The friendship between Kingston and Isabel did not progress apace.
Its development was jerky, uneven, unsatisfactory. Kingston was at
once restrained and spurred on by resentment. He resented the fact of
the friendship, was perpetually reluctant, suspicious, filled with a
strange, alert uneasiness. Isabel, for her part, found the relation
less careless and smooth than her friendships usually were. It brought
an usually poignant satisfaction, and, in revenge, an unusually
poignant feeling of strain and annoyance at Kingston’s refusal to
meet her half-way. Normally she should not have cared a straw--by all
her rules she did not care a straw--yet, none the less, the guarded
hostility with which he met her advances stimulated and exasperated her
to the point of defiance.
The two women did not find, as their acquaintance grew, that any
intimacy ripened between them. Gundred retained her desire to keep
Isabel by her side as a foil, but not even the ardour that the
contrast was to keep alive in Kingston could quite reconcile her to
the mental eccentricities and untidinesses of Isabel. In Gundred’s
mind nothing was ever disorderly or misplaced; second-hand ideas lay
neatly labelled in rows; the chaos of Isabel’s thoughts, her incessant
flurry of pursuit after some wild notion or other, her ransackings
of her intellectual store to find some lost fancy, to run down some
far-fetched theory, were so many evidences, to Gundred, of her cousin’s
unmethodical, ill-balanced nature. All thought, to Gundred, was clear,
simple, obvious; she never entertained any opinion that had not been
sanctioned by fashion and much previous use; she could not imagine why
anyone should accept new notions, much less go wild-goose-chasing them
up and down the cloudy domain of ideas. What had been thought before
by wise, good teachers was quite good enough for her; to want more, to
ask questions, to test ‘truths’ by reason, seemed forward, ill-bred,
and unwomanly. She put down all Isabel’s vagaries of mind to her
disastrous colonial education, and believed at first that a few weeks’
association with ‘nice people’--the nice people being, in the context,
herself--would cure her cousin of such vagabond tendencies. So by
smiles and indifference she repressed Isabel’s ebullitions; and when
she found that her conduct had no effect beyond excluding herself from
the conversation, she resigned herself calmly to the inevitable.
Irritated at first by Isabel’s mental jumps and flights, Gundred,
after her attempts at repression had failed, grew tired and bored,
made no effort to follow her cousin’s mental movements, and, with a
mildly reproving air which nobody noticed, stood graciously aloof from
Isabel’s dialogues with Kingston. She let them talk, and, by way of
tacitly rebuking her cousin, ostentatiously ceased to take any interest
in what they said.
With Kingston, as was inevitable, this course insensibly began to
shift her relationship. As the days went by, he talked more and more
to Isabel, until by degrees she became insensibly the target for
everything he said. Imperceptibly he grew to ignore his wife, thanks to
the attitude that she assumed. However, she was perfectly, increasingly
happy. For, as his intellectual intimacy with Isabel advanced, he grew
more and more the warm lover of his wife. And she, the apparently cold
and ethereal, by the irony of her own limitations, came at last to base
the triumph of her wifehood on the strength of her husband’s embraces.
His raptures, his compliments, his kisses, grew in number and ardour;
she had her heart’s desire. No thought of jealousy could ever have
approached her; for intellectual intimacy she had no taste, no wish.
As long as she had Kingston’s arms, Isabel was perfectly welcome to a
monopoly of his tongue. She, Gundred, was his wife, and nothing could
alter the glory of that. She triumphed in the successful development of
their relations.
That men like to chatter and overflow and sweat off in talk the
superfluous energy of their minds she knew to be an accepted fact.
Some women are born for men to talk to, but the ultimate triumph
belongs to the wife, the woman who orders the man’s dinner, sees to
his comforts, has him for her property at bed and board. As long as
his body remains faithful and loyal, who cares where his undisciplined
mind may go roving from hour to hour? So Gundred was glad to compound
for Kingston’s increasing affection by welcoming the distractions in
which his mind indulged, and even, in the rare moments when she could
divert her attention from her own bliss, was vaguely sorry for Isabel,
reduced to so poor and undignified a rôle as that of wash-pot to the
intellectual offscourings of a married man. But Isabel, after all,
had brought the humiliation on herself, and Gundred soon returned
to the contemplation of the mastery which she had established over
her husband’s affection by providing him with someone to talk to.
Wifely tact, she felt, had been splendidly justified. She never
stopped to consider that the means by which she had achieved her end
in themselves betrayed the disastrous weakness of her position. Her
idea of temptation was limited to physical allurements; husbands, she
knew, were only led away by bad, beautiful women, never by untidy,
talkative ones. Her position was absolutely safe and dominant; the more
freely her husband’s mind was allowed to wander and kick up its heels,
the more securely was her husband’s body bound in the bonds of its
allegiance. Infidelity is only a matter of the flesh. Without physical
desire there can be no adultery.
So passed the remaining days of their stay at Brakelond. Then the three
removed to Ivescar, and, with the setting, the colour of the whole
drama changed. Human life and death was the keynote of Brakelond;
its Castle seemed built and mortared with the tears and tragedies of
innumerable generations. Every stone was permeated with the history
of ten thousand men and women, who, through eight centuries, had
brought to bear upon the building the fire and fury of their individual
existences. Outside the walls rolled down the skirt of forest, and
below lay the sea; but forest and sea were subordinate in the scheme,
decorations and embroideries on the main theme. And the main theme was
the incessant human note that resounded in every detail of the old
tragic Castle.
At Ivescar, on the other hand, man was a new-comer, an accident,
a thing irrelevant and even incongruous. High up in its narrow
mountain-valley lay the house, amid a plantation of stunted, wind-swept
pines. It had the air of having been put there, not of having grown.
Brakelond had sprung and waxed from the rock it stood on; it was the
last crowning development of the land it dominated. Ivescar was an
artificial product, unrelated to the soil, the work of alien brains and
alien natures. Twenty centuries might pass over it without bringing it
into any closer kindred with its surroundings, without softening the
raw, crude note of novelty that it would always strike among the solemn
eternal hills. It was a large sandstone building, of the most solid
Early-Victorian Tudor design, as Isabel’s instinct had foretold. In the
middle rose a big square tower, finished off with a stone lacework of
circles and spikes. It had a flagstaff, a cupola with a bell in it, and
a huge conservatory that had been put there because it was expensive to
set up, and now remained there because it would be expensive to remove.
On three sides of it stretched a bare lawn, and on the fourth its
less honourable quarters were shrouded in sparse plantation, created
at great outlay, with much difficulty and no success. The one level
space of ground in the glen had been picked out, all its irregularities
trimmed away, and the pretence of a park elaborately maintained under
the mountain-slopes that rose stark and stern on either side. A little
river struggled down from the end of the valley, and found its way
among stones and mosses through the young woodland. Where it passed
within sight of the house, at the other side of the flat lawn, it had
been civilized and sedulously constrained into decorum. Its banks had
been widened, made uniform and flat. Dammed at one end, it had been
made to stretch out into a square shallow lake, whose grey and steely
surface reflected the staring yellow of the house against the grey
hills and sky behind, with a dreariness impossible to conceive. Coarse,
rank grasses grew along its margin, and its shoals, malodorous and
muddy, were abristle with melancholy rushes.
Behind and on either side of Ivescar rose the fells--steep slopes of
grass and scree, carrying up to the white precipices that hemmed the
little valley in. High above these again, but out of sight, rose the
mass of the great mountains, each standing on its plinth of limestone.
Here and there the line of a wall betrayed the existence of humanity,
but otherwise, except for the house in its artificial wood, with its
artificial lawn and lake, the landscape utterly ignored the world
of men. It was grand, primeval, solitary, remote from all the small
mortal concerns of life. As it had been since the dawn of history,
so it remained to-day. Peoples had come and gone, dynasties towered
and crashed; but the little glen under the shadow of the Simonstone
had wrought out its own fate untroubled by the clatter and tinkle of
collapsing empires. Silent and serene as it stood, the finger of man
had never scarred its tranquillity, the voice of man had never broken
into the current of its dream. And yet, in the midst of this immortal
solitude, the fancy of a rich manufacturer had planted this insolent
mushroom of a house, this brazen assertion of a fact which the hills
had always chosen to ignore, though Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman had
vainly striven to enforce it on their consciousness, as they fought
out their ephemeral fights across the flanks of Ravensber, or made
their settlement on the flat crown of the Simonstone. The valley and
the mountains had taken their unruffled course. Had the house been
less clamorous, the assault on their notice less insistent, they might
in time have come to assimilate the signs and the presence of man. A
quieter dwelling might insensibly have melted into their scheme, have
been merged into the vast individuality of the hills. But Ivescar was
too flaunting, too blatant, too eternally new. It compelled attention,
was an unceasing penny-whistle across the great harmony of silence.
And so, unable to make Ivescar one with themselves, the mountains
took the only other course, refusing all compromise, and forced the
incongruity of the building upon the world’s notice, by the blank
contempt with which they ignored it. Their unnoticing disdain made
its yellow stones, its pretentious tower appear even more undignified
than ever, emphasizing every detail of their parvenu richness, their
uneasy vulgarity. Man at Brakelond was the dominant note of Castle and
country; here the note was an isolated discord. Man was nothing, his
works an offence, amid the enormous loneliness of the fells.
Gundred, however, found herself warmly approving of Ivescar. True, the
country just round was “dreadfully black and barren, very ugly and
uncultivated”; but the house was roomy, airy, warm, comfortable, quite
suitable and pleasant in every way. It would hold plenty of people, and
had been built with an eye to the convenience of house-parties. Carpets
and curtains and cushions were all opulent and softly luxurious. They
compared well, to her taste, with the bare floors, the flags, the
worn matting of Brakelond. She resolved on a few improvements, but, on
the whole, was very well satisfied. A building produced by one mind
may, perhaps, have a less complicated personality, a simpler sense of
unity, than one built up by the varying tastes of twenty succeeding
generations. Ivescar was plain and direct in scheme. There was a good
collection of pictures, bought, all together, by James Darnley from
the previous owner, who had accumulated them because he imagined it a
suitable thing to do; otherwise Ivescar was tormented by no ambitions
whatever, artistic or dramatic. It only aimed, with a good-humoured
whole-heartedness, at being altogether comfortable. Gundred entered
into its spirit, and in an environment so congenial her abandonment
of all attempt to share in conversation with Kingston and Isabel
became at once more complete and less noticeable. She passed into
entire absorption in the details of daily life, lost any wish to be
in touch with intellectual life, took the colour of her surroundings
so perfectly that neither she herself nor the others realized how
completely she had withdrawn from their company.
As for Isabel, the exasperating vividness of the woman leapt into more
violent relief than ever against the smug complacency of Ivescar. At
Brakelond Isabel had been a part of the place; her individuality had
toned in with all the other individualities that had gone to make up
Brakelond. As one organ note is inconspicuous among a crowd of other
organ notes, so Isabel’s nature had there been merged in a crowd of
other similar natures. Here, however, at Ivescar the organ note of
her personality sounded harsh and tremendous, almost terrifying, amid
the clacking babble of mediocrity for ever kept up by the house. Only
trifling, futile people had had part in the building and the life of
Ivescar; their influence had left the place a pleasant little chorus
of tinkling inanities; and, by contrast, the fierce song of Isabel’s
nature rose dominant, tyrannous, obliterating all the lesser voices
around.
Kingston by degrees began to notice the disappearance of his wife and
the supremacy of her cousin in his mind. Occasionally he showed a
dim foreknowledge of the inevitable by brief spasms of anger against
Isabel, by fruitless attempts to carry Gundred with them in their
flights. But by now Gundred’s mental immobility had begun to be an
annoyance to him, and he was always glad to relinquish his efforts and
fall back into the familiar swing of dialogue with Isabel. The faint
air of greatness which for a time had been reflected on Gundred from
the walls of Brakelond had now faded utterly. She was swallowed up
in household details, could be seen meditating on ‘menus’ while the
most fantastic notions were flying swiftly between her husband and her
cousin. Her life was now consumed in coping with the cook; she was
completely happy in her task, and it was with growing readiness and
growing wrath that Kingston let her drop from his mental intimacy.
She filled up time by talks with her mother-in-law, who had a dower
house down the valley. The somewhat woolly mind of Lady Adela was very
congenial to Gundred, and her small, clear-cut nature found it both
harmonious and restful--like her own, though so utterly unlike. The two
women took refuge in each other; and Gundred, taken up by the house
and Lady Adela, would not have had the leisure, even had she had the
acumen, to remark how completely she was passing out of her husband’s
life.
‘Is the house insured?’ asked Isabel one morning. Kingston and she were
sitting together under the long wall of the picture-gallery.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘I always forget things like that. My
dear,’ he cried, calling to his mother, who had walked up across the
fields with her knitting, and now had established herself in one of the
cushioned window-seats close to Gundred, who was methodically checking
a Stores List--‘my dear, is the house insured?’
Lady Adela answered in the affirmative, and Gundred made haste to
clutch her share in a conversation that she could understand, by
swiftly affirming that, if not, it ought to be at once.
‘Otherwise one feels it such a responsibility to live in a house--yes?’
she added.
‘I don’t like betting and gambling,’ replied Isabel, assuming a manner
of exaggerated rectitude.
‘My dear!’ protested Lady Adela, looking mildly up at her over her
spectacles. If Lady Adela could dislike anyone, she disliked her
daughter-in-law’s new cousin. Deep in her heart she condemned Isabel as
strong-minded. Tiresome and strong-minded.
‘It’s a gamble with Fate, you know,’ explained Isabel; ‘all insurance
is, of course--having a bet on with the Almighty that He won’t burn
down your house or throw your train off the rails.’
‘My dear!’ protested Lady Adela again.
‘You have such strange fancies, Isabel,’ said Gundred coldly. ‘You
always think of things that no one else would think of.’
Clearly, as delivered in Gundred’s neat, precise tones, this was the
final expression of righteous disapproval.
‘My feet must be extraordinarily small,’ said Isabel to Kingston.
‘I seem to be always putting them into it. They go into the most
incredibly tiny loopholes. I don’t believe I could walk across the lid
of a pepper-pot without putting my foot into it somehow.’ She stuck out
both her feet in front of her, and gazed at them dispassionately.
The action may have been an instinctive appeal for admiration. The
feet, though large, were beautifully shaped, with a suggestion of
strength and swiftness in their lines. But Kingston angrily compelled
himself to notice that they overlapped their shoes, that one shoe had
lost its buckle, and that the stocking above each descended in wrinkles
that betrayed a weakness in the matter of suspenders.
‘Cover them up,’ he said. ‘Mine eyes dazzle.’
‘They haven’t died young yet, though,’ replied Isabel, finishing the
quotation. ‘Perhaps they will, though--the feet, I mean.’
‘Why do you ask about insurance, Isabel?’
‘I was thinking that you might welsh the Powers that be, and burn the
house down, and get the money to build a decent one. This great garish
glassy palace is not a bit at home here among the hills. You want
something sombre and quiet and self-sufficient as they are--something
that will be at ease with them. This house of yours is about as much
at ease among the hills as a brewer’s wife having tea with half a
dozen Dowager-Empresses. You want a building that won’t be fussy and
assertive.’
‘Then want must be my master. You have the most placid way of
suggesting things. Do you always get what you want yourself, quite
irrespective of the means?’
‘What is the use of wanting things,’ said Isabel defiantly, ‘if one
doesn’t get them? One might as well never want them.’
‘But what about other people? If they object? If you can only win over
their dead bodies?’
‘Oh, they must look out for themselves. Every herring must hang by its
own tail. It is everybody’s business to get what they want. If they can
prevent me from doing as I wish, why, then they may; and if they can’t,
well, I romp in; and if they get in my way while I am doing it, why,
so much the worse for them. They go under.’
‘There’s your crude individualism again,’ protested Kingston. Then he
turned to his wife, determined to bring her into the dialogue. She was
soberly conversing with Lady Adela over the Stores List.
‘Are you an individualist, Gundred?’ asked her husband. ‘Isabel’s a
terror; she has no respect for other people.’
Gundred finished her sentence calmly.
‘Besides, they say that spotted ones are bad for the eyesight,’ she
concluded, then prepared to answer her husband. ‘What did you say,
dear? Of course one must respect other people, or how are other people
to do the same to us?’
Unlike Kingston, Isabel was inclined to resent her cousin’s invasion.
‘Oh, Gundred doesn’t count,’ she cried. ‘Gundred’s a civilized woman.
Now, you and I are only pagans, Kingston.’
‘My dear, dear child,’ exclaimed Lady Adela, unspeakably distressed,
‘Kingston is nothing of the kind, I am sure!’
‘Don’t trouble about Isabel,’ explained Gundred. ‘She is always talking
nonsense--yes? Nobody ever cares what she says. Go on talking to
Kingston, Isabel, but really you must not interrupt us any more. We
have our duties, Kingston, and you idle people must not disturb us....
Dear Lady Adela, do you really think we want a dozen of those common
table-cloths?’
Kingston and Isabel were silent for a moment, listening to Gundred’s
conversation with her mother-in-law.
‘Well, I always believe it is best in the long run to get rather too
much than too little,’ replied Lady Adela, pondering the question.
‘Besides,’ amended Gundred, with a more cheerful air, ‘they might
give one discount on a quantity.’ Nothing should induce her to waste
the superabundant Darnley wealth. She licked the tip of her pencil,
prepared to tick off table-clothes with a lavish hand.
‘Would you say at eight and six each, or at nine shillings?’ she asked
anxiously, poising the pencil in indecision.
‘Oh, for the servants, my dear, eight and six will be ample. They wear
out their things in no time. It is quite shameful that they should
be wanting new ones already. I got them a whole supply only the year
before last.’
Gundred cluck-clucked.
‘Dear, dear,’ she said, ‘that Mrs. Bosket must really be a very
careless woman--yes? And she tells me that new sheets are wanted as
well--sheets and pillow-cases, dear mamma.’
‘My child, how truly dreadful!’ answered Lady Adela. ‘You must
certainly keep a close eye on Mrs. Bosket, though I do trust the poor
thing is honest.’
‘Oh, perfectly, and most obliging, but not equal to responsibility.
One so often finds that in a household. And it is so important to have
an efficient head--yes? I feel that one cannot safely leave her the
ordering of things like this, for instance. I have to do it myself.’
Had she had ten housekeepers--had she been the daughter of two
reigning sovereigns--Gundred would still have insisted on ordering the
table-cloths herself. It was her nature, but she made a virtue of her
nature’s necessity, and fell to weighing the comparative merits of
pillow-cases at half a crown and at three and six. Half a crown was
eventually fixed on.
Isabel looked at Kingston. She saw that Gundred’s dialogue had
irritated him. Why his annoyance was so keen she hardly knew. He
himself would have been puzzled to account for it. Her eyes triumphed
as she watched him, and obviously rejoiced at the defeat of his effort
to pull Gundred into their talk.
‘That’s all you are likely to get out of Gundred for an hour or two,’
she murmured.
‘Martha is a much more pleasant, useful person than tiresome,
head-in-the-air Mary,’ he flashed back at her resentfully.
‘Especially to talk to,’ replied Isabel mildly. ‘As a matter of fact,
a man wants both sorts--a Martha-wife and a Mary-wife: the Martha-wife
to air the beds and order the dinner, and the Mary-wife to look at and
talk to. Most of the tragedies in history have arisen from a man’s
failure to get the two in one person. Lucky men have an aunt or a
sister, as well as a wife, to fill the second part; but generally a
man either has a Mary-wife who talks brilliantly, but feeds him on
cold mutton, or a Martha-wife who will order a good dinner, but can
only talk about the servants. And then he looks round for someone
to think about meals, while Mary discusses the soul; or to discuss
the soul while Martha is interviewing the cook. And then there are
complications. The whole system is wrong. People ought to be much freer
to get what they like.’
Kingston resented Isabel’s tranquil description of the Martha-wife.
It had nothing to do with any case they knew of. To talk about it was
silly impertinence.
‘Individualism again,’ he answered. ‘You are an anarchist, Isabel, like
all egoists. Anarchy never pays in the long run.’
‘No,’ admitted Isabel, ‘one has to pay for it in the long run, of
course. But until the bill comes in one has a good time--quite worth
the price one has to give.... Ask the lady behind you. There is
a triumphant instance of the Mary-wife, and the egoist, and the
individualist, all in one. She died for it at last, but she had all she
wanted while she lived. That is me; I’ll die gladly, but I mean to have
all I want till then.’
Kingston turned to look at the picture to which Isabel pointed. From a
background as dark as her end there smiled out at him, enigmatically,
whimsically, the face, so much more prudish than passionate, of a woman
so much more passionate than prudish--the face of Anne, “Marquis” of
Pembroke, concubine and Queen.
‘So there is your model,’ he answered her contemptuously. ‘Well, she
had her way, and her way led her to the block on Tower Green.’
‘Let it. What does that matter? It had led her first over the scarlet
cloth of a throne. The price was heavy, yes, but she always knew it
would be. I expect she was even glad to die at last, and have rest, and
be out of all her glorious, dreadful suspense. And the splendour she
bought was worth it. What do I care for the bill I may have to settle
some day? If I want a thing, that means I intend to have it. Do you
think a beggarly consideration of economy would stop me? Thank Heavens,
I am not a miser. Why, to haggle over Fate’s account would be like
Gundred wrestling for a twopenny discount off a pillow-case. No, Queen
Anne and I know better, don’t we, your Grace?’
Isabel rose and stared into the picture. The pursed lips, the sly,
slanting eyes beneath their demure lids, responded mysteriously to
her gaze. This was not the woman that Holbein drew in the last hours
of her tragedy, weary, worn, and haggard; this was the Queen of his
earlier paintings, as he and Lucas Cornelisz saw her in the radiance of
triumphant battle, the fierce adventuress-soul that, with nothing in
her favour--neither beauty nor position nor wealth--and with everything
against her in the fight--a kingdom, a wife, a Church--yet by sheer
force of brilliancy, courage, and charm, fought her way at last,
through the wreckage of a religion, to the throne of a Queen.
‘Your Grace,’ said Isabel, ‘you and I are friends. You were a pagan
like me. What you wanted nothing could stop you from getting, neither
armies of enemies nor any silly dread of the price to pay at the end.’
‘I wish you joy of your friend,’ said Kingston, filled with
inexplicable hostility. ‘Ask her what she thought of it all at the
end; ask her what she felt that last night at Greenwich, when the
King had deserted her, when she was still treated as Queen by people
bowing and backing and saying “Your Grace” to her, who in their hearts
were all stealthy enemies from whom there was no escape (with bets
among themselves as to when her head would be off and a new Queen
crowned); when she had to be brave and royal among all those crowding
black, invisible dangers, under the descending shadow of the axe.
Don’t you think she wished then that she had not been such a pitiless
individualist? Don’t you think she wished then that she had been
allowed to live and die plain Lady Northumberland?’
‘Brave and royal you were, your Grace,’ cried Isabel to the picture.
‘You never regretted, did you? If you had, you would have been a poor
lath-and-plaster creature, unworthy of what you did. Your nerves gave
way for an hour or so. They had been at full stretch for three terrible
years of crowned suspense. So it was no wonder they snapped just for a
moment in your fall. But it was not death you were afraid of; it was
just the crash and the dying. You were a Queen at heart. You fought for
your life as a Queen, and in the end it was as a Queen you died. Nobody
else, not even in that strong, brutal time, died in such an exaltation
of gladness.’
‘An egoist should not be an idealist as well,’ protested Kingston.
‘You make too pompous a song about a peddling adventuress put
shamefully out of the way by a political job.’
‘Take care,’ cried Isabel. ‘When I knew her Grace, she was not a lady
to be spoken lightly of. Her enemies only killed her because they did
not dare to let her live. Even her worst enemies dreaded her cleverness
and her courage. And her dying words must have taken the skin off her
husband’s back when he heard them. The demure gentleness of them, the
vitriolic irony of them! You may have been “spiteful, flighty, and
undignified,” your Grace, but you were splendid, terrible, indomitable.
And you must have been marvellously charming when you chose, you plain,
prudish-looking creature with six fingers and the devil’s temper.
There’s a Mary-wife for you, to hold the interest and curiosity of
the King, while his poor good Martha of a Katherine was everlastingly
saying her beads and hemming shirts.’
‘My dear Isabel, I tell you that the song of history is “Pay, pay,
pay.” If you want to follow Anne Boleyn, you must follow her all along
the road.’
‘My dear Kingston, history may sing “Pay, pay, pay,” but it sings to
deaf ears when it tries to impose its twaddling threat on well-bred
souls. Only stupid, parvenu people ever think of reckoning up the cost
of anything beforehand. It’s the hall-mark of recent wealth to be
sparing of its pence. One does not bother about such things. One buys
first, and only asks the price when the time comes to pay the bill.’
‘And then the price may make you bankrupt.’
‘Oh no. Fate’s bills are paid in courage, and I hope one would never
be bankrupt of that. I think I shall always be able to settle up. One
plunges, like Queen Anne. Your Grace did not stop to haggle. You and
I go boldly forward, order what we want from the Stores of Life, and
don’t give a thought to discounts and reductions and Summer Sales. And
then, when the time comes, we fork up with a will, and pay out our
uttermost penny.’
For a moment Kingston did not answer her. He stood looking into the
secretive face of the Queen. Gundred’s voice broke the silence.
‘I know where one can get them at two and six,’ she was heard remarking
in her clear, level tones.
‘There’s Queen Katherine arranging the household,’ laughed Isabel,
with insolent regardless frankness, ‘and here is Queen Anne ordering a
crown across the counter of life. No discount asked, and only the best
required.’
Kingston looked at her with rage in his eyes. She was always saying
crude things like that--things that roused in him swift opposition
and dislike. Yet he remained helpless, as if bound by a spell. And
her indifference to everyone’s opinion was so profound, her scorn of
conventions so sincere that no reproach could be brought home to her.
She had no common standard for measurement by the rules of the world.
One might as well have attempted to reprove a savage for going naked,
or an Englishwoman for going clothed.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I hope your bill will be as heavy as Queen
Anne’s; then we shall see how you behave when it comes to paying for
it.’
‘But perhaps I have not really decided what I shall order from the
shop-keeper?’
‘Oh, well, I neither know nor care,’ replied Kingston savagely. ‘And
you don’t seem to have the decent instincts of the real honest buyer,
either. From the anarchistic things you were saying a few minutes ago,
I should have thought you would have been a shop-lifter, pure and
simple, going in and stealing whatever you wanted, without a thought of
paying for it.’
This time he had touched her. She flushed.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘When it comes to the big things of life, I am as
honest as the day. Love and hope and so on I should expect and intend
to pay the top price for--pay it thoroughly to the last farthing,
sooner or later. I am only an anarchist in little things. I might
steal for a fancy, and assert my individualism for a whim, but really,
really, Queen Anne hasn’t a thought of bilking when she orders her
crown. Whatever I buy I shall pay good money for, Kingston--pay it
ungrudgingly, if I have to die for it.’
Her earnest face, as she turned it to his, burning and eager, had a
strange fascination. He turned roughly away towards his wife.
‘We are talking about Anne Boleyn,’ he cried, raising his voice to
penetrate Gundred’s attention--‘how she had her fun, and then paid the
money.’
‘And nine is twenty-one,’ answered Gundred, completing her sentence
in mechanical tones.... ‘What, dear? Oh yes, Anne Boleyn, poor little
thing! so dreadfully treated by her husband. The first martyr of the
Church of England.... And now, about prunes, mamma?’
Kingston, angry and disappointed, turned again to Isabel. Primly,
inscrutably, Queen Anne smiled down upon them from the wall. She had
heard about that martyrdom before. She knew better. She had been the
martyr of ambition, not of dogma; she sold her life for a crown, not
by any means for a faith. And she thought her martyrdom the grander.
In her passionate mysterious heart she pondered Isabel’s brave
declaration, and wondered whether the modern woman, too, would be
content to pay her debt, when the time should come, for the big things
she had ordered at the counter of Fate. Beneath the riddle of her
smile Kingston and Isabel fell once more a-talking, while across the
room Gundred was still ticking off groceries, and exchanging plans of
household economy with her mother-in-law.