RODDICK'S WIFE.
"Well?" demanded Roddick, as Griff thrust his head in at the open
window of the Wynyates parlour. "How does marriage go?"
"Like the weather, old man; soft, variable winds, no showers to speak
of, and a touch of green showing everywhere."
"Come in, can't you? Why do you stand there with that perennial grin
on your face, as if you were posing for a full-length portrait of the
happy bridegroom? Away with you newly-married people!"
"Thanks," said Griff, striding over the low window-sill.
"You think the whole world must be looking through your rose-tinted
spectacles. Wait till the glass gets smoked, and walk delicately in the
meanwhile; you're not a degree higher than a cat on a glass-bottled
wall, and if you go prancing along in this style----"
"You are in very good form this morning, Roddick. It does a man good to
listen to your breadth of epithet."
"Breadth of epithet! Why talk like a book, Lomax? Call them swears, and
have done with it. What have you come for?"
"To be congratulated. I couldn't miss your pretty way of putting
things, so here I am, the very morning after my return."
"I suspect you want comfort," snarled Roddick. "I can give you that.
There's a heap of fools in the same box with you, so you won't run a
chance of feeling lonely. About how soon do you think of bolting for
good and all?"
"Roddick, you're going a bit too far----" began Griff, hotly. But he
caught a wicked light of satisfaction in the other's face, and made up
his mind that he would not be guyed--"trailed," as they called it in
Marshcotes--however much the amusement might give Roddick a vent for
his ill-humour.
"I mostly am. Once I went very much too far, and--have some tobacco."
They smoked on in silence for awhile. Griff ventured a remark at
length; his companion took no notice whatever, but went on frowning at
the live peats in the grate.
"About that woman," said Roddick, finally.
"Which woman?"
"The thing you mistook for a vampire when you were last here. What did
the pretty little beast do to you, Lomax, out there in the darkness?"
Griff shuddered; he had almost forgotten the incident under stress of
the quick march of later events.
"She leaped out of the wind and rain like a storm-elf, and glued her
flabby lips to mine, and called me 'Leo.'"
"Only that? You'd get used to it with practice," said Roddick, with a
grim caricature of cheeriness; "one does to anything. Leo happens to be
my own name, if you remember. On my soul, Lomax, I'm jealous! You've
stolen one of the kisses that are my exclusive property. Gad, I've a
mind to horsewhip you!"
Roddick was swung by passion into the very worst of his moods. All
through this bitter levity ran a streak of blasphemy--a silent,
strenuous blasphemy that was worse than any red-hot flow of words could
have been.
"But who is she?" said his companion, gravely.
"Who is she?" Roddick's laugh burst out as if it had been
half-strangled on its way to his mouth. "Innocent friend, who is a
woman usually that prowls round one's doorway in the dark, and leaps
into one's arms, and--the rest of it? The woman is my wife, of course."
Another dead silence. The first of the summer's bees forsook the white
arabis that was coming into blossom under the parlour window, and flew
into the room. Roddick watched it as it buzzed from wall to wall; then
it wanted to escape, and made a dive for the upper window, banging
itself against the glass.
"It's fun getting in, but how are you going to get out again, little
fool?" muttered Roddick. He went to the window and squashed the bee
flat against the glass; then returned to his place. "Lomax," he said
quietly, "you'd better hear all about it; half a true story is worse
than a whole lie. You want to know how this Venus became my cherished
wife?"
"Oh, drop that tone, old man!" cried Griff. "You don't mean it, and it
grinds at one's nerves horribly. Is she really your wife? From what I
could see of her in the dark, she seemed too old--any age she might
have been----"
"She's forty-five, as you are rude enough to call a lady's age in
question," said Roddick, still in the same voice. "Drink has delicate
fingers, you know, for modelling a woman's face, and she looks older.
As to her being my wife, there is no question: she carries her
marriage-lines like a talisman next to her breast. She brought the
paper out, only a day or two ago, and asked me to gloat over it with
her in Darby and Joan fashion; but you can understand that I find it
rather difficult nowadays to play the _rôle_ of dutiful husband."
Griff had abandoned thought of interruption. It was frightful to listen
to the man's cold-blooded rendering of his tragedy, but Roddick must
tell his story in his own way, or not at all.
"We'll begin with the idyllic stage, Lomax, as you've rather a taste
for sweetmeats. When I was twenty, and charmingly innocent, I went for
a week's fishing in Devonshire. I put up at a little inn, a hundred
miles from anywhere, and the landlord's daughter--who was scarcely
innocent, I believe, at the moment she was born--took me in hand. You
know what that means, when a young cub just let loose from school is
flattered and fawned on by a woman five years his senior. The girl was
passably pretty, too. Well, I came down again to the inn a few months
later, and I was greeted with news--news, and tears, and entreaties
from the girl that I would marry her. I was soft in those days--tender,
you know--and I did marry her, more out of pity than anything else. I
have never been tender since," he added, with a sudden deepening of his
voice.
"Then--you were married all the five years we knew each other in town?
Did Dereham, or any others of our set, know about it?"
"No, though I nearly blurted it out more than once, when they came to
me with their doll's-house prettinesses about women. _You_ thought you
were a cynic, now and then, didn't you, Lomax, when the Ogilvie woman
touched you up a bit too hard? Lord, I could have taught you a cynicism
that grips your vitals! You'll never learn it now, so it's lucky you've
struck into optimism--it fits you better."
"Never mind me, Roddick. Finish your story."
"Six months after I married my picturesque maid of the inn--the
child died a day or two after its birth--she began to take opium for
sleeplessness; she continued it as a luxury. From that she passed, with
true catholicity, to wine, brandy, whisky--or, failing these, gin. She
grew more beast-like every year, till now it's only the clothes and the
walking on her hind legs that stamp her as a woman. Three times she
has tried to kill me, and once--my cursed conscience won't let me do
anything else--I have saved her from death."
"I thought you disclaimed tenderness just now," put in Griff, scarce
knowing what to say. "In your place, I should have let her die."
"You wouldn't, when it came to the point," snapped Roddick. "We've most
of us been murderers in theory, but it rings differently when it comes
to practice. Not that tenderness has anything to do with it. I loathe
her, and wish she were dead: it's my fool of a conscience, I tell you,
that ought to have perished of _ennui_ years ago. But neither will die;
they're tough as nails, both the wife and the conscience. Wherever I
go, I take the woman with me, like a monkey in a cage, with a nurse to
look after her. When I lived in town, I planted my menagerie down in
Hampstead; when I came here, I put her in a cottage as far in the heart
of the moor as I could manage--she's there at this moment, unless she
has given her nurse the slip again and come in search of me."
"And you see her often?"
"I have to," said Roddick, with bitter weariness; "sometimes it takes
a strong pairs of arms to hold her. But her tantrums are the part of
our married life I find the easiest to bear. She is not always mad, you
know. She only tries to throttle me in and between whiles, by way of
variety; at other times she loves me dearly, she fawns on me, she----
Never mind, Lomax; it makes me sick to talk of it."
"Poor old chap--poor old chap!" muttered Griff, vaguely. "Why the
devil can't she die? A year or two of such a life would finish off any
ordinary woman."
"Don't repeat that!" cried Roddick, sharply. "The next step is, what a
fool I am not to kill her, and I kick ideas of that kind out of my mind
before they get a chance."
"Roddick," said Griff--with a sudden glimpse of the reason that had
brought his friend to this out-of-the-way moor--"Roddick, have you told
me all?"
The other was silent for a space. His brows came together, overhanging
his deep-sunken eyes like a jagged thatch.
"No, it is not all. When I said I had shelved tenderness, I lied.
Dereham learned that end of my story, because he happened to know the
girl's people."
Griff bethought him of Frender's Folly--of the coincidence between
the coming of Laverack and the letting of Wynyates Hall--of the hint
that Gabriel Hirst had once given him as to the distress of Laverack's
daughter.
"The Laveracks, you mean?" he said bluntly.
"How did you guess that?"
"I remembered that you and they turned up almost together, that was
all."
"Well, it doesn't signify, I suppose. You're not the man to gabble, are
you, Lomax? I used to wonder at what you artistic people call illicit
passions; close upon forty, with a wife who had taught me my lesson,
it never occurred to me that I should be bothered by love. But Dereham
took me one afternoon to the Laveracks'; why I went with him, the Lord
only knows, hating tea-cup frippery as I did. Anyhow, I went, and Janet
was there; you can piece the beginning together for yourself. The thing
was as inevitable, Lomax, as thunder after lightning; we had been
waiting all our lives for each other, and--there I go, slipping into
the old, weather-beaten tags. A man can't touch love with words, any
more than he can describe a sunrise."
"Did you strive against it?" The question was out and away before Griff
could capture it. He was curious to know how a man of Roddick's stamp
would behave under such an unexpected stress.
"Strive? No, you fool! It's the half-way people who flutter and beat
their wings against the cage. A man either cuts the whole thing at
once, or yields unconditionally. I yielded. Then Laverack got wind of
it, and took the Folly in a hurry, and carried off Janet to the moors
here."
Roddick got up from his chair, and began to pace about the room.
"Old man," he cried suddenly, "thank your God you have never had that
to fight against--to live chained to a woman you loathe, and to know
that a word will give you the love you crave for. And sometimes"--his
voice sank to a whisper--"sometimes my little lady, in her innocence
and passion, entreats me to take her away somewhere, and end it all.
Then, Lomax, it is just hell."
Griff was driven to bay, as we all are when our friends force us to be
helpless spectators of their distress.
"Do you remember the advice you once gave me--to cut and run, and
snatch happiness while I could? A man, you say, doesn't beat his wings
against the cage--but you are doing it," he said, impotently.
Roddick turned and blazed out on him.
"Do you know what that would mean for Janet? Do you know that I'd pawn
my beggarly soul to save her little finger an ache?"
"Can't you get a divorce?" said Griff, breaking a long silence.
"No valid excuse, or shouldn't I have jumped at it? A woman may drink
one's good name away and attempt one's life, and be faithful for all
that. Drink comes under the sickness or health, richer or poorer,
clause."
Griff also rose from his chair and fidgeted nervously up and down the
floor.
"I'm off, Roddick," he said at last. "God help you, old fellow!"
Roddick grinned.
"I used to say that, but I had less experience then. You're not going
to leave me yet. I'll saddle the grey, and we must have a gallop
together. There's nothing like a horse for driving sanity into a man."
But all along the road, gallop, canter, or trot, Griff could not rid
himself of the burden--
"If only the woman would die; if only the woman would die."