The months passed. The decree nisi was pronounced, in due course made
absolute. It was a period for Irene of entire calm and repose. The
strong soul braces itself to stand the storm of great events; in the
dull after-time it yields to the beseech-ings of the exhausted flesh.
Day after day Irene read and thought and rested, scarcely desirous of
other pursuits. Her outlook over men and things was narrowed within the
horizon of an invalid or a prisoner. The waves of life beat unheeded
against the fortress of her seclusion. Her servant Jane--who had begged
to be taken into her service when the Sunnington establishment was
broken up, on Gerard’s going abroad--the Cahusacs, and Hugh were the
population of her universe. During these months of reaction and physical
and moral apathy, she desired no more from life than immunity from its
stress. An ample income, her own heritage, kept her assured against
material cares, and the need of work for its own sake was stifled by the
much greater need of self-reconstruction. And even after the healing of
torn fibres, she loved the soothing calm of her lethargy.
Then, suddenly, a slight shock from the outer world gave a necessary
stimulus. Hugh came to her one afternoon, in great excitement,
brandishing an evening paper.
“The mystery is cleared at last! They have found the murderers. As I
said all along--a common, sordid burglary!”
The discovery of some burglar’s tools buried in the wood behind The
Lindens, coupled with the fact that, at the time of the murder, two
well-known ticket-of-leave men had failed to report themselves, had put
the police on the track. The miscreants were captured.
Irene revived, devoured greedily, during the succeeding weeks, the
newspaper reports of the case. The wretches confessed during their
trial; were eventually hanged. In spite of her own public disproof of
Hugh’s guilt, she had never been able to free herself from the horrible
feeling that he still walked before the eyes of the world under the
black shadow of suspicion. This was eternally dispelled.
“Did you never think it possible,” said Hugh one day, “that I might have
done it--in a fit of anger?”
“You would have given yourself up and faced the consequences like a
man,” replied Irene.
When he mused, a while later, on the saying, a queer feeling of pity
wove itself into his thoughts of her. If she only could see mortality in
those upon whom she bestowed her affection or her friendship!
The awakened spirit of the woman rose with a hunger for fresh interests.
To one with a keen mind, a fervent heart, and a full purse, London
offers no lack of occupation. Gradually she gathered round her a little
array of charitable duties, which she performed in quiet, unostentatious
fashion. Again, the years of happy labour had borne ripe fruit of
knowledge. She showed Hugh one day an article which she had written on
“Some Unrecorded Facts of Infant Mortality.” In his enthusiastic way
he bore it off to an editor of his acquaintance, who took it for his
journal. It was the beginning of a series of articles signed “Delta”
that attracted considerable attention. Thus Irene found a vocation. But
being a very human woman, she sighed occasionally for that which she had
surrendered and for the comfort that came not.
One afternoon Harroway stood in the street comically perturbed, watching
the retreating figure of Hugh, who had marched away in great wrath. He
shrugged his shoulders and returned to his office; but the perturbation
remained and accompanied him home. It was his usual experience of Hugh
Colman. The man was like a cigar that smokes mildly and comfortably
until, piff! paff! with awful unexpectedness, some maliciously secreted
gunpowder sends the thing to smithereens. Thus Harroway summed him up to
his wife, during that evening’s dressing hour, while he tied his white
tie. The imitations of the explosion, interrupting the operation and
endangering the cambric, brought down conjugal rebuke.
“Your usual tact, I suppose, my dear,” said his wife suavely.
Harroway waited until the two little pats announced that he was well and
duly cravatted and then burst out. Tact! If he had to humour Mr. Hugh
Colman, whom on earth was he to speak straight to? A man who owed his
first brief to him. A man whom he had set his heart on making the most
brilliant advocate of the day--who had egregiously disappointed him.
A man for whom he was even now trying to build up a chancery
practice--Tact, indeed!
“You’ve said that so often, my dear,” said his wife. “If only you would
tell me why he exploded to-day I might more readily sympathise with
you.” Harroway explained. He had been lunching with Chevasse the artist.
Talk had fallen upon Hugh and Mrs. Merriam. Chevasse, very broad-minded
and kindly disposed to them both, had been talking the matter over with
the Cahusacs. Mrs. Cahusac, of course, was unconventional enough to keep
in with Mrs. Merriam, but Mrs. Chevasse was like Harroway’s own Selina,
and drew certain lines.
“Very rightly,” interrupted Mrs. Harroway. “Hard and fast. Marriage
lines.”
“Precisely,” said Harroway. “That’s Mrs. Chevasse’s attitude also. I
uphold you. I’m fond of them both. I help Hugh all I can. Would help her
if I could, but I’m not going to visit a woman my wife doesn’t visit.
And my wife doesn’t countenance irregular liaisons. I’m old-fashioned
enough to agree with you fully. Let them get married decently and we’d
stretch a point. So would the Chevasses. One or two others doubtless
would be ready to meet them. I dare say Gardiner and his wife. Everybody
is sorry for them. As sorry as they are for Merriam. Somehow the
luridness of the tragedy disposes people to forgive them.”
“The man’s pluck was heroic. Almost an atonement in itself,” said Mrs.
Harroway. “Almost. So was the woman’s. But there is the eternal law,
you know. Hundreds of women would be glad to meet Colman. You would,
Selina.”
“Yes,” she replied frankly, “I should be willing to receive him, but he
won’t come.”
“That’s where I admire the man. He mixes with men. Of course he’s
obliged to. But he won’t cross the threshold of a woman who doesn’t
receive Irene Merriam. He’s a strong-willed devil, and he’ll stick to
that all his life. Selina, I wish to goodness I could believe the story
she told Merriam! But it’s beyond possibility, and the other is only too
miserably human.”
“If you want to get to Mr. Colman’s explosion, before the people come
to dinner, Algernon, you had better make haste,” said his wife, fan and
gloves in hand, advancing with the calm of buxom years to the ottoman
where he was sitting.
“It will take you half an hour to put on your new gloves, my dear,”
he retorted. He emphasised the fact of their newness, because he had
brought them home with him that afternoon.
“So like a man,” murmured Mrs. Harroway.
“Well, sit down and I’ll tell you,” he said, making room for her on the
ottoman.
She sat and busied herself with the gloves, and Harroway relapsed into
narrative. In the middle of the discussion with Chevasse, in walked
Hugh. The restaurant was one of his usual haunts. Sat down at their
table, and talked about things in general in the charmingest of moods.
One would have thought him the mildest mannered man--like Lambro.
“Like _who?_” said Mrs. Harroway.
“Don’t interrupt, we haven’t time,” replied Harroway with a chuckle.
He resumed. Chevasse went away, leaving him alone with Hugh. They had
coffee, liqueurs, and cigars. Things very comfortable. Harroway enquired
after Mrs. Merriam. She was well, though of course feeling the quietness
of her life. She was writing on social subjects, under a pseudonym, and
was making a little reputation. But it was bitter for her. Here was the
chance. What need of tact?
Why didn’t he marry her? Hugh twirled his moustache. Selina knew the
way. Began to look dangerous. He supposed that was what everybody was
asking. There was no question of marriage between them. Never had been.
Never would be. He drank off his coffee, threw away his cigar, and put
his hands in his pockets. He worshipped the ground she trod on, said he;
would give up his life for her any day. But no idea of marriage.
“Why not?” asked Mrs. Harroway, wide-eyed.
“I don’t know. How should I? I said it was his duty. Replies that he
knows where his duty lies. I suggest that society demands it. He damns
society. I get him to listen to me. Tell him about Chevasse. He looks at
me with those blue sword-blade eyes of his, just as he looked at Hanna
at the trial. ‘It’s for her sake,’ I said. ‘Pardon an old friend’s
bluntness.’ ‘Of course I pardon anything you choose to say, you know
that well enough,’ he replied. So I went on; told him that every woman
in her position was not offered such a chance of social recognition. He
calls the waiter, tosses him some silver, waves him away with a lordly
gesture as he fumbles for change, and gets up. I accompany him to the
street. ‘It’s very good of your wife and Chevasse--tell them so,’
says he, ‘but I’m not going to do it.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s scarcely
honourable, Hugh.’ Whereupon he grips me on the shoulder--the rheumatic
one, my dear; I feel it now--and bawls out, ‘Damn it, man, if you
think me an infernal blackguard say so at once.’ I was nettled--also in
physical pain--so I did say it. And then he gave his shoulders a shrug
and stalked away like a madman.”
Mrs. Harroway looked at him demurely. “I suppose you think you managed
it all beautifully.” Then she laughed. But Harroway got up indignant.
“Hang it all, Selina!” he exclaimed, “I did expect a little sympathy
from you.”
Whereupon she mollified him, so that he should eat his dinner with an
unruffled mind, and thus avoid indigestion. A wife’s thoughtfulness is
often very far-reaching.
Meanwhile Hugh had marched away in great wrath from his friend and
benefactor. A man in a false position is apt to be unreasonable.
Harroway should have taken it for granted he was acting honourably to
Irene. Society generally ought to take it for granted. The irony of his
friends’ kind suggestion was a red rag to his anger. Marry her! It was
a palpitating vision of a paradise in this world for which he would
cheerfully accept damnation in the next. Even were he not tied to Minna
for life, and were free to ask Irene, sheer honour and loyalty forbade
him to go to her with protestations of passion. She did not love him
in the common way of women. Thus there was a double barrier to the fool
wish of that composite fool society! And the maddening part of it was
the impossibility of saying the words and bringing forward the proofs to
convince it of its folly.
If he had loved her loyally through her married life, he loved her now
with a new reverence. A new sacredness had arisen in his conception of
his attitude toward her, such as had not hitherto invested his thoughts
of women, and her influence had made itself felt in his work-a-day life.
He had vowed he would never again plead in a criminal court, and had
kept his vow. He was struggling to carve out a career in chancery
practice. He had to supplement his income with irregular journalism. It
was a hard battle; but he was not a beaten man. If he needed stimulus
there were flashing goads in Irene’s eyes.
On this evening he had arranged to dine with her at seven. It had just
struck the hour when he arrived at her flat in Kensington. Jane, who
opened the door, greeted him with a smile, hung up his overcoat, and
showed him into the drawing-room. Irene threw down her book beside her
on the sofa, and rose in her quick, impulsive fashion.
“At last. You are two minutes late. They have been tedious.”
He looked at her, his eyes strangely blinded. The gradation from
her customary laughing tenderness into something tenderer had been
imperceptible. Perhaps to her as much as to him.
“A welcome like that is sweet after a day’s work,” he said. “And I
haven’t seen you for forty-eight hours.”
“Very dull ones, I assure you. I have striven to improve them. A harder
task than the busy insect’s.”
“Gathering honey out of blue-books?”
He indicated a couple of government publications lying open, face
downwards, on an arm-chair.
“Horrid things!” cried Irene, pouncing on them and stowing them beneath
a chiffonnier on the other side of the room. “I am tired of them. Let us
be happy this evening, and forget their existence.”
A glance of surprised questioning met her. Usually she was eager to talk
of her pursuits.
“I have a great need of happiness, you know, Hugh,” she continued,
rather defiantly. “I could suck up an ocean of it, like an infinite
sponge.”
Then she laughed, and turning away to her writing table swept the loose
sheets of manuscript lying on it into a drawer.
“You see, I’m beginning to cultivate nerves.”
He watched her somewhat anxiously. She was looking pale this evening,
and her grey eyes were more lustrous than usual. A faint pearl-coloured
gown unrelieved by a spot of brighter colour accentuated the delicacy of
her face.
“You are overworking yourself, Renie. Needlessly. You want a holiday--a
change to sunshine and blue skies.”
“I want my dinner,” said Irene. “Here it is.”
Jane made formal announcement. They went into the little dining-room,
where the table was daintily set with flowers, bright silver and glass.
“You are wrong,” she said quietly, as she helped the soup. “I am not
overworking myself. I sleep like a top and haven’t an ache or pain in my
body.”
“Still a change of air would do you no harm.”
She assented with idle interest. Where should she go? He suggested
Spain. Zaraws, not far from St. Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay; fairly
secure from English; warm, picturesque, with the comforts of a civilised
hotel. From personal acquaintance he launched forth into glowing
description. The golden sands and the purple seas of the south. The
olive gardens with their shivering silver and green. The dark-eyed
Basques. The wealth of sun and colour. Irene leant her elbow on the
table and her eyes dwelt softly on him.
“Does it please you?” he asked.
“The way you talk of it does. I would sooner have that. It does me more
good. You always speak as if the subject of the moment were the one
interest of your life. I wish you had a parliamentary career before
you.”
He laughed. “That is dangerously near satire, Renie.”
“Women only use satire when they want to hurt, and to hurt deeply,” she
said. “I want to--” She stopped, embarrassed.
“What?” he asked.
Her eyes fell before his. She made a pretence of eating. Jane entered
with the next course. They discussed the weather, until she had retired.
“What could I do to make your life happier, Renie?” he asked. A futile
question; yet men will continue to put it.
“What can I do to make _yours_ happier? That is the all-important point
to me.”
“Nothing,” he said in a low voice.
“This is the happiest time of my life.”
“There is nothing I could do--beyond asking you to dinner?”
“Nothing,” he repeated. “If there were, I should tell you.”
“You have only to ask,” said Irene.
Woman could say no more. There was a short silence. Hugh understood--yet
did not divine. The inner man fell at her feet, blessing her for her
sweet graciousness of surrender. He was fine enough to perceive that she
was grateful to him for restraining expression of the love long known to
her, and that her words were meant to relieve him of the obligation
to which he had bound himself. But it was divine and tender charity.
Nothing more. It was her way to reward royally out of proportion to
services rendered.
“Life is a queer tangle,” he remarked after a while.
“The art of unravelling it is the art of living. But one must hold the
master thread.”
“The master thread is work,” said Hugh, forcing his tone to lightness.
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
She did not answer. A little involuntary sigh fluttered her bosom.
“I wish I could put you back into your bright circle, Renie,” he said,
putting his own interpretation upon her mood. With Harroway’s words
fresh in his memory, his heart grew heavy.
“Yes, I miss my friends,” she replied absently.
The talk dropped a little. She stayed with him while he smoked his
cigarette, and then they went into the drawing-room. Hugh drew her chair
to the fire, set a footstool for her feet, and placed a cushion behind
her head. She thanked him shyly, trying to keep back a rush of thoughts.
Gerard had never done such a thing for her in his life. Suddenly tears
came into her eyes. Hugh bent over her, in some concern.
“My poor Renie.”
She smiled as she wiped the tears away.
“The past sometimes hurts,” she said. “But the present is healing it.”
Again their talk languished, strangely lacking spontaneity. The breath
of a new influence was hovering round them. At last Hugh rose to go.
“You look so tired that I won’t keep you up any longer. God bless you
for what you have said this evening.”
She turned her head aside quickly and began to tremble a little. He
could see the flush rising on the sweet contours of her temples, and
losing itself in the shadow of her hair. “Then you did understand?” she
murmured.
“Yes. But it was the angel and not the woman that spoke,” he said rather
huskily. “Besides, I could never ask you for what I did not feel myself
free to accept.”
She turned and faced him, looking him bravely in the eyes, while the
flush flamed into scarlet.
“You will never think--as other men might think----?”
Her insinuation flashed for the first time through his mind--that she
was urging him to marry her for social reasons.
“Good God, no!” he said. “Don’t speak of it.”
A moment afterwards they parted, and Hugh rushed down the stairs with
his temples buzzing.