position I am not likely to forget.”
He uttered this copy-book sentiment, so different from his usual loose
slang, as if he had rehearsed it, and Julia began to perceive that he
had cut out a new rôle for himself, and was wearing it with his usual
methodical consistency.
“But can you afford it? You know this is a matter which does not admit
of debt—”
“I am not in the habit of being catechised, but I am willing to gratify
you. I satisfied myself at Bosquith that neither my cousin nor his child
has many months to live.”
“But I heard that the child was healthy, and that the duke was
uncommonly well.”
“They are both in the last stages of tuberculosis, Bright’s disease, or
diabetes, I have not made up my mind which. And I also satisfied myself
that Margaret will have no more children.”
“Oh! I see. Then you expect to succeed shortly.”
“Within a year.”
“Then perhaps when you have what you’ve always most wanted in life, you
will let me go my own way.”
For the first time his glassy eyes lit a small sinister torch, although
they did not meet hers. They had not met hers since his return.
“You will be my duchess and do your little to support the prestige of
the great house into which you have had the good fortune to marry. If
you leave me, or in any way bring discredit upon me and my family, you
know one penalty. Others you will learn if you cause me even the
lightest displeasure.”
Julia laughed outright. “Really, Harold, you were about the only man I
had never thought funny—for good and sufficient reasons! Now you are
too absurd, with your airs of superiority over the mere female, and your
new rôle of stage lord. You were more impressive when you were the
ordinary male brute, for at least you were natural. You never were
intended for an actor.”
“Actor?” His tones were still even. It seemed impossible to ruffle him.
“I have told you that I expect to be Duke of Kingsborough in six
months.”
“Even so. What duke do you know that puts on such airs? Even
Kingsborough pretends to be simple and democratic.”
“The great peers of England have made a mistake in affecting a democracy
it is impossible they should feel. They have only lowered the dignity of
their position. I propose to raise it. When I am Kingsborough, I shall
restore the ancient glories of Bosquith, and live as the old feudal
lords lived, with an army of retainers, and a tenantry to whom my
lightest word is law. I shall entertain as kings have forgotten how to
entertain, and in no village on my estates anywhere shall an election
ever be held again.”
“Good Lord! Do you fancy you can turn back the clock? This is the
twentieth century.”
“I am not the only one who believes that the clock will turn back—to
absolute monarchy. It is the only solution—barring Socialism—if we are
to escape mob rule.”
This was the one thoughtful remark he had made, and she looked at him
with a trifle less suspicion, then remembered having read an intensely
conservative article in one of the reviews, not long since. She had left
it in the library, she recalled. But it was odd that he should open a
review. She had never known him to read anything but French novels and
the _Pink ’Un_. Was he trying to educate his mind, late in life? Far be
it from her to discourage him, even if it did lead to impossible dreams.
She rose from the table.
“Well, it will be picturesque,” she said. “I suppose I shall wear gold
brocade to breakfast—”
“I have not risen,” said France, in an even remote tone.
“Oh? What? Are you practising on me?”
France turned almost purple. But he made no reply. He merely rose with
great dignity and left the room. Julia watched him cross the court with
as much interest as amusement. His back was imposing, regal. Nature
certainly had started in a lavish mood to fashion him, then suffered
from a fit of spleen when she finished his shoulders, and vented it on
his head—without and within! Poor devil, what mortifications awaited
him! For the moment she forgot the bitter debt she owed him.
VIII
ON the following day, at luncheon, France remarked:—
“I shall leave cards on the county. When they are returned, no one will
be admitted. I do not wish you to have any relations with my neighbors.”
“I haven’t the least desire to have any relations with our neighbors.”
“And you will exercise on foot hereafter. I shall want all the mounts.”
“Very well.”
“If you wish to go to London, you will walk to Stanmore. I have given
orders at the stables that none are to be taken from you, and the
servants will take none to Stanmore.”
“Very well.”
Julia looked up, and their eyes met for the first time. In his was the
strange glitter that had terrified her early in her married life and
with which she had grown horribly familiar during her previous sojourn
at White Lodge. It was an expression of utterly soulless mirth, such, no
doubt, as lit the eyes of savages while watching their victims at the
stake. She saw at once that he was devising new methods of tormenting
her and debated whether it would be wiser to laugh at him or to let him
think he was accomplishing his purpose. Being now poised and entirely
without fear, it was her disposition to reveal herself, if only as a
compensation for what he had made her suffer; but, on the other hand,
she wanted what peace she could get; she felt no desire to vary the
monotony of her life by egging him on to a point where, in spite of her
pistols and her courage, he could easily, with his devilish resource,
make her life unbearable. She believed that if she possessed her soul in
patience, he would weary of the game and leave, even if he did not
fulfil her hopes and go quite out of his mind first. She decided to
temporize, and dropped her eyes.
“You make my life very hard, but I can only submit,” she murmured.
“I wish you never to forget that you are, so to speak, a prisoner of
state.”
Julia controlled her muscles and replied demurely:—
“The king commands. I have only to obey. I shall probably expire of
ennui, but, after all, I am only a woman, so what matter?”
“Quite so!”
Julia raised her lashes. The dancing glitter in his eyes was appalling.
There was no doubt in her mind at that moment that his complete loss of
reason was but a question of months. So much the better if she must
merely humor a madman; that, at least, was “managing” without loss of
self-respect. She sighed, and looked wistfully out of the window.
“I suppose you do not intend to permit me to follow the hounds?”
“Certainly not. I intend that you shall remain within the walls of White
Lodge for the rest of your life and do nothing.”
“Oh, very well.”
Having banished all expression from her eyes, she looked at him again.
This time he was regarding her with condescension and approval. “You may
go to your room,” he said.
She thanked him and retired in good order.
He did not address her again for quite a month. Then he informed her
that there would be a large hunt breakfast at the house on the following
morning, and commanded her to appear. He had already entertained a
number of red-coated men at breakfast, and Julia wondered at their
complaisance in admitting him to something like intimacy; for, in spite
of the position he had enjoyed for a time as a respectable benedict and
heir to a dukedom, he had never made a friend, and it was patent that he
was swallowed with many grimaces. But she guessed that noblesse oblige
had much to do with it. The man had been accepted when placed in a
position by his powerful relative to press home his social rights;
therefore, was it impossible, in his fallen fortunes, to retreat to
their old position, unless he proved himself a flagrant cad. Besides, he
had fought bravely in South Africa, and personal courage and patriotism
compensate for many shortcomings. Moreover, he was an admirable
cross-country rider. He was safe enough for the present.
She dressed herself with some excitement on the following morning, for
it was long since gayety of any sort had entered her life. But when she
stood in her house gown among some twenty men and women in pink coats
and riding habits, all chattering of the prospective meet, and of the
one two days before, she felt sadly out of it, and wished she had been
permitted to remain in seclusion. It was nearly two years since she had
presided at a hunt breakfast, and then she had worn her own habit, and
been as keen for the chase as any of her guests. But as she stood with a
group of women waiting for breakfast to be announced, and answering
polite questions, assuring her indifferent neighbors that her frail
health alone forbade her joining them in the field, she was astonished
to find that she did not envy them, nor did she feel the least desire to
race across the country after a frantic fox. It seemed such a futile
attempt at self-delusion in the matter of pleasure. What had come over
her? Had she seen too much of the serious side of life during her eight
months in London?
If she had wondered at France’s benevolence in permitting her to meet
his guests and preside at his table, she was not long receiving
enlightenment. They sat opposite each other in the table’s width, and
before ten minutes had passed, he opened upon her batteries which hardly
could be called masked. She had almost forgotten him, and was laughing
merrily at a sally of the good-natured youth who sat on her left, when
France leaned across the table and said softly:—
“Not so loud, my dear. You have forgotten your manners this last year.
This is not Nevis.”
Julia was so completely taken by surprise that to her intense annoyance
she colored violently. But she instantly understood his new tactics, and
blazing defiance on him, regardless of consequences, turned to her
neighbor. Whatever she might submit to in private, pride commanded that
she hold her own in public.
But every time that she answered a remark addressed to her by some one
opposite, his dry sarcastic glance crossed hers, and once he said,
raising his voice: “Workin’ in a bonnet shop doesn’t improve manners, by
Jove. But my wife is only a child yet, and my cousin Kingsborough and
Lady Arabella worked too hard over her not to have been rewarded if she
could have remained with them. Of course, I’m only a rough sailor.”
There was an intense and painful pause after this speech, although Julia
paid no attention, and once more permitted her musical laugh, not the
least of her charms, to ring out. She fancied this was the last time the
county would honor White Lodge, but shrewdly surmised that it was the
last time they would be invited. They had been brought together to
satisfy her husband’s passion for inflicting torment.
And not once did he betray himself. He looked superior, tolerant,
lightly annoyed, but never vicious. His guests pronounced him a cad by
the grace of God, but too great an ass to know what he was up to. They
had long since accepted the fact that he was off his head about his
wife; and, although this was damned uncomfortable, could only conclude
that he was trying in his blundering way to apologize for her; why,
heaven only knew, as she could give him cards and spades on breeding.
Julia secretly hoped that he would suddenly lose his self-control and
burst out in a torrent of abuse, but France still had sentinels posted
at every turn in his brain, and played his part throughout the breakfast
without an instant’s lapse. He laughed tolerantly whenever he caught her
making an observation or airing an opinion, but it was not until just
before they rose from the table that he made another attack. The
incessant sporting talk had ceased for a moment, and some one had
mentioned Nigel Herbert’s books, apropos of his fine record in South
Africa.
“Is he goin’ to hammer away at Socialism for the rest of his life?”
asked one of the young women. “Awful bore, because he’s an old pal of
mine, and I’d like to read him. Do use your influence, Mrs. France. He
thinks a towerin’ lot of your opinion.”
“Oh, now! now!” broke in France. “Don’t encourage my little wife in any
of her nonsense. She’s straight, all right, but an awful little goose
about men. Hope you haven’t turned her head, Lansing,” addressing the
young man beside her. “She’s only a child yet, and devoted to me, but I
don’t want to be teased noon and night for a new toy.”
“By God,” muttered one of the men, “let’s take him to the duck pond.
Serves us right for coming here. Wish I’d opposed his election. Silly
asses, all of us. Leopards don’t change spots. But she’s a brick.”
Julia, at least, had won the admiration of the company by her attitude,
after the first attack, of serene unconsciousness. She might have been
deaf and blind, and at the same time there was no betraying note of
defiance in her voice or flash in her eyes. It was impossible to call
France cruel, but the guests, as they filed out, and got on their mounts
as quickly as possible, voted that it must be harder to be shut up with
a bounder like that than to have lost the prospect of being a duchess.
After they had gone, and Julia had brought the angry blood from her head
by a long tramp in the opposite direction, she recalled a visit she had
once paid with France to the castle of a young peer of the realm who had
married a wealthy American girl for whom he had conceived an intense
dislike. This man had appeared to take a peculiar pleasure in mortifying
his wife in company, by an irresistible play of wit directed at herself.
Julia had felt a passionate sympathy for the helpless young duchess, who
had neither the subtlety of tongue nor the bad manners of the man who
was spending her money, and had expressed her wrath to France in no
measured terms. France forgot nothing. When he felt the time had come
for a new weapon, he selected one that is in every husband’s armory,
and, although he used it clumsily, possessing nothing of the young
duke’s cold irony and glancing wit, there was no chance that it should
miss its aim.
Julia was apprehensive that France, irritated at his failure to provoke
her to retort, if not to tears, might seek other vengeance. But when
they met on the following day it was evident by the expression of his
eyes that he was quite satisfied. The arrogance of his manner, indeed,
led her to suspect that his faith in himself was too great to recognize
failure if it sprang at him, and for small mercies she was thankful.
It was nearly three months before he addressed another remark to her
beyond polite phrases calculated to impress the servants. But one
morning, shortly after the first of the year, he sent her word that he
wished her presence in the library. She went at once and found him
sitting before the table in a magisterial attitude. Before him was a
long itemized bill.
“You have been ordering books,” he said in a voice of cutting reproof,
as if speaking to a dependant who must be shown his place. “I gave you
no permission to run up bills of any sort.”
“I have always ordered books—for years, at least—it did not occur to
me.”
This time Julia was deeply mortified, and showed it as plainly as he
could wish.
“You pretend to loathe me—your own word—and yet you are not too proud
to run up bills for me to pay.”
Julia’s gorge rose, and her humiliation fled. “You compel me to live
with you, and I am entitled to compensation. Besides, after all, you are
my husband and I see no reason why you should not pay my bills. If you
permit me to live away from you, that is another matter. I had nothing
charged to you while I was earning my living.”
“If you want books, my lady, you can write to your mother for the money
to pay for them. Silly ass I was to marry a girl without a penny. Who
else would have married you if I hadn’t, and you thrown at my head? You
ought to be thankful for bread and butter and a roof. No girl has a
right to marry a man in my position unless she brings him her weight in
gold.”
“What a pity I shall cost you so much when I’m a duchess,” said Julia,
mildly. “You would better let me go at once.”
“When you are a duchess, you’ll have clothes, but you’ll have no books,
and no more liberty than you have here. As for this bill, I’ll pay
it—when I get ready—but I shall write to-day and tell them that you
have no further credit. You can go now.”
Julia, as she left the room, felt dismayed for the first time. What
should she do without books? The winter was very wet, and English
winters are very long, and often wet. She was forced to remain indoors a
good deal; and to sit and hold her hands!
In the course of another month she found a new cause for uneasiness.
Several times she awakened suddenly in the night and listened to heavy
breathing outside her door; and when France was unable to hunt he
prowled unceasingly about the house in the daytime. It was all very well
to wish he would go quite out of his mind, but to be forced to accompany
him through the various stages might be too great an ordeal even for her
sound nerves.
IX
SHE stood one morning at her window, staring out at the rain. She had
evaded the question for days, but she faced it now. What was she to do?
She had always despised women with nerves, the strong fibre of her brain
and the steel frame in her apparently frail body balancing her otherwise
abundant femininity. When women had complained to her of nerves, cried
out that they hated life, she had felt like an entomologist looking at
specimens on a pin. When they had demanded sympathy she had asked them
why, if they didn’t like their life, they didn’t go out and make
another. Bridgit and Ishbel had done it, and she had heard of many
others, although few of these were in her own class. Had not her sense
of fate been so strong, she should have gone herself years ago.
These superfluous women had not taken kindly to her advice, and when she
had added that strength was the greatest achievement of the human
character, they had merely stared at her. These confidences had not been
many, but one woman had replied petulantly that politics and charities
were not in her line, and one had reminded her gently that a woman did
not always hold her fate in her hands. She had despised this woman more
than any of the others. In her youthful arrogance and consciousness of
powers of some sort, she had equal contempt for the woman who submitted
to detested conditions, and for the man who was too poor to keep up his
position and yet grumbled, without seeking the obvious remedy.
But her spirit was chastened. She had discovered one woman, at least,
that was quite helpless, and it seemed to her highly ironic that this,
of all women, should be herself. She had felt her independence so keenly
during the eight months she had earned her bread, working as hard as any
of her humble associates, after she had persuaded Ishbel that she was
broken in. She had often been tried to the point of fainting, for she
had been accustomed always to the open-air life, and it would take more
than eight months and a strong will to make a well-oiled machine of her;
but she had persisted, never thought of looking for easier work, always
rejoicing in her liberty and in the independent spirit that had bought
it. Moreover, she had formed the habit of work, and soon after her
return to White Lodge she had begun almost automatically to wish for a
regular occupation of some sort. She had understood then why Ishbel
loved her business as she never had loved society and its pleasures. But
after she had made over all the clothes she had left behind at her
flight, and retrimmed all her hats, she realized that there is no joy to
be got out of useless work; with the exception of the hunt breakfast she
had not even crossed the path of one of her neighbors. Her evening gowns
alone had proved necessary, as France, the day after his return, had
issued an edict that she was to dress for dinner.
She had by no means forgotten her old desire to write, but although she
had essayed it more than once, particularly during the past month, she
could rouse her mind to no vital interest in fiction, although she had
come upon themes enough during her sojourn in the world. She wondered if
such productive faculties as she may have been born with had withered
under the blight of her married life; not knowing that the genius for
fiction survives the death of every illusion, being, as it is, quite
outside the range of personality and watered by the lost fountain of
youth. She had not, however, dismissed the belief, cunningly nursed by
Bridgit and Ishbel, that she had talents of some sort, and that the
expression of them would manifest itself in due course.
But now? What was she to do meanwhile? Where should she seek refuge
against a possible disaster in her nervous system which might wreck her
life? There was nothing here. If she fled to London and obtained
employment of any sort, even in an obscure shop, France would carry out
his threat and ruin Ishbel, one way or another. If he dared not employ
his original method again—and why not? He was cunning enough to know
that one sensational episode might be explained away, but not two of the
same kind. There is nothing people weary of so quickly as explanations.
If she could only take up a difficult language. She had studied French
and German during four of her years in the world, and knew the power of
a foreign tongue to dominate the brain. She had intended to take up
Italian, and it was the resource for which she most longed at the
moment. But she could as easily furnish the library downstairs.
She was about to turn from the window and go for a ten-mile tramp in the
rain, since nothing was left her but physical exercise, when she saw a
fly crawling up the avenue. She was not particularly interested, as the
occupant was more than likely to have a dun or a writ in his pocket, but
she lingered, watching idly. The least event broke the monotony of her
existence.
As the fly approached the end of the avenue, the door was flung open and
a man jumped out impatiently, paid the driver, and walked rapidly toward
the house. It was Nigel Herbert.
Julia’s first impulse was to run downstairs and embrace him. Her spirits
went up with a wild rush. But she rang the bell and asked the servant if
her husband was in the house. He was tearing across country with his
pack on an independent hunt. She ordered a fire built in the
drawing-room, rearranged her hair, and put on a becoming house frock of
apple-green cloth. She observed with some pleasure that her skin was as
white as ever, if her chin and throat were not as round as when Nigel
had seen her last. Excitement brought the old brilliance to her eyes,
and she smiled for the first time since the hunt breakfast. She ran
downstairs and into the drawing-room. Nigel, who was standing before the
fire in the chill room, met her halfway and gave both her hands a close
clasp.
“Oh, this is so delightful—so delightful—how did you think of it—when
did you come back—” Julia delivered a volley of questions, not only
because she was excited herself, but because she saw that Nigel had come
charged with so much that he could say nothing at the moment.
They sat down and continued to stare at each other. Nigel was far more
changed than Julia. The smooth pink face she had first known was lined
and rather sallow, his eyes had lost their careless laughter, his lips
their boyish pout.
“Oh, South Africa! South Africa!” said Julia, softly. “How it has
changed all of you.”
“Rather!” said Nigel, sadly. “Those that are left of us. Perhaps you
don’t know that I am literally the last of my name now, except my poor
old father—who has forgiven me once for all. I had four brothers and
six cousins when this war began. Now I have scarcely a friend of my sex.
At all events I know the worst. There is no one left to mourn for but my
father, and he’ll go soon. But I haven’t a pang left in me—not of that
sort. God! What a cursed thing war is! A cursed, useless, souless thing!
But I’ll treat that subject elsewhere. I’ve come here to see you, and I
don’t fancy we’ll be uninterrupted any too long—”
“Oh, he rarely takes luncheon here—and you are to take yours with me.
Do you know that I haven’t had a soul to talk to since last November?”
“I know. And that is what I have come to see you about. I—” He got up
and walked to the window, then back, his hands in his pockets. “The last
time I made love to you—the only time, for that matter—you put me off,
turned me down—”
“Alas! I only went out that night because the romantic situation
appealed to me. What a baby I was! And since! Oh! oh! oh!”
She sprang to her feet, and running over to the fire, knelt down,
pretending to arrange the logs. Tragedy rose on the stage of her mind,
but at the same time she felt an impulse to laugh. The hard shell in
which she had fancied her spirit incased, sealed, had melted the moment
the man she liked best had appeared with love in his eyes. But tragedy
swept out humor and took possession. She flung her head down into her
lap and burst into tears. They were the first she had shed and they beat
down the last of her defences.
“Oh, Nigel! Nigel!” she sobbed. “If you knew! If you knew! I never have
dared tell one-tenth. I dare not remember—”
Nigel, like most of his sex, was distracted and helpless at sight of
tears. “Yes! Yes!” he exclaimed, bending over and trying to raise her.
“I know. You need not tell me. Please get up. I have so much to say—I
can’t say a word while you are like this.”
She let him lift her and put her back in her chair. He made no attempt
to take her in his arms.
He took the chair opposite hers and smiled wryly. “I don’t fancy I’m as
impulsive as I was! Ishbel told me when I returned last week. If I had
heard—say, during the first year of our acquaintance—I should have got
one of these new motor cars and flown to your rescue without a plan. But
much water has flowed under our bridges since then!”
“Don’t you love me any longer?” Julia sat up alertly and dried her eyes.
“I’ve always loved you and I fancy I always shall. But—well, we are
only young once—young in the sense of love being the one thing to live
and breathe for. And, then, I have had a resource! There have been many
months when I have been able to put you out of my head altogether. That
is what work, productive work, does for a chap. And after—well, soon
after that night at Bosquith, I hated you for a time. You could never be
the same delicious wonderful child again. That would have broken my
heart if I had not both hated you and taken the first train into the
kingdom of Micomicon. Even when I found you so charming, when I saw so
much of you, that next season, I still congratulated myself that I was
jolly well over it. But—well—you never really ceased to haunt me—you
had a way of asserting yourself in the most disconcerting fashion. When
I heard of the duke’s marriage, I began to worry—I knew that life would
not go as smoothly with you—I had heard from the girls that you managed
France very cleverly, saw comparatively little of him. Out there in
Africa, I never was alone at night that I didn’t find myself thinking of
you. But I never guessed—When the girls told me, I thought I’d go off
my head. It’s too awful! Too awful!”
“It’s not so bad now. I have five pistols in the house.”
“I know. But what a life! It is so hideous that it is almost farcical.”
“People’s troubles are generally rather absurd when you come to think of
them. And I fancy I’m a good deal better off than a lot of women. Many
have husbands that are worse than lunatics, and as the divorce laws
won’t help them, they suffer in silence, without a ray of hope. At least
I may hope mine will betray himself in public sooner or later. I can
manage him in a way, and of death I have not the least fear—”
“Oh! It is all too dreadful! How old are you? Twenty-five? It’s awful!
Awful! But you must end it—”
“If I could conceal two alienists in the house long enough—”
“But you can’t. Nor would their certificate give you real freedom. I’ve
no doubt he’ll go raving mad in time—but when one reflects upon what he
might do first! No! I have not come here without a plan, and here it is:
You must go to the United States at once and get a divorce. There is a
place called Reno, where one can be got at the end of about ten months.
Bridgit will go with you. We held a conclave over it—we two and
Ishbel—not the first! Great heaven! What an eternity ago that seems—”
He laughed bitterly. “Once—was it only seven years ago?—we three
talked the subject over and came to much the same conclusions, but our
plans were frustrated by France’s illness. Well—we were all young then,
but it was a good plan and we readopted it. You must get away from this
without delay—there has been enough! When the divorce is granted, I’ll
follow and marry you if you will have me. If not, we’ll provide for you
in whatever part of America you choose to live in. But I hope you’ll
marry me. I don’t think I ever really loved you before. When Ishbel told
me! When just now you crouched by that fire!”
“Oh, how good you all are!”
“I’ve not taken to philanthropy. I want you more than I ever did when we
were both careless and young and arrogant. I never thought it could be.
But either Time or what you have endured with that man has annihilated
everything. Can you go to-morrow?”
“Oh! I must think. I don’t know. It is all very alluring. But I am not
sure.”
“You mean that you don’t love me?”
“Oh, if I could! If I could!”
Julia sprang to her feet and threw out her arms. “Away from all
this!—from the memory of it! The horror! And there are other memories
behind those three months! I don’t know! I have felt so sure I never
could forget. And if I cannot forget, I cannot love you or any man. I
have never felt so sure of anything as of that.”
“You are but twenty-five, remember. The mind is not crystallized at that
age. Even memory is fluid. I believe that anything can be forgotten,
given change of scene—at your age, at least. A year in the United
States, and all this will be a dream. At the end of ten months in a life
which is like a French poster out of drawing, you will be a different
being—no, you will have lived with your old sense of humor, and be the
same enchanting creature—Oh, we young people take life so tragically,
my dear, and we succumb so generously to time and distance! Blessed
antidotes to life! Time and change! And you are full of buoyancy, to say
nothing of your brains. Once I regretted that you had any. Where would
you be without them? A woman must find them a pretty good substitute
when man fails her. Oh, I have learned! The land of shadows in which we
writers of fiction live is peopled with the luminous egos of women as
well as with their conventional shells; we have only to take our choice!
And you—I shall find Julia Edis again, with all her enchanting
possibilities at least half developed. Oh, you are wonderful! When one
thinks of what you might have become—of the brainless women that brood
and brood. Will you go?”
“I must think! I must think!” The powerful suggestion in his words
seemed to have delivered Julia Edis from the tomb to which she had crept
in terror, but hidden and shivered intact. She ran up and down the room,
she even thrust her hands into her hair as if to lift its weight from
her struggling brain, that it might think faster. Freedom! The new
world! The annihilation of memory! A quick divorce which would deliver
her forever from the terrifying creature she had married, over to the
protection of the new world’s laws. It was an enchanting prospect. She
drew in her breath as if inhaling the ozone, drinking the elixir of that
land of youth and freedom. And happiness! Happiness! Why shouldn’t she
love Nigel—
But she stopped short and dropped her hands. Her whole body looked
paralyzed. The youth seemed to run out of her face.
“It is impossible,” she whispered. “I cannot take with me his power to
avenge himself, and he will do that by ruining Ishbel—”
“We have talked all that over. Ishbel will manage to protect herself.
What are bobbies for—”
“It won’t do. A policeman at the door! People would soon hear of it—and
stay away. Besides he is a fiend for resource—”
“Yes—but Mr. Jones can’t last much longer. And then—well, I fancy
Ishbel will marry Dark—he’s on his feet again, and will be home before
long.”
“Ishbel will never give up her work. Remember she took it up because it
seemed to her the most vital thing she could find in life, not because
she was driven to earn her bread. And it has become a sort of religion
with her.”
“Ishbel never had been in love then! But if she kept the business on,
she would have a husband to protect her. You would be out of it—”
“But not yet!”
“We are none of us willing you should wait, Ishbel least of all.”
“I know, but I can’t sacrifice her. I should be a beast. Harold is
capable of writing the most frightful anonymous letters to hundreds of
people—”
“Why the devil isn’t he rotting in South Africa? When I think of the
hundreds of fine fellows—Oh, well, I’ve given over trying to understand
space and fate. But I wish I could have run across him down there. I’d
have shot him like a dog if I’d got the chance, and never felt a pang.”
“So should I! That is the most dreadful result of it all—the hardness,
the callousness, the cynicism—”
“Oh, it will all fall from you. We don’t change much under the armor
Life forces us into. Dismiss Ishbel from your mind. Take care of
yourself. What is Ishbel’s business when weighed against a lifetime of
horror and demoralization? Nobody knows this better than Ishbel. I fancy
if you don’t go, she’ll chuck the business. It’s a deuced unpleasant
position for her. And she has made enough to live on comfortably until
she can marry Dark—”
“I don’t believe it. It might be years—”
The butler entered and announced luncheon. Julia smoothed her hair,
feeling much herself again.
“I can see the force of all your arguments. And I am tempted. I don’t
deny it. But you must give me time to think it over. Perhaps I
exaggerate about Ishbel. But there is another point: I was not consulted
in regard to my first marriage. I should be something more than a fool
if I rushed blindly into another, no matter what the temptations.
Still—Come, you must be starved.”
X
LIFE moves in circles. Some are larger than the span between infancy and
senility, but that is about the only difference we know of. It is a far
cry from the primigenous mere female, or even the Sabines, to the women
that compose the advance guard of their sex to-day, but when man wants
to win and wear this highest product of civilization, he would better
kidnap her, and pay her the compliment of arguing with her brain later.
Her impulses are still primitive, but they must be taken by assault. The
more he reasons, the more vigorously will she throw up mental defences,
and, what is worse, in the utmost good faith with herself.
This, of course, in regard to women that already know something of life,
or that have an instinctive love of liberty and independence. The
maternal girl, and she is legion, may safely be left in charge of the
race, and wooed in the orthodox fashion favored of society. But the
women that exert a powerful attraction for men, either exceptionally
advanced themselves, or exceptionally weak in character while possessing
every charm of mind, women that are approaching closer and closer to
that exact balance of masculine and feminine attributes which, when
attained, will give them the one perfect happiness, setting them free,
as it must, from the present curse of the race, the longing for
completion, are already too close to independence to be won by simple
methods. It is little, after all, that man can give them. They are
conscious of too many resources both within themselves and in life;
after a man’s novelty has worn off, they are more likely than
not—certainly apt!—to find him their inferior in brain, and almost
inevitably in character, full of the little weaknesses and dependencies
of childhood. If they make these discoveries after marriage, the man has
some small chance of keeping his spouse, particularly if he has won a
measure of respect by audacity and brute force plus sympathy, but too
much consideration for a woman who is almost half male while he is still
but one-fourth female will lose him the game.
Nigel, of all the men that Julia had met, was the best equipped to
appeal to sentimental, romantic, and clever young women, who were at the
same time cultivating their wings for the higher flights. As a matter of
fact, he had appealed to a good many women of various sorts in his
earlier twenties when he was all freshness, frankness, adoration, and
honest eager youth. Later, when he wore the literary halo with ease and
modesty, his charm was not diminished; and it was easy to predict that
when the war was really over and London, her mourning laid aside, roused
herself to do honor to her heroes, Nigel would come in for thrice his
share of lionizing. As a matter of fact, he did, and he philosophically
accepted it as a compensation for the lack of better things.
When he stepped from the fly on that gloomy Wednesday morning and walked
across the dripping garden, the dark and romantic wall of woods behind
him, he looked as gallant a knight as ever came to the rescue of a
damsel in distress; and Julia, as dreary as Mariana in the moated
grange, was in the proper frame of mind to be taken by assault. She was
still very young, she was very lonely, she was on the verge of despair;
her imagination, always active, had been bred in youth by dreams, and
developed later by real castles and titles, purple moors, London
society, and great expectations. She hailed from the West Indies, one of
the most romantic spots to look at on earth, and all the circumstances
of her life there had been exceptional. She was still more or less
romantically environed, when you consider the old world dinginess,
inconvenience, and isolation of White Lodge, a presumptive lunatic
always threatening developments, and that she was as much cut off from
her friends as if she literally were in an underground dungeon with
walls instead of trees dropping the constant tear. Take all this into
consideration, and add the momentous fact that she had never loved, and
had arrived at the susceptible age of twenty-five, that she was more
attracted to Nigel than she ever had been to any man, that underneath
her despair and her manufactured stolidity she was full of eager
curiosity and the desire to live, and it will readily be seen that if
Nigel did not win her, it was strictly his own fault.
He should have retained the fly. He should have descended upon her like
a whirlwind (having ascertained that France was out of the way,—which,
as a matter of fact, he did at Stanmore), refused to listen to protests,
caused in her bewildered mind what psychologists call an inhibition,
swept her out into the fly, up to London, on to an Atlantic liner
(passage already engaged), turned her over to Mrs. Herbert (thus
eliminating every possible excuse for reproach during the subsequent and
less glamorous period of matrimony), joined her at the earliest possible
moment in Reno (where Bridgit and Reno would have seen that she was
sufficiently amused), and when she walked out of the court-house with
her decree, met her with a license. That is the only way to manage them,
my masters. Try it, or take a back seat, now and forever.
But Nigel, alas! in spite of his manly qualities, was the most
considerate and tender of men. The very idea of kidnapping a woman would
have horrified him. He had all those instincts of the hunter upon which
men pride themselves, but he wanted to hunt according to the rules of
the game. It would have given him the most exquisite pleasure to woo
Julia day by day, in Reno or out of it, and it never occurred to him
that this program might induce a yawn in Julia.
She sat up all that night thinking. It was a rosy panorama he had
unrolled before her, this charming young man that she might have loved
if he had not given her so many opportunities to like him. He was a rich
man and would one day be richer. They would live in New York and other
wonderful cities of America, play with the kaleidoscopic society
American novelists wrote about, hunt in the Rockies, steep themselves in
the romance of California, vary this exciting program with frequent
trips to Europe and the Orient. England would be closed to them, lest
France cause her arrest for bigamy, as one of many offensive actions. On
the other hand, he might release her by divorce. Then she could marry
according to the laws of her country, and all the world would be her
oyster.
Above all, and Nigel had emphasized this point during their afternoon
conversation, she would have a strong and devoted husband to protect
her, to shield her from all that was harsh and unlovely in life, to
study her every wish, and make her a queen among women.
Curiously enough it was this last alluring set of promises that lost him
the game. Nothing he had said to Julia had appealed to her so forcibly
at the moment. He had never looked so handsome and so manly, so
distinguished, so perfect a specimen of his type. His face had flushed
until the lines and the sallowness had disappeared, his eyes forgot the
things they had looked upon this last year, forgot that their inward
gaze saw his heart a tomb crowded with beloved dead; they flashed with
hope and passion, with undying love for the one woman that must ever
make to him the complete appeal. She had almost put her hands in his
then and there. But he had left soon after, and without even kissing
her. Dear knightly soul! Julia never forgot his tender consideration,
but on the other hand she never regretted it.
For when she had finished visualizing the United States of America and
all their centres of delight, to say nothing of certain states of Europe
and Asia, which she longed unceasingly to visit; when she had dwelt upon
the deep relief of turning her back forever upon Harold France (France
prowling about the halls and breathing heavily against her door
materially assisted Nigel at this point); when these phases were
disposed of, and her imagination, weary, left the brain free to face the
particular ego of Julia France, in some ways so typical of woman, in
others individual and peculiar, a very different set of ideas marched to
the front and argued pro and con.
Did she want another husband, no matter how good, how devoted, how
generous, how strong? It was now nearly a year and a half since she had
lived with France, but if the memories of her married life were no
longer active, no longer embittered her existence, she had by no means
buried them, and they affected her attitude toward all men. Had Nigel
swept her out of England and into that strange bizarre world of America,
no doubt the experiences in the new land, assisted by the fiction that
she was about to begin life over, really would have annihilated memory;
but thinking it all over in the cold small hours of an English winter
morning, wrapped in a blanket and shovelling coals into a small
unwilling English grate, she failed to visualize love as the sweetest
thing in the world.
Even so, this inability to respond to the genuine love that was offered
her might not have prevented her ultimate acceptance. The man’s foe was
far more deadly.
Looking into herself, Julia slowly understood that what she, in her
youth and inexperience, had mistaken for hardness and callousness, was
in reality strength. Nature had endowed her with strength of character
and independence of mind. For eighteen years her mother had dominated
her, almost without her knowledge; then she had been flung into the
world and treated to a succession of experiences which had left her
gasping and dizzy, without either the maturity or the opportunities to
develop herself with deliberation. But the subsequent years had done
their work; ultimately certain influences, sufferings, horrors, terrors,
had pushed her on to a point where she must sink or swim. In swimming
she had proved that she belonged to the army of the strong, not to the
vast and insignificant majority of her sex that found their only
strength in man.
She was strong. She fully realized it for the first time. All the
spurious cynicism and philosophy of youth fell away from her; she saw
herself for what she was, a woman, equipped with a nature of flexible
steel, able to endure any test without snapping, fashioned not so much
for endurance as for conquest. Conquest of what? She speculated, that
something which so long had striven for expression moving dumbly. Never
mind, it was there; she should find the connection in time.
Her mind rapidly reviewed the whole field of woman. She had no
statistics, but she knew that several millions of her sex were forcing
the world to recognize them as breadwinners, independently of any
assistance from man. It was magnificent, the opportunities of to-day,
when compared with the meagre resources of the past, and the repeated
struggle of woman for expression and independence almost from the dawn
of history. They had found themselves at last, the twentieth century was
theirs, and they were driving rapidly toward the goal of complete
equality with man. But how many of these women were strong enough to go
through life without love? None, she fancied, until they had undergone a
process of disillusion similar to her own. Then she rejoiced in what for
so long had seemed to her the harshest of destinies; for sitting there
in the cold dawn, the one perfect destiny seemed to her to be an utter
independence of soul and mind and body, the power to cultivate every
faculty toward a state of development in which one human being, having
in perfect balance the highest potencies of both sexes, should stand
alone, indifferent to all extrinsic aid. And this perfect balance could
be attained only by woman, unhampered as she was by the animality of
man.
Perfection. The word started her off on another train of thought. How
was this perfection of strength, character, mind, and poise to be
attained? To stand alone without aid from man or woman was neither a
means nor an end. She had none of the common need of religion. It could
play little or no part in her development. Nor could happiness be found
merely in perfecting self toward a standard which must inevitably
deteriorate into self-righteousness. To stand alone is the most
magnificent ideal of the human character, but that strength must be used
toward some end beyond self. She groped along and began to see clearly.
She must work for the race. She must regard herself as a chosen
instrument of usefulness, as, indeed, all exceptionally gifted people
were. And for this she was peculiarly equipped, not only by nature, but
by life. Had she not married at all, or at the most, casually, her
woman’s nature would have protested against any such program, demanded
its rights first; but these sources of disturbances were choked with
hideous weeds, and Julia was unable to conceive that the weeds might rot
in time and the waters rise refreshed. She felt that she was fortunately
accoutred, and she longed for her opportunities.
What they might be she had no inkling as yet, nor was she conscious of
love for her kind, and a desire to be useful to it on general
principles. Her ambition, if ambition it could be called, was centred in
her brain. If she had been chosen for a work, she would perform it. What
else, in fact, was there for her to do? It had not needed Bridgit and
Ishbel to teach her contempt for the morbid type of female that
exaggerates sex until it becomes a disease, the women that play with
their nerves until they have become mere neurotic systems without either
sex or brains, and that exhibit egos either in private or public whose
swollen deformities cause a momentary thrill and a prolonged disgust.
Abnormal without individuality. It was an ideal carefully avoided by all
the sane strong women Julia had met.
For the present, she could only wait and endure. She could not even go
out and study the great problems of life, those problems she had chosen
to ignore. But there is hardly any greater test of strength than passive
endurance; and the time of her liberation could not be far off. The day
Ishbel married Lord Dark she should leave France and look for work in
London.
Nigel’s fate was settled before the rising of the sun. Far away on what
to Europeans seem the confines of civilization, in other words, San
Francisco, a youth was growing to masterful manhood, who, in due course,
would avenge him, and, incidentally, much else. But of that poor Nigel
could know nothing, nor would he have felt consoled had he foreseen;
when he received Julia’s letter, whose finality was as convincing as a
black midnight without stars, he wished that he had left his wretched
heart and bones in South Africa, retired to the country with his broken
father, and began another book. There was still the Nöbel Peace Prize to
work for, and he felt peculiarly fitted to win it. It may be stated here
that he did, and all England (of his class, and one or two strata just
below) was astonished that an Englishman should have competed for a
prize that involved a damnifying of war. It deeply disapproved.
XI
THE hunting season closed. France still rode for several hours every
day, but it was patent that his restlessness was increasing. When he was
not riding, he was walking, and he walked more than half the night about
the house and grounds. Oddly enough, however, the serenity of his mien
was unruffled, and Julia came upon him several times standing before a
long mirror in one of the halls, his head so high that the muscles of
his neck creaked, his eyes flashing with a pride and triumph no harassed
king ever felt on his coronation morn. As a rule, he left the table the
moment the meal was over, preferring to take his coffee alone out of
doors or in the library, but one day Julia, who was beginning to take a
certain scientific interest in his developments, arrested his attention
as he was about to rise.
“Didn’t you tell me once that Kingsborough and the little chap were
delicate? I heard the other day that both are remarkably fit. The little
boy always has been, and the duke gets stronger every day.”
She looked at him ingenuously as she spoke, quite prepared for an
outburst of rage, but he only bestowed upon her a smile of withering
contempt.
“They are merely indulging in what the Americans call ‘bluff.’ I happen
to know that they are both full of disease and cannot last the year out.
I shall be Duke of Kingsborough before Christmas.”
“How nice. That is the reason, I suppose, you don’t mind all these duns.
We may be sold out any day, you know. Summonses are becoming as thick as
rain, and I am told that not a man in the stables or kennels has been
paid—”
“They all understand perfectly. The summonses and grumblings are a mere
matter of form. I have promised an enormous rate of interest and higher
wages when I have moved into Kingsborough House and Bosquith. The other
estates I have already agreed to let to American millionnaires. They are
impatiently awaiting Kingsborough’s death.”
“Ah? Where have you met the millionnaires?”
“They have been hunting with the Hertfordshire all winter, and we have
discussed matters at my solicitor’s.”
Julia knew that he had not been to London for several months, save for
the queen’s funeral, but forbore to press the subject. She remarked
amiably:—
“What a fine income you will have!”
His eyes flashed. “Ah, yes! Millions.”
“Surely not quite that.”
“Millions. Kingsborough’s income alone is two millions.”
“I thought it was forty thousand pounds.”
“Forty thousand for a duke of Kingsborough! No emperor has a vaster
revenue.”
“How jolly. My robes of state shall be woven of pure gold. Meanwhile,
why don’t you go to Paris for a while? I notice that you are restless,
since you have nothing to ride after, and nothing to kill. You keep me
awake at night banging about the house.”
“Do I?” France’s eyes flashed with something besides triumph, but it
passed almost at once. He was losing interest in her. As he rose, bent
his head graciously and sauntered out into the garden, he forgot her
absolutely in a new vision that had haunted him since the queen’s
funeral. There for the first time he had seen sovereigns en masse. The
sight had thrilled him; he had made up his mind to signalize his
succession by the greatest banquet London had ever known; all the
reigning princes of Europe should attend it. The letters of invitation
were already written. He had written them many times, finding one of the
keenest pleasures he had ever known in the process, congratulating
himself that for the first time in his life he was about to have
associates worthy of his name and ego. But although he had never heard
the word paranoia, and while at Bosquith had finally dismissed from his
mind the haunting thought of insanity (it was outside of reason that he,
Harold France, could even sprain the wonderful organ he had inherited
with other unique characteristics from the most illustrious house in
Europe), nevertheless, instinct warned him to lock up his letters of
invitation, and keep his grandiose dreams to himself. Only to Julia, and
only when she spurred him to speech, did he admit a very little of what
filled his thoughts day and night.
But he was well aware that his nerves were on edge, and he was beginning
to be troubled with pains in his head. He slept little, and when he
thought of it took a malicious pleasure in disturbing his prisoner, whom
he could imagine sitting on the edge of her bed pistol in hand.
But it was not the pistol that kept him from breaking down the door and
laughing in her face. He had anticipated amusing himself with her female
terrors as soon as the hunting season closed, but he found himself grown
quite indifferent not only to her charm, but to the exquisite pleasure
it had once given him to torture her. His dreams and visions, his
increasing delusions, filled his life. Woman was too contemptible to
consider; were it not that it gratified his growing passion for
autocracy to have a prisoner of state, he might have amused himself by
turning her out of the house in the middle of the night and dogging her
footsteps to Stanmore or Bushey.
He still compelled her attendance at table, but otherwise took no notice
of her whatever. So absorbed was he that he failed to observe that his
wife was now well supplied with books and no longer looked desperate or
even discontented. Her three devoted friends had made an arrangement
with her bookseller to send her all that she ordered from his catalogue,
and Bridgit had turned over her membership with the London Library. One
of the first books she sent for was a recent work on insanity. She was
not long discovering that France was a paranoiac, and she wrote to her
aunt, asking her to invite him to dinner, and two alienists to meet him.
But Mrs. Winstone was shocked at the suggestion, not only because she
hated increasingly the “grimy,” in other words serious, side of life,
but because it would be a thankless task to assist in proving that a
member of one of the great families of Britain was a lunatic. She chose,
therefore, to believe Julia quite mistaken, that France was merely a
trifle more impossible than ever, and assumed the high moral ground that
it would be unfair to take advantage of a trusting guest. Julia
concluded that to write to the duke would be equally ineffective,
besides making an enemy of him for life, and she knew that France would
not be induced to dine with either Bridgit or Ishbel. He had always
hated both of them. There was nothing to do, therefore, but wait for him
to develop acute mania, and to keep a pistol in her pocket; taking her
walks abroad while he was forced to sleep, and locking herself in her
room when she was not at table.
It was during this strain on her nerves that she began to long for the
repose of the East. Orientalism was in her brain cells. What imagination
her mother possessed had been projected toward the East for long before
and after her birth. The science of astrology is the birthright of the
East, the very word sways and parts the shadowy curtains that hang
before civilizations old before the Occident was born, evokes the
gorgeous heavy sinister pictures of ancient cities, of vast arid plains
where only the stars were alive. This mysterious poetical science had
been the romance of Julia’s youth, and the East was the one quarter of
the globe, save Great Britain, that she had ever heard discussed. In
London she had escaped theosophy and other made-up fads of the same
nature, but although the call of the East had often and for long been
overlaid in her consciousness, it never failed to make itself heard if
she stood before a picture portraying India, Arabia, Persia, or read of
personal adventures in the East by writers with the rare gift of
atmosphere. In the loneliness and terrors and constant tension of her
present life she forgot the call of the too modern, too similar life,
across the Channel, hearkened increasingly to that of the East. It
promised a vast repose, an endless feast of beauty, unfathomable
mysteries, a life as different from that of the West as it was in the
days of Mohammed, Zoroaster, or Christ.
Julia’s first passion was slowly growing in the unsatisfied depths of
her mind, but that is the last name she would have given it. She was yet
to realize that imaginative people with productive activities, however
latent, have passions of the brain or ego as intense and profound as
ever one sex compelled in the other in the interests of the race. Julia,
abominating all that the word love implied (a state of mind inevitable
unless she had been coarse and callous), but young, fervent, and
conceptive, was both situated and tuned to be caught in the eddies of an
impersonal passion. It might have been art, but she was not an artist;
study and politics had failed her, and although psychology interested
her, she was too restless for science in any form; therefore, she had no
sooner chanced upon one or two picturesque old books of Eastern travel
than she succumbed to the passion for place. She sent for no more books
save those that carried her to the Orient. Her imagination blazed. She
was transported into a new and enchanting world. Her good resolutions to
live for the race were forgotten. The moment she was free she would fly
to the East and live. She was almost happy. Then she descended into
England and the purely personal life with a crash. Ishbel sent her a
marked copy of a newspaper containing the announcement of Mr. Jones’s
death, a week later wrote that she should marry Lord Dark as soon as a
decent interval had elapsed, and commanding her to leave France and come
to London, where employment awaited her.
Julia became her cool practical self at once. She packed her boxes, sent
for a fly when France had gone for one of his merciless rides,—he was
killing his horses,—and left this note behind her:—
“Mr. Jones is dead. Ishbel will marry Lord Dark as soon as
possible. If you make a second attempt to wreck her business you
will have him to reckon with. He is, in any case, well able to
take care of her, and no doubt she will give up the business. As
there is now no way in which you can injure her or any of my
friends, I have made up my mind to leave you once for all. You
will save yourself trouble by recalling that we are in the
twentieth century and that the law does not compel me to live
with you.
“JULIA.”
XII
BRIDGIT met Julia at the train and there was purpose in her eye. Julia
laughed, knowing that her time had come, but returned the warm embrace
with which she was greeted, and allowed herself to be carried without
protest to the house in South Audley Street. Mrs. Herbert was no less
handsome and fascinating than of old, but if anything she was still more
upright of carriage, determined of eye, and expressive of ardent
purpose. Widowed long before the war, Geoffrey’s death had made no
change whatever in her life, although she had sent after him the sincere
and hearty regret she would have felt for the loss of any friend. As she
was needed in South Africa she had gone there, made herself useful
without any fuss, and returned as soon as she could to her work in
England. This work was now clearly defined. Bridgit Herbert, indeed, was
not the woman to spend any great amount of time seeking or floundering.
No dreamer, her mind, once awakened to the futilities of the life of
pleasure, her energies roused, she had applied herself immediately to a
survey and study of her times, and found the work which coincided with
her particular talents. Horrified and disgusted with poverty, she sought
and found the obvious remedy in the Socialism of the advanced and more
practical of the Fabians, although the “ideology” of the older
Socialists would have made little appeal to her. Soon convinced,
however, that Socialism could make little headway against the
individualistic and acquisitive mind of the twentieth century male, her
fighting blood had warred with her direct practical mind until she had
happened to go to the north with an inspector of factories, and listened
to somewhat of Christabel Pankhurst’s propaganda in behalf of Woman’s
Suffrage among the trade-union organizations, a factor in politics of
increasing power. She was struck, not only by the abominable grievances
of the working women in general and the factory women in particular, but
by their intelligence; nor was she long discovering that the average of
intelligence all over England was higher among poor women than among
poor men. Where a man grew dull in the routine of his work and further
blunted his faculties in the public house, his wife, with her manifold
petty interests and schemings to make a little money go a long way, and
filled with ever changing anxieties for her children, was far more alert
of mind and eager for improvement. It did not take either Mrs. Pankhurst
or her sleepless daughters to remind Bridgit that in this great body of
women lay the future hope of Socialism, or of any reform directed
against the elimination of poverty. But this army was of no more
consequence at present than an army of ants. It must have the ballot,
and Bridgit had spent much of her time in the last two or three years
among the working women of England, educating them to a sense of their
responsibilities. It was not until 1903 that the women of the middle
class were generally roused from the apathy into which they had fallen,
with the exception of spurts, since 1884, and the Woman’s Social and
Political Union was formed by Mrs. Pankhurst; but when Julia arrived in
London, the old movement was beginning to lift its head, and Bridgit
Herbert was not the only hopeful and far-seeing mind at work.
“And what is it you want?” asked Julia, listening to the old familiar
and beloved roar of London. They were in Mrs. Herbert’s den, and the
hostess, her eyes still radiant with hospitality, was standing behind
the low fire-screen with a hand on either point. Julia wondered if White
Lodge were a nightmare.
“The vote. Because the time has come, men having made a mess of most
things, for women to apply their higher faculties to the domestic
affairs of the nation; also because the condition of poor women and
children in this country is appalling, and men have proved their utter
indifference to a fact which is also a factor in so many great incomes.
Moreover, men have had their day, just as monarchies and aristocracies
have had their day. The day of woman and the working-class is dawning,
and it is high time.”
“And are women ready?”
“Those that are not can be taught. That is what we are for.”
“We? I suppose,” with a sigh of resignation, “_that_ is my métier, what
I have been struggling toward all this time.”
“You recognize that you have abilities at last, then?”
“Oh, yes, and I shouldn’t wonder if I had ambition, but just now I don’t
feel either ambitious or energetic. I’m wild to go to India and the rest
of the East—”
“Oh, nonsense, we’ve a great fight coming, and you must brace up and be
one of the generals. Time enough to idle when you are old. Just now,
until we can shut France up and ask the courts to give you an income,
you are going to be my secretary—”
“Do you really need one?”
“Do I? Well, rather. I had one of the best, but her mother is ill and
she may not be able to return to me for months. You’ll have tons of
letters to write.”
“So much the better, for I couldn’t live on even your charity.”
“Charity? When my only chance to have an intimate friend is in a
secretary, I am so rushed? I’m companionless, but life is frantically
interesting.”
And if Julia found herself unable to reach this pitch of enthusiasm, she
certainly found the new book of life offered for her daily reading quite
absorbing enough to fill her time and thoughts. Her clerical hours were
short. The rest of the day, and often during half the night, she was
seeing all the problems at first hand. She went daily with Bridgit to
the East Side and saw poverty outside of books; poverty, unthinkable,
criminal, fleshless, stinking. At night she dreamed that all the babies
in the world were wailing for food, all the mothers were emaciated, with
eyes of bitter resignation, all the little girls pinched and old and
hard. Herded misery, hopeless filth, black despair. Julia was quite
unable to recall the reverse side of the picture, in which many were
healthy in spite of poverty, and cheerful if only because temperament is
stronger than circumstance. She hoped that some day she should fully
wake up and burn with a zeal as great as Bridgit’s, but now her brain
was tired, and, had she but known it, she protested against living for
others until she had lived for herself first. Quite as unconsciously her
mind was made up to live her Eastern romance the moment she was free.
She heard not a word from France, but guessed the truth; he had
forgotten her. If this were the case, however, it might mean that at any
moment he would be a dangerous lunatic, and she felt that the duke
should be warned. As this was a delicate task, and as her uneasiness
grew, she finally, on Bridgit’s advice, wrote to his firm of solicitors.
Solicitors are probably the most conservative members of conservative
England; but full of duty withal. The junior member found himself
overtaken by a storm near White Lodge and craved hospitality of his
patron’s distinguished kinsman. France, either because suspicion was
still active in a brain not clouded, but blazing with a light unknown to
common mortals, or because he happened to be in a good humor, had never
appeared to better advantage. The solicitor returned to London so
inflamed with indignation that the letter he wrote to Julia breathed his
contempt for her entire sex. Julia shrugged her shoulders and dismissed
the matter from her mind. Let them work out their own destinies.
When she was not haunting the slums, she was attending meetings: Fabian,
labor, working-women, coöperators’, old and new suffrage; at all of
which the eternal problem of poverty was the main topic of discussion.
She was also taken to visit the slaughter-houses, where the ignorance
and savagery of the women employed was primeval. She visited the textile
factories of the north, where the work of women and children at the loom
was relieved only by alternate hours of drudgery in the home, and where
there seemed no object in living whatever. The pit-brow women, at least,
had developed the strength and endurance of men, and no doubt would have
proved equally efficient in war.
Manchester was a very hot bed of social reform, and Julia was shown all
the horrors to which reform owed its concept. She wondered increasingly
at the frail fabric of aristocracy and wealth that tottered on its
heaving foundations, and conceived some measure of respect for its
cleverness.
This drastic experience was enlivened now and again by glimpses of
Ishbel, still the merriest, and now the happiest, of mortals. The lines
of fatigue and anxiety had disappeared, she was once more the prettiest
woman in London, and she needed but the halo of her future position as
Countess of Dark to make good people wonder how they could have
forgotten it. Julia thought her the most fortunate of women, if only
because she was realizing all the romantic dreams of her girlhood on the
bogs. Dark was handsome, clever, kind, almost unselfish. He was
profoundly in love and he had a very decent income. Above all he had the
most romantic title in the British peerage—Earl of Dark! No wonder
those fluttering moths of American girls wanted titles. Such a one would
make the dullest man in England look romantic to yearning republican
eyes, when even an Ishbel was enchanted at the prospect of owning it.
“And yet I am the most practical of mortals—the half of me!” she said
gayly, one day, as they sat in the boudoir over the shop, drinking tea
unseasoned with reform. “Odd and modern combination!”
“But you’ll give up the shop?”
“Not really. It is coöperative now, and too many would suffer if I
neglected it altogether, or withdrew. I must continue to see that it
remains a success, for it is something to have solved the problem of
living for a few women, at least.”
Julia hastily changed the subject.
“Shall you become a society beauty again?”
“I’ve hardly thought of it. I mean to be happy, and I think we’ll travel
and live in the country for a year. Society is always with us. That
first year! No duties shall share an hour of it.”
“Right you are. I never could love and never want to, and I’m quite
resigned to becoming a torch-bearer, suffering martyrdom, if necessary,
in the cause of woman, but meanwhile I’ve something up my sleeve. I dare
not mention it to Bridgit again, and shall have to run away when my time
comes, but I can confide in you. The moment I am free I am going to
India—Persia—Arabia—and stay there until some other part of me is
gratified, I hardly know what. I only know that the call is unceasing
and that I never can accomplish anything here, whole-heartedly, at
least, until I have got that off my mind.”
“By all means, go. It’s unhealthy to repress your strongest personal
desires, and you are young yet. I wonder, by the way, if you will ever
have the zeal of these other women? You have a sort of sardonic humor—”
“I want a career, and in this rising inevitable woman’s movement lies my
chance. When my time comes, my zeal will be great enough—for all they
can give me I’ll pay them back a hundred fold. I want power if only
because nothing less will pay the debt of these last years, and I am
horribly sorry for the poor of the world. When I am ready I shall jump
into the arena with my torch, but I’ll find myself wholly in the East
first.”
“Why not go now? I can let you have the money.”
“No, I’ll wait.”
As it happened she did not have long to wait. She and Bridgit were
driving home one evening after talking to an intelligent club of East
End women, when they heard the familiar cry of “Extra,” and a flaming
handbill was waved in front of the window as the brougham was blocked.
Bridgit, whose quick glance overlooked nothing, exclaimed, “Great
heaven!” and leaned out, throwing the boy a sixpence.
“What is it?” asked Julia, languidly. She had been forced on to the
platform, and was still cold from fright. “A strike?”
Bridgit lifted the tube and gave an order to the coachman that made
Julia sit erect.
“Kingsborough House.” Then to her companion, “France tried to kill the
duke this afternoon.”
They found Kingsborough House in confusion, the flunkys looking as
flabby as if the ramrods in their backs had dissolved, leaving nothing
but the sawdust stuffing. The duchess was in hysterics upstairs (“she is
sure to be an anti,” remarked Mrs. Herbert); the duke was under the care
of his doctor; but Lady Arabella received them, and graciously observed
that she was glad to see that Julia still felt herself a member of the
house of France. She told them the story, which was brief enough. France
had suddenly appeared that afternoon, and upon being shown into the
duke’s study had sprung upon his kinsman before the footman had closed
the door, demanding that he should abdicate in his favor, threatening
him with immediate death if he refused. The footman had called other
footmen, and it had taken four of them to hold France down while the
duke, his coat torn off and his face bleeding, had himself telephoned
for the police. France meanwhile had struggled like a demon, shouting
that he had come to kill not only the duke but the boy, that his time
had come to live and theirs to die, that they were deliberate malicious
enemies who stood between him and the greatness which would permit him
to send his invitations to the crowned heads of Europe; and “heaven
knows what else,” added the distressed Lady Arabella. “To think of poor
Harold going mad. At first we thought he might merely have been
drinking, but with the police came poor Edward’s doctor, and he
pronounced him as mad as a hatter. Do stay here with me to-night, Julia.
You are a clever little thing, and always keep your wits about you.”
Julia remained at Kingsborough House for several days. When the duke
heard what little of her own story she was willing to tell, and that she
had endeavored to protect him through his solicitors, he was honest
enough to admit that he would have been hard to convince of a kinsman’s
insanity, and generous enough to be grateful to her. Indeed, so relieved
was he at his narrow escape, and at the report of the lunacy commission
which incarcerated France for life, that he bubbled over with something
like human nature; and, as the expensive sanatorium would cut deeply
into his cousin’s original income, announced his intention of giving
Julia for life seven hundred and fifty of the thousand pounds he had so
long allowed her husband. Julia refused this offer, until the duke told
her impatiently that if she did not take it he would merely pay Harold’s
expenses in the sanatorium, and leave her to the courts, also that she
was legally a member of his family, and pride, therefore, absurd. Julia
turned this over, and concluding that the house of France owed her a
good deal more than it could ever pay, consented and thought no more
about it. A month later she was on a P. and O. steamer bound for India.