in her eyes! What
a pity it is that a woman cannot believe in the regard of a man who
is not ready to behave like an idiot in all the affairs of life for
her pleasure! ‘You pretend that you love me,’ cries offended Beauty,
‘and yet you won’t forfeit a colonelcy in the Life Guards in order
to attend me to a garden-party at Miss Burdett Coutts’s! You declare
that you adore me, and yet refuse to make a bonfire of your father’s
family-seat for my amusement!’”
Mr. Desmond’s mind was not altogether in his work that day, and more
than once the remorseless pen of the editor lay idle in his hand, while
he pondered on a subject which within the last year had become the
unanswerable enigma of his existence. It was much easier for him to
soothe Emily’s doubts with pretty, reassuring speeches than to satisfy
the perplexities of his own mind.
Was this lukewarm friendship an alliance that good men and pure-minded
women could approve--this friendship which must needs be continually
measured by the thermometer of the proprieties, lest it should become
a degree or so warmer than society could warrant? Was it a fair and
honourable thing, this tacit engagement, the fulfilment whereof was
contingent on the death of a man whose hand Laurence had taken in
friendship many times in the past, whom he might meet with friendly
greeting to-morrow? No, a thousand times no! Laurence Desmond was well
aware that he occupied one of those false positions into which men
sometimes slip unawares, and from which extrication is so difficult.
Could he bring himself to tell Emily Jerningham that this friendship
was wrong, and that it lacked even the charm that sweetens some
wrong-doing? Could he do this, could he inflict pain upon her, when his
own conscience told him that the keen sense of the dishonour involved
in his position had only arisen in his mind since the position itself
had become wearisome to him?
Yes, this was the _mot de l’énigme_. He had loved her very dearly;
but he loved her no longer. He looked backward to the days in which
he had walked with her in the little garden at Passy, and thought how
happy they might both have been if he had been less prudent, if he had
obeyed the impulses of his heart, instead of the hard axioms of the
worldly-wise. The time and the opportunity were past and gone, and he
felt that some part of his own youth and hope had gone with them.
He made his appearance at Spa when Mrs. Jerningham and Mrs. Colton had
been at that pleasant watering-place for more than a month, and he was
received somewhat coldly by the younger lady, who could not forgive
him for doing his duty as editor of the _Areopagus_. But she soon
melted. It was not possible that she should long conceal the delight
she felt in his presence.
“I am angry with myself for being so glad to see you,” she cried at
last; “but, oh, you cannot imagine how dull and hopeless my life has
been in this place! My poor aunt likes the humdrum gaiety, and the
nauseous waters, and the dawdling drives, and the Tauchnitz novels; and
I have stayed to please her. But more than once I have been tempted to
take the train for Liége, and offer myself as a novice at the first
convent I came to after leaving the station. Why should I not go into a
convent, or at least a béguinage? What use am I in the world?”
Hereupon Mr. Desmond had to reiterate the old protestations, to the
effect that the lady’s friendship was the pride and happiness of
his life, and that to him, at least, she was a person of supreme
importance--the very pole-star, or guiding influence, of his life; and
then, after speaking to her with great warmth and kindness, he began to
lecture her a little upon the emptiness of her existence.
“You would not be so foolish as to imagine these things, if you were
more employed, Emily,” he said.
“How shall I employ myself?” asked the lady, with an incredulous
laugh. “Shall I tat? The tatting of our great-grandmothers has come
into fashion. I have tried it, and for a little while it seemed really
delightful; but there is a time when one gets tired even of that. I
have worked screens in Berlin wool with beads--or have begun them;
my aunt has a knack of finishing my work. I paint ever so little in
water-colours; but after sitting in a damp meadow for two or three
hours, exposed to a midsummer sun, the result is only that I hate
myself because I am not Creswick. And with music it is the same. The
morning-concerts spoil one for amateur music. I devoted last summer
to the harmonium--I suppose because there is such a rage for it;
but it was like the tatting--there came a stage at which it seemed
all weariness. If it were not for my orchids, I think I should go
melancholy mad; but for the cultivator of orchids there can be no such
thing as satiety until all the forests on the shores of the Amazon have
been rifled by exploring botanists.”
“Don’t you think it just possible you might find a better source of
interest even than orchids?” suggested the editor, gravely. “Your
fellow-creatures, for instance--a little sympathy for them might not be
thrown away.”
“You mean that I should turn district-visitor, and go about with
tracts and packets of tea and sugar,” replied the lady, listlessly.
“My aunt does all that. She is a clergyman’s widow, you know, and that
kind of thing is very easy to her. My maid goes with her sometimes,
and tells me dreadful things about the poor people, as she brushes my
hair--the St. Anthony’s fires and St. Vitus’s dances, and wens and
whitlows, and frightful complaints that they suffer from; and really
there seems a particular class of diseases that poor people have
entirely to themselves, just as if they have a copyright in them, you
know. I am sure I am very sorry for the poor creatures; and when there
is anything out of the common way, we send money; besides which, our
rector knows that my cheque-book is at his service in any emergency. I
cannot see that I should do any particular good by walking about in the
hot sun with tracts.”
“I dare say, so far as your own parish goes, you and your aunt are
ministering angels, my dear Emily; but you see that is a very narrow
sphere, and there are people of a higher class than those you help who
may have more need of your sympathy.”
“If you are going to ask me to be philanthropic, I warn you at once
that it is useless,” exclaimed the lady, with a little cry of alarm. “I
have not the elements of the philanthropist. I do not care the least
in the world for woman’s rights; and if I had the privilege of an
electress to-morrow, I should--what do you call it?--plump unblushingly
for the man who could offer me a new orchid. I do not care about female
printers or female doctors. I think it very sad that poor seamstresses
should work in stuffy rooms until they fade and die; but I can only
pity them, and send money to the newspapers for them, or for their
survivors. I have not strength of mind enough to be of any practical
use to them.”
Mr. Desmond sighed. He saw no remedy for the weariness of spirit from
which Mrs. Jerningham suffered. Did not Madame de Maintenon complain of
a like weariness when she was the envied of all French men and women,
thereby drawing upon herself a trenchant and somewhat impious remark
from her brother D’Aubigné? She was happier, perhaps, in the old days,
before Scarron pitied and married her--the days in which she did or did
not share the chamber of Ninon de l’Enclos.
“I do not ask you to take up the human race,” said Mr. Desmond, after a
pause; “but I think your life is too--pardon me if I say egotistical.
If you had more friends--I don’t mean visitors; you have plenty of
them, but intimate acquaintance--intimate enough to fly to you in their
perplexities, to consult you in their social arrangements, and to--”
“They would only bore me.”
“Perhaps; but they would occupy you, they would take you out of
yourself; and even when they were dullest and most obnoxious, they
would give a keener zest to your hours of solitude. Depend upon it,
one must consent to be bored now and then, in order to appreciate the
rapture of not being bored. I am sure, Emily, you would be happier if
you took a little more interest in the affairs of your neighbours, or
if you had more people dependent on your kindness.”
“You may be right,” returned the lady, listlessly; “but I do not care
for my neighbours. I cannot bring myself to sympathize with their
serio-comic woes about recalcitrant butlers and flaunting housemaids.
Nor have I any dependents whom my kindness could benefit. My father and
I were the only poor members of the family, and there is no one who
would care to profit by my prosperity.”
What could be said after this? Laurence Desmond felt that this lonely
lady’s life wanted a something that gives form and purpose to the
lives of other women. Existence for Emily Jerningham had been made too
easy, and, extremes meeting in this as in all other cases, it was fast
becoming difficult. She was like some dowager sultana, weaned of palace
and gardens, fountains and slaves, peacocks and birds of paradise. All
the ease and luxury of her life palled on her, and that most fatal of
moral diseases, discontent, was fast gaining a hold upon her mind.
That old story of the greedy apprentice in the pastrycook’s shop is a
fable of wide application. The boy fancies he can never be weary of
an existence that is all raspberry-tarts and bath-buns; and being let
loose in his master’s shop, makes himself bilious in a week, and hates
the sight of a raspberry-tart ever afterwards.
There had been a time when Miss Jerningham, sadly restricted in all the
aspirations of young-ladyhood, had believed that an open account with
a West-end milliner, a perfectly appointed barouche for the Park, and
a miniature brougham for shopping, must constitute the supreme good of
earthly existence; but after half a dozen years’ enjoyment of these
blessings, she discovered that the most accomplished of milliners,
and the most perfect of establishments, cannot give happiness. The
toy-villa at Hampton was a place to dream of; but its mistress found
the hours intolerably long in those Paradisaic gardens, the evenings
unutterably weary in that fairy drawing-room, the drives by Bushey and
Richmond, Kingston and Chertsey, very little gayer than the prisoner’s
tramp in the grim gaol-yard, under surveillance of a hard-visaged
warder.
The lady had nothing to do. If she read a volume of a novel, and paid
a few visits, or received a few callers, to-day, she could only look
forward to another volume, and another visit, or visitor, to-morrow.
The days were all alike, and they left no mark behind them. When a year
came to an end, Mrs. Jerningham told herself that she was twelve months
older than when it began, and that was the sole effect the passage of
time could exercise upon her fate.
“It is all very well for Laurence to be happy and active,” she said to
herself. “He has that odious _Areopagus_ to interest him, and the
hope of going into parliament by and by. He is getting rich, and has
had the excitement of earning his money. He has his social triumphs
and his literary successes, the friendship of great men. It is always
the same story. _They_ have ‘the court, camp, church; the vessel
and the mart; sword, gown, gain, glory;’ and we have only the London
Library and Jaques’s croquet.”
Mr. Desmond stayed a fortnight at Spa, and then hurried back to the
British Isles, being “due” at a ducal palace in the Highlands--a grand
old château, romantic as a picture by Gustave Doré. To say that he
assured Mrs. Jerningham he had not the faintest expectation of deriving
pleasure from this visit, and that he went to Scotland simply because
the political interests of the _Areopagus_ obliged him to stalk
the duke’s deer and shoot the duke’s grouse, is only to say that he was
a _man_.
Within a week from his departure Mrs. Jerningham and her companion
also turned their backs upon the romantic Belgian valley. Emily would
have liked much to make the return journey under the escort of the
editor; but this would have just a little outstepped the bounds of this
carefully regulated friendship, and Mr. Desmond was too profoundly
versed in the philosophy of his own world to suggest the measure. He
knew exactly how much would be permitted to himself and the woman
he--had loved, and still hoped to marry; and he adhered closely to the
letter of that unwritten law which is Society’s Koran.
When autumn was fast fading into the chill gray of early winter, Mr.
Desmond came back to town, and resumed his visits at the Hampton villa,
where his pleasure and his caprices were studied with affectionate
solicitude, but where a good deal was exacted from him in return for
this solicitude. If Mrs. Jerningham for her part paid a certain price
for Laurence Desmond’s friendship, so surely did he for his part pay
somewhat heavily for the honour and privilege of the lady’s regard.
In plain English, she was jealous. The agony which neither “mandragora
nor all the drowsy syrups of the East” can lull to rest was the agony
that racked the soul of Emily Jerningham. Little wonder that the
pleasures and luxuries of her life palled upon her. There was a poison
in her cup which flavoured every joy and embittered every pleasure. All
the petty doubts and frivolous misgivings of the jealous mind harassed
this lady’s quiet days, and tormented her through the slow hours of
her wakeful nights. She was miserable when Laurence Desmond was away
from her; she was restless and anxious when he was with her. If he were
grave, she fancied him bored by her society; if he were especially
gay, her demon-familiar suggested that his gaiety might be assumed.
She tortured him by her eager curiosity about the manner in which his
life was spent when he was away from her. She insulted him by the air
of incredulity with which she received his answers. The mention of some
beautiful or distinguished woman whom he had met in society sufficed to
fan the flame that was always burning.
“Why do you pretend not to admire Laura Courtenay, and why do you
give your shoulders that depreciating shrug when you talk of Lady
Sylvester?” she would exclaim, with suppressed anger. “Do you think I
am deceived by that kind of thing? You dined at the Sylvesters’ four
times last season; and you are always dancing attendance upon those
Courtenay girls, though you make quite a favour of coming here once
a week. I shall ask Laura and Julia Courtenay to stay with me next
summer, and then perhaps I shall be honoured by your society.”
Of course Mr. Desmond did his uttermost to satisfy the lady’s doubts
and cheer her spirits; but he found it not a little wearisome to repeat
the same protestations, the same assurances, week after week, to very
small effect.
“If I could see Emily contented and happy,” he said to himself, “I
should be the last to count the cost of our friendship; but her tears,
and misgivings, and accusations harass and worry me almost beyond
endurance.”
Nor did Mr. Desmond feel thus without justification. The lady’s
jealousy might, indeed, be the strongest possible evidence of her
affection, but it was an evidence which Laurence Desmond could have
gladly dispensed with.
“Surely there must be within the limits of possibility a love that
means peace, trust, unselfishness. Is every woman like Emily, exacting,
suspicious, insatiable of devotion and protestation, for ever on the
watch to discover falsehood and hypocrisy in the man who loves her?
Poor girl! I am hard and cruel perhaps, when I blame her. These doubts
and suspicions may be some of the penalties of our position. There can
be no true union of hearts where there is a separation of existences.
It is all very well to talk sentimental balderdash about the union
of souls, the sympathy of minds that think alike, the sighs that are
wafted from Indus to the Pole; but, in spite of poetry and metaphysics,
real union means the family breakfast-table, the daily dinner, the
constitutional walk, the drowsy home-evening when there are no
visitors, the summer trip to Switzerland, the quiet, half-tearful talk
in the big, darkened bedroom when first the faint squeal of babyhood
is heard in the family mansion. Out upon Platonic friendship between
men and women who have once knelt together at the shrine of Venus! It
is a delusion, a mockery, a lie! There is no union except marriage.”
This was the shape which Mr. Desmond’s reflections were wont to assume
after a painful interview with Emily Jerningham. She loved him, and she
would fain have believed in his love, but her familiar demon would not
allow her so much peace, such pure delight. If Laurence succeeded in
convincing her of his truth and devotion to-night, and left her at the
gate of her pretty garden, smiling and happy, after a cordial pressure
of her soft white hand, it was as likely as not that an hour’s solitary
promenade and contemplation in the same pretty garden would enable the
lady to develop new doubts and misgivings from her inner consciousness,
which would result in a melancholy letter of five or six pages, written
that night, and delivered next morning at Mr. Desmond’s late breakfast.
Those who knew the editor of the _Areopagus_, and knew or guessed
his position _auprès de_ Mrs. Jerningham, envied and hated him as
the most fortunate of literary highflyers. What more could he desire?
Had he not the regard of one of the handsomest and best-bred women in
London, who would in all probability come in for a princely fortune
whenever Jerningham should go off the hooks? Mr. Desmond was the last
of men to admit the pinching of the shoe which he wore with so good
a grace. No one among his intimates ventured the impertinence of a
congratulation; but it was a generally understood thing that he was
supremely happy, and that Mrs. Jerningham’s friendship was a blessing
which he would not have bartered for a kingdom. And while his friends
were permitted to suppose this, Laurence Desmond was profoundly
miserable.
“How will it end?” he asked himself sometimes; “and will it ever end?”