BEFORE she had time to leave the window she heard a step in the room.
She turned and saw Leo Ulford, smiling broadly--like a great boy--and
holding up the latch-key she had sent him. At the sight of her face his
smile died away.
“Go--go!” she whispered, putting out her hand. “Go at once!”
“Go! But you told me--”
“Go! My husband’s come back. He’s in the house. Go quickly. Don’t make a
sound. I’ll explain to-morrow.”
She made a rapid, repeated gesture of her hands towards the door,
frowning. Leo Ulford stood for an instant looking heavy and sulky, then,
pushing out his rosy lips in a sort of indignant pout, he swung round
on his heels. As he did so, Lord Holme came into the room holding the
bottle of eau de Cologne. When he saw Leo he stopped. Leo stopped too,
and they stood for a moment staring at each other. Lady Holme, who was
still by the open window, did not move. There was complete silence in
the room. Then Leo dropped the latch-key. It fell on the thick carpet
without a noise. He made a hasty, lumbering movement to pick it up, but
Lord Holme was too quick for him. When Lady Holme saw the key in her
husband’s hand she moved at last and came forward into the middle of the
room.
“Mr. Ulford’s come to tell me about the Blaxtons’ dance,” she said.
She spoke in her usual light voice, without tremor or uncertainty. Her
face was perfectly calm and smiling. Leo Ulford cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he said loudly, “about the Blaxtons’ dance.”
Lord Holme stood looking at the latch-key. Suddenly his face swelled up
and became bloated, and large veins stood out in his brown forehead.
“What’s this key?” he said.
He held it out towards his wife. Neither she nor Leo Ulford replied to
his question.
“What’s this key?” he repeated.
“The key of Mr. Ulford’s house, I suppose,” said Lady Holme. “How should
I know?”
“I’m not askin’ you,” said her husband.
He came a step nearer to Leo.
“Why the devil don’t you answer?” he said to him.
“It’s my latch-key,” said Leo, with an attempt at a laugh.
Lord Holme flung it in his face.
“You damned liar!” he said. “It’s mine.”
And he struck him full in the face where the key had just struck him.
Leo returned the blow. When she saw that, Lady Holme passed the two men
and went quickly out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Holding
her hands over her ears, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom. It was in
darkness. She felt about on the wall for the button that turned on
the electric light, but could not find it. Her hands, usually deft and
certain in their movements, seemed to have lost the sense of touch. It
was as if they had abruptly been deprived of their minds. She felt
and felt. She knew the button was there. Suddenly the room was full of
light. Without being aware of it she had found the button and turned
it. In the light she looked down at her hands and saw that they were
trembling violently. She went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down
on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She clasped her hands together in
her lap, but they went on trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids.
She felt utterly degraded, like a scrupulously clean person who has been
rolled in the dirt. And she fancied she heard a faint and mysterious
sound, pathetic and terrible, but very far away--the white angel in her
weeping.
And the believers in the angel--were they weeping too?
She found herself wondering as a sleeper wonders in a dream.
Presently she got up. She could not sit there and see her hands
trembling. She did not walk about the room, but went over to the
dressing-table and stood by it, resting her hands upon it and leaning
forward. The attitude seemed to relieve her. She remained there for a
long time, scarcely thinking at all, only feeling degraded, unclean. The
sight of physical violence in her own drawing-room, caused by her, had
worked havoc in her. She had always thought she understood the brute in
man. She had often consciously administered to it. She had coaxed
it, flattered it, played upon it even--surely--loved it. Now she had
suddenly seen it rush out into the full light, and it had turned her
sick.
The gold things on the dressing-table--bottles, brushes, boxes,
trays--looked offensive. They were like lies against life, frauds.
Everything in the pretty room was like a lie and a fraud. There ought to
be dirt, ugliness about her. She ought to stand with her feet in mud and
look on blackness. The angel in her shuddered at the siren in her now,
as at a witch with power to evoke Satanic things, and she forgot the
trembling of her hands in the sensation of the trembling of her soul.
The blow of Fritz, the blow of Leo Ulford, had both struck her. She felt
a beaten creature.
The door opened. She did not turn round, but she saw in the glass her
husband come in. His coat was torn. His waistcoat and shirt were almost
in rags. There was blood on his face and on his right hand. In his
eyes there was an extraordinary light, utterly unlike the light of
intelligence, but brilliant, startling; flame from the fire by which the
animal in human nature warms itself. In the glass she saw him look at
her. The light seemed to stream over her, to scorch her. He went into
his dressing-room without a word, and she heard the noise of water being
poured out and used for washing. He must be bathing his wounds, getting
rid of the red stains.
She sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed and listened to the
noise of the water. At last it stopped and she heard drawers being
violently opened and shut, then a tearing sound. After a silence her
husband came into the room again with his forehead bound up in a silk
handkerchief, which was awkwardly knotted behind his head. Part of
another silk handkerchief was loosely tied round his right hand. He came
forward, stood in front of her and looked at her, and she saw now that
there was an expression almost of exultation on his face. She felt
something fall into her lap. It was the latch-key she had sent to Leo
Ulford.
“I can tell you he’s sorry he ever saw that--damned sorry,” said Lord
Holme.
And he laughed.
Lady Holme took the key up carefully and put it down on the sofa. She
was realising something, realising that her husband was feeling happy.
When she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an
intense scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were
standing up and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the
culprit in this matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to
think swiftly again and her hands stopped trembling. That look of
exultation in her husband’s eyes had changed everything.
“Sit down, I want to speak to you,” she said.
She was surprised by the calm sound of her own voice.
Lord Holme looked astonished. He shifted the bandage on his hand and
stood where he was.
“Sit down,” she repeated.
“Well!” he said.
And he sat down.
“I suppose you came up here to turn me out of the house?” she said.
“You deserve it,” he muttered.
But even now he did not look angry. There was a sort of savage glow on
his face. It was evident that the violent physical effort he had just
made, and the success of it, had irresistibly swept away his fury for
the moment. It might return. Probably it would return. But for the
moment it was gone. Lady Holme knew Fritz, and she knew that he
was feeling good all over. The fact that he could feel thus in such
circumstances set the brute in him before her as it had never been set
before--in a glare of light.
“And what do you deserve?” she asked.
All her terror had gone utterly. She felt mistress of herself.
“When I went to thrash Carey he was so drunk I couldn’t touch him. This
feller showed fight but he was a baby in my hands. I could do anything I
liked with him,” said Lord Holme. “Gad! Talk of boxin’--”
He looked at his bandaged hand and laughed again triumphantly. Then,
suddenly, a sense of other things than his physical strength seemed to
return upon him. His face changed, grew lowering, and he thrust forward
his under jaw, opening his mouth to speak. Lady Holme did not give him
time.
“Yes, I sent Leo Ulford the latch-key,” she said. “You needn’t ask. I
sent it, and told him to come to-night. D’you know why?”
Lord Holme’s face grew scarlet.
“Because you’re a--”
She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
“Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I’ve married,”
she said. “I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him
here.”
“You didn’t. You thought I wasn’t comin’ home.”
“Why should I have thought such a thing?” she said, swiftly, sharply.
Her voice had an edge to it.
“You meant not to come home, then?”
She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered,
thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it,
but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely
to have been crushed by the weight of Fritz’s fury, she dominated him.
Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
“You meant not to come home?”
For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to
his wife he retorted:
“You meant me to find Ulford here! That’s a good ‘un! Why, you tried all
you knew to keep him out.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“I wanted--but you’d never understand.”
“He does,” said Lord Holme.
He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his
bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:
“And you do.”
“I?”
“Yes, you. There’s lots of fellers that would--”
“Stop!” said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.
She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say
sitting down.
“Fritz,” she added, “you’re a fool. You may be worse. I believe you
are. But one thing’s certain--you’re a fool. Even in wickedness you’re a
blunderer.”
“And what are you?” he said.
“I!” she answered, coming a step nearer. “I’m not wicked.”
A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire--as she had slangily
expressed it to Robin Pierce--to “trot out” the white angel whom she had
for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there? Some
there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others.
And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them,
she relied on them at this moment.
“I’m not wicked,” she repeated.
She looked into her husband’s face.
“Don’t you know that?”
He was silent.
“Perhaps you’d rather I was,” she continued. “Don’t men prefer it?”
He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his
face.
“But I don’t care,” she said, gathering resolution, and secretly
calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to
whether she was there in her place of concealment. “I don’t care. I
can’t change my nature because of that. And surely--surely there must be
some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to--”
“Ulford, eh?” he interrupted.
The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme’s temper. She forgot the
believers in the angel and the angel too.
“How dare you?” she exclaimed. “As if I--”
He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of
physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage
returning.
“Good women don’t do things like that,” he said. “If it was known in
London you’d be done for.”
“And you--may you do what you like openly, brazenly?”
“Men’s different,” he said.
The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme
feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the
disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment
she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady
Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the
Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch, and her sense of impotent fury
was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that
men should be “different,” or at least--if not that--had smilingly given
them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that
she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever,
almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him.
An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.
“Men’s made different and treated differently,” he said. “And they’d
never stand anything else.”
Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her
left hand and held it tightly in her lap.
“You mean,” she said, in a hard, quiet voice, “that you may humiliate
your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she
enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the
one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my
devotion to you--I daresay it wouldn’t take much to kill it. Perhaps
it’s dead already.”
No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment
she thought that probably it was truth.
“Eh?” said Lord Holme.
He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered
in shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement,
that overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo
Ulford’s midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the
uttermost faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps
her love for him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man.
Had his conceit then no limits?
And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too,
a firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered
Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set
among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now--? Can there
be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly
Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met
him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit.
She called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in
her heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over
his forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she
thought that the colour of the red deepened.
“Come here, Fritz,” she said softly.
He moved nearer.
“Bend down!”
“Eh?”
“Bend down your head.”
He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some
resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched
the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.
A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand
in an obedient attitude, and a woman--was she siren or angel?--was
bathing an ugly wound.