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THE HUMAN INTEREST
THE
HUMAN INTEREST
A STUDY IN INCOMPATIBILITIES
BY
VIOLET HUNT
AUTHOR OF
“A HARD WOMAN,” “UNKIST UNKIND,” “THE MAIDEN’S PROGRESS.”
[Illustration: colophon, FAIRE ET TAIRE]
HERBERT S. STONE AND COMPANY
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK
MDCCCXCIX
COPYRIGHT 1899, BY
HERBERT S. STONE & CO
THE HUMAN INTEREST
CHAPTER I
One dull afternoon--and it was in summer--a London authoress of some
repute, whose nom-de-guerre was Egidia, was wandering along the pavement
of a dull and imposing street in Newcastle. Day was beginning to
decline, but the approach of evening was not alone responsible for the
heart-felt ejaculation of the South-country woman, “Oh, this Northern
gloom!” as she walked along under the smoky pall that, summer and
winter, shrouds the city.
She stood still presently, carefully scanning the solemn, stately houses
with pillared porticos all of the self-same pattern, which run in an
interminable row to a vanishing point seemingly far beyond conjecture.
“Each of the houses is exactly like the other,” she murmured to herself.
“In which, I wonder, does the Muse of Newcastle hold her court? Like
most muses, she gave no number. I must judge by out-sides. Oh, here we
are; green Liberty curtains in the windows--a more daring green on the
door--a knocker of mediæval tendencies! I will try.”
She went up the steps of No. 59 Savile Street and rang the bell, and
stood there pensive.
“I promised to call on this woman, and I am doing it, but I shall be
bored. She will talk of Ibsen, and Meredith, and tell me she had read
Plato through before she was fifteen. She will take herself seriously,
and me too, and inundate me with questions about the people in London.
All these provincials do. Still, she pressed me so prettily to call that
I could not say No. But I shall be bored!--Is Mrs. Mortimer Elles at
home?” she enquired of the handsome, full-blown parlour maid who opened
the door widely and invitingly.
“Oh, yes, ma’am--this is Mrs. Elles’ day at home.”
“Much too familiar!” thought Egidia, as she followed the swing of the
maid’s cap streamers through portièred doorways and past Syrian
shawl-draped cornices, and other pathetically futile attempts to conceal
the impossible architecture of a commonplace house, built in a bad
period, and decorated originally on the worst principles.
“Muslin curtains are a mistake in an atmosphere like this of Newcastle!”
she thought, “and a parlour-maid should not aim at looking like Madame
Sans Gêne.”
She was shown into a drawing-room, “stamped with the evidences of
culture,” as the interviewer would say, and “redolent of a personality.”
Books were scattered about; the piano stood open, with the latest
“mood” of the latest fashionable composer lying on it; there were
magazines, with paper-knives negligently bisecting their leaves. There
were, on the walls, some grim old pictures--family portraits,
presumably--of ill-tempered, high-stocked old gentlemen and prim,
dignified ladies, but they were interspersed with sundry scratchy and
erratic modern etchings and photogravures; there were great bowls of
flowers--whose apparent substance, the authoress could not help
suspecting, was cleverly eked out with artificial imitations procurable
at drapers’ shops. The whole effect was rather pretty and French, and
thoroughly out of keeping with the grim realities of Northern hardness
and abnegation of art-feeling that reigned outside.
A young woman, beautifully dressed, who was sitting over the fire,
though it was not cold, rose eagerly to receive her distinguished guest,
exclaiming, with the most flattering and heart-felt emphasis,
“Oh, Miss Giles, how good of you to come! I was afraid you would have
quite forgotten me and my day!”
She was a slight woman, not tall, but slender enough to look so. Her
eyes were very large and bright, her cheeks, flushed, perhaps with the
fire. She made wrinkles when she laughed, but she did not look more than
twenty-eight. A little powder, carelessly and innocently cast there,
showed on cheeks “hollowed a little mournfully,” as the poet has it. Her
hair was arranged in hundreds of little waves and curls, and her
dress--Egidia had been in the best houses in Newcastle, during the last
few days, but had seen nothing to equal the style and taste of this
little solicitor’s wife. Thought and ingenuity had gone to the devising
of that gown, but the wearer of it had forgotten to fasten the last two
buttons of her sleeve.
“The artistic sense strongly developed--but very little power of
co-ordination.” So the authoress, taking all these points into
consideration and exercising her own professional faculty of
classification, mentally assessed her hostess.
“This is my day,” Mrs. Elles was assuring her. “I partly hope people
will come, and partly not. I would so much rather have you to
myself--but then, some of my friends were so anxious to meet you when I
said I knew you--so I had to give them a chance--you don’t mind being
lionized a little, do you? We can’t help it!”
The “celebrity” had been a “celebrity” so long that she had left off
objecting to the outward indications of her supremacy. Though she was a
lion, and gave lectures, she was modest and easily pacified. She was
fascinated by something curiously plaintive and beguiling about her
hostess’s voice and manner; a suggestion of childishness, of almost
weakness as she thought, in its artificial cadences. For it was an
affectation, Miss Giles, whose nom-de-guerre was Egidia, decided, though
a pleasing one.
“I wonder if she scolds her servants in that tone?” she thought, while
submitting to the charm, and, lying easily back in her chair, listened
to her hostess’s ecstasies about her books and her lectures, her
prettily expressed enviousness of the presumably happier conditions of
her guest’s life in London.
“Oh, what it must be to be in the midst of life, really in it--of
it--part of it! Here one sits, and yearns, and only catches the far-away
echoes, the reverberations of the delightful things that are happening,
away down there, where you are--in the very, very heart of it all!”
The peri left out of Paradise clasped her pretty, soft, pliant hands,
and the novelist asked her, willing to be instructed,
“Is Newcastle, then, worse than other provincial towns?”
“I only know Newcastle, but I am sure it’s worse. There are a few nice
advanced people, but they go away all the time, or if they bring nice
people down from London, they keep them to themselves. I never see any
one worth talking to. Oh, it is hopeless--hopeless!” She shrugged her
shoulders. “It is simply a form of Hades,--this life for me, for I have
‘glimpses of what might make me less forlorn,’ of a life to live, a
world to move in. I feel I was not meant to merely stagnate--to
vegetate--to wither gradually away, consumed by my own wasted energies.
You laugh! coming straight, as you do, from that paradise of life and
movement, that I am sure London is, you can have no idea of what
Newcastle and my life is! Inertia kills people like me, one’s soul is
starved, don’t you know?--one’s mental life has nothing to feed on, no
pabulum, except books--and they are not easy to get--new books. I am the
trial and pest of the libraries here!”
“You read a great deal?”
“Oh, yes. I live on books. They are the greatest possible comfort to me.
They are literally my saviours. I quite sympathize with the heroine of a
novel I read lately, who was kept from suicide by the sight of her
favourite poets on her book-shelf! I make myself up a dream-life, don’t
you know--the life I should like to live if I could choose. One
dream-life, do I say?” Her eyes lightened and brightened: she was
extraordinarily alert and vivid. “Two or three--a perfect orgy of
dream-lives! They cost nothing. But I have always read a great deal. The
classics I don’t neglect. I read Plato before I was fifteen--in Jowett’s
translation, of course.”
Egidia smiled.
“And your books?”
“Don’t! don’t!” Egidia held up her hands.
“But I love them--I go to them for comfort and help. I have them all--on
a shelf near my bed--a whole row of my favourites--Browning, and
Meredith--and Ibsen. I am a great Ibsenite--are not you?”
“It is very fashionable!”
“Oh! but really, don’t you think--?” She was becoming quite incoherent
in her excitement. “Now, Nora in the ‘Doll’s House’?--It is the story of
so many of us. Only it is a mistake of Ibsen to make the husband a
cheat--that seems to put him too much in the wrong, he is wrong enough,
without that. Oh, Nora was so right to leave him, I think. So strong! Do
you know the sound of the house door banging in that play stirs me like
the sound of a trumpet?”
“You should write a book yourself!” suggested Egidia, indulgently,
knowing well the answer she would receive.
“Ah! I haven’t time. But if I did, I could put in things--things that
have happened to me--experience--more of feeling than of incident,
perhaps. I was an only daughter; my father was in the army; I travelled
a good deal; but I have not had a life of adventure; I married when I
was seventeen. My husband was a widower then, and his son, Charles,
lives with us--and his aunt, Mrs. Poynder.” She had an involuntary
little shudder. “He is a solicitor; you know that. And he has a huge
practice. He is very much occupied, and takes no interest in the
things you and I care about. Of course, he laughs at me for
my--enthusiasms--but I should die if I didn’t.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“Some day, if you will, you must come and stop with me in town,” said
Egidia, in an access of womanly compassion for this somewhat
ungrammatical but sincere tale of misfortune.
“Shall I? Shall I? Oh, how lovely that would be!” Her brilliant smile
came out again. “To see--to have a glimpse of all those wonderful
literary people in whose company your life is spent.”
“Well, I happen to know more of artists than I do of literary people,”
said Egidia. “You see, my own ‘shop’ bores me. Do you collect--I am sure
you do?” She had seen the unmistakable flame of the autograph-fever leap
into Mrs. Elles’ eyes. “I can send you some, if you like. I have one in
my pocket now that I can give you, from Edmund Rivers, the landscape
painter.”
“The R. A.?” Mrs. Elles, who always took care to have a Royal Academy
Catalogue sent up to her every year, and learnt it by heart, enquired
eagerly.
“Yes, the R. A. and my second cousin!” Egidia answered, carelessly
pulling a crumpled note out of her pocket and handing it to Mrs. Elles.
“Read it!”
“Dear Alice,” (read Mrs. Elles), “I am so sorry that I cannot have the
pleasure of dining with you on the 31st, but I hope to be in the North
on the 26th, at latest, to begin my summer campaign. I see the spring
buds in the parks, and the Inspector of Nuisances has invited me to clip
my sprouting lilac bushes, and it all reminds me too painfully of the
paradise of greenness that is growing up in the country, and calling me.
I shall soon be ‘a green thought in a green shade’--as Marvel says, and
very much in my element. Yours ever, Edmund Rivers.”
“The twenty-sixth,” said Mrs. Elles, meditating. “This is the thirtieth.
Then he is gone.”
“Oh, yes, no one will set eyes on him again till November, when he comes
back from what he calls his summer campaign. He takes good care that
none of us shall even know where his happy hunting ground is--somewhere
in Yorkshire, I believe! Oh, yes, you may keep the letter.”
Mrs. Elles took the letter with her pretty, be-ringed fingers, and
scanned it again with the air of a connoisseur.
“Do you know,” she said, “I take a double interest in these things;
first of all, because they are autographs of distinguished people, but,
in the second place, because I can read their characters so well from
their handwritings.”
“I wonder if you can tell me anything of this man’s character, then?”
said the novelist, with a look in her eyes which set Mrs. Elles
thinking. Miss Giles, in her way, was attractive. It was not Mrs. Elles’
way, but Mrs. Elles had sufficient discernment to see merit in a style
that was not her style at all. Miss Giles had no pose, unless it was
that of bonhomie. The charm of her face lay in its nobility, touched
with shrewdness; a certain modest mannishness as of a woman who had to
look after herself, and who had cut out a way for herself, marked her
appearance. Her dress was not in any way unfeminine, but Mrs. Elles
decided that she would have looked well, dressed as a boy. She had
beautiful eyes, and dark hair that curled. She must always have looked
thirty-six, and would probably never look any older than she looked now.
“It is a very odd, characteristic handwriting indeed,” she began
gravely, “he is complicated, tremendously complicated, I should say.”
“He is an artist, a genius indeed, in my opinion,” said the novelist,
soberly.
“Ah! then, of course, he has a right to be eccentric. They all are,
aren’t they? Well, isn’t he a little--how shall I say it?--fanciful,
faddish, difficult to get on with?”
“You have, in the words of the song, ‘got to know him first,’” quoted
Egidia, laughing.
“And you do know him, well, of course! But still, I should say he is
what is called a misogynist.”
She was watching the effect of her words on the other. Even the
strong-minded authoress of novels with a purpose has her weak spot, she
was glad to see.
“Hating women! Well, I can’t say he pays them much attention. I don’t
suppose he ever looked at a woman in his life!” There was certainly a
touch of bitterness in this speech, and Mrs. Elles was delighted.
“Not married then!” she exclaimed. “And yet, I should say that he is not
obtuse to the charm of material things--that he is even a great lover of
beauty--in the abstract, then, I suppose. Nature--you said he was a
landscape painter, didn’t you? Does he never put people into his
pictures--never put you, for instance?”
Egidia laughed.
“No? Well, I must say I don’t care for pictures without any human
interest at all.”
“Then you wouldn’t care for Edmund Rivers’ work, unless you could get
your romance out of the scarred, weather-beaten face of an old windmill
or a ruined castle! He leaves the human interest entirely out of his
pictures.”
“And out of his life, too, it seems,” said the other, “and both suffer
in consequence. Don’t tell me; there is something wrong about a man who
doesn’t care for women! Some day one will awaken him. But meantime I see
a certain want of sympathy in the determined uprightness of these
capital N’s that refuse to merge properly into the letters that come
after, and obstinacy in the blunt endings of those g’s. And yet he must
have great delicacy of touch--he seems to feel certain words as he
writes them. Isn’t his painting very refined and delicate?”
“It is all sorts, strong and delicate at once,” Egidia asseverated with
enthusiasm.
“And he is a great friend of yours!” Mrs. Elles remarked conclusively,
folding up the letter and putting it in her pocket. She was now quite
confirmed in her theory that the authoress had a secret passion for the
painter. “Is he young?”
“Fifty!” said Egidia, bluntly; she was beginning to guess the drift of
her companion’s thoughts, and, though secretly amused at them, was
minded to put her off a little, “and his hair is turning grey.”
“But I adore grey hair,” Mrs. Elles exclaimed hastily and
enthusiastically, as the door opened and a Miss Drummond was announced.
“Oh dear!” ejaculated the hostess, almost in the new arrival’s hearing,
but made amends for her discourtesy by a very effusive greeting. She
introduced “Miss Giles--Egidia, you know;” with a flourish as one with
whom she was on deeply intimate terms, casting at the same time a
pathetic, imploring look in the latter’s direction, as much as to ask
her not to discount her statement. Then more people came in. The room
was filling.
“Don’t go,” she whispered to Egidia, more as an appeal than a civility,
and the good-natured authoress stayed and watched her, and studied her.
She saw that dim notions of Madame Récamier to be emulated and a salon
to be held prevailed in the mind of the lady whom she had dubbed the
Muse of Newcastle. Such culture, such an atmosphere of literary gossip
as is current in many a second-class literary centre in London,
flourished here, and Mrs. Elles led the inferior revels with aplomb and
discrimination. She manœuvred her guests very cleverly, on the whole,
and talked much and well--with the slight tendency to exaggerate which
Egidia had already noticed in her. Like many restless, excitable people,
she did not seem able to both talk and look at a person at the same
time, and her restless eyes were continually directed towards the door,
as if expecting and dreading a fresh arrival.
About half-past five the mystery was solved; a tall, well set-up woman
of fifty walked in, bonnetless, who seemed to know nearly everybody and
shook hands with all the painful effect of a bone-crushing machine, as
Egidia experienced when “my aunt, Mrs. Poynder,” was introduced to her.
The stout lady then took a tiny seat near Miss Drummond, and Egidia was
much diverted by her loudly-spoken comments on her niece’s guests. She
was a woman to whom a whisper was obviously an impossible operation.
“And which is Fibby’s grand London authoress she’s so set up with?” she
was heard to ask. “Fibby mumbles names so that I haven’t a notion which
it is! Oh, deary me, here’s the Newcastle poet. I’m sure he has no call
to stoop as he comes in; he needn’t think he’s tall enough to graze the
lintel.... But I would dearly like to cut his hair for him.... Po-uttry!
No! po-uttry I can’t stand ... why, if a man’s got anything to say,
can’t he say it straight without so much ado?” The Newcastle poet, who
wore his hair nearly as long as poets do in London, shook hands and
presented a slim, green volume to Mrs. Elles.
“You must write ‘Phœbe Elles’ in it!” his hostess said, imperiously, and
led him to a side table, where, with many a dedicatory flourish, he did
as she required. Then she introduced him to Egidia, with the air of one
introducing Theocritus and Sappho.
“And do you kill the lovers?” she asked, alluding, presumably, to
characters in the volume she held. “How relentless of you!” She added to
her guests, “I had the privilege of reading it in the proof, you know.”
“Ah! I had to kill them,” he murmured, plaintively, “sooner than let
them know the sad satiety of love.”
“My goodness!” Mrs. Poynder muttered.
The conversation, appallingly immoral as it was, yet seemed to interest
the good lady, for she drew nearer and formed a chorus to the very
modern discussion that ensued between the poet and Egidia and her niece,
of which London and London literary society was the theme. The epigrams
that were flying about she visibly and audibly pooh-poohed. “Give me
Newcastle!” she murmured at intervals, and “You, a mere lad, too!” was
elicited from her by any world-weary extravagance of the poet’s. He was
in self-defence; driven to incidentally mention his age--quite a
respectable age, as it appeared. Mrs. Elles was not to be outdone--
“I am twenty-six,” he remarked, with an air of reluctant candour.
“And a very good age to stop at!” observed her aunt, with intention.
The novelist looked with compassion on this poor woman who, like
Widrington, fought the battle of pose and society, at such frightful
odds. The poet presently drifted in her direction and they held a short
but epoch-making--as regarded Mrs. Elles--conversation.
“Mrs. Poynder is to me just like an upas-tree,” he confided to Egidia,
wringing his hands together. “In her shadow, any poetical idea would
wither and die!”
“There is, indeed, a good deal of shadow!” remarked Egidia, alluding to
Mrs. Poynder’s truly majestic proportions. “She is a handsome woman in
her way!”
“Yes,” he replied wearily, “plenty of presence, and all of it bad, as
they said of George III. But seriously, you know, she leads our dear
friend a sad life. She contradicts her in everything, and thwarts every
instinct of culture. If Mrs. Elles had not plenty of pluck, she would
have given in long ago. And her husband!”--he held up his hands.
The poet’s indiscretions bore fruit in a hearty invitation from Egidia
to Mrs. Elles, to visit her often at the house where she was staying in
Newcastle.
“Brave little woman! I will try and cheer her up a bit!” she thought, as
she left the house.
The little party broke up soon after, and Mrs. Elles was left alone with
her aunt, who, as the door closed on the last guest, opened her lips and
gave, uncalled for, her opinions of the guest.
“That’s a real nice woman!” she said, “that littry friend of yours; I
approve of her. It’s a good thing I didn’t take your advice, Fibby, and
go trapesing up to Jesmond, this afternoon, to call on Miss Drummond.
Why, the girl was here. And such a crowd, too. You said there wouldn’t
be anybody here to-day!”
“Did I? One never knows,” replied her niece negligently, sauntering up
to the piano, and opening it.
“I’ll be bound you knew well enough, Fibby. Wanted to be rid of the old
woman, eh? Well, I’m glad I defeated your little plans, and saw your
friend, who seemed a sensible sort of woman, not the flyabastic sort you
generally get here. Pity but she’d seen Mortimer!”
“Do you think Mortimer would have impressed her?” asked his wife,
bitterly.
“And why not? Are you ashamed of your husband, Fibby? It’s my belief
that you are ashamed of us all, and hankering after those London people
and the ramshackle life they seem to lead. Gallant times they have, to
be sure! Thinking only of themselves and their pleasures and making love
to each other’s wives! And you are just savage because you aren’t there,
too! Oh! I know you!”
Mrs. Elles had broken out into a stormy mazurka that nearly drowned Mrs.
Poynder’s words, as possibly she intended it to do. “Ay! ay!” the latter
remarked, “work it off that way--I advise you!”
“Don’t insult me, aunt!”
Mrs. Poynder laughed in her own harsh fashion, and, looking towards the
door whose handles just then turned, called out, “Come in, Mortimer!
Come and speak to this wife of yours!”
The clumsy, thick-necked man who entered stopped short and looked round
stupidly; his wife sat with her back turned, playing; his aunt stood
there, smiling her cruel, blighting smile, that showed a set of the
most perfectly formed teeth that money could buy. He took his cue from
her, and going across the room, laid a heavy hand on his wife’s
shoulder, saying kindly,
“What’s the matter, old lady?”
“Oh, Mortimer, please don’t call me that. I can’t bear it!”
She hid her face in the keyboard and sobbed violently.
“Well, really!” said he.
“Hysterical!” said the aunt, still smiling. “I don’t wonder, after the
conversation we have been having, and the things we have been hearing!
Fibby’s had grand new London friends here--to put her out of love with
us all. We’re all too plain and common for Fibby now!”
Still smiling--was a smile ever so denuded of grace and
benevolence?--she gathered up her crochet and left the room. Mrs. Elles
then rose from the piano, and, dabbing her handkerchief to her eyes,
made a step in the direction of the door. But she changed her mind and
stood still by the mantelpiece with the figure half averted.
“I’m sure I beg all your pardons,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. “Oh,
damn! where’s the paper?” said Mortimer Elles. Securing it, and sinking
into an arm-chair with a great, puffing breath, he hid his face behind
the broad white sheet. His coat tails caught the Oriental cloth on a
small table near him and dragged it nearly off. Mrs. Elles rushed
forward and saved one of the many pieces of china that rested on it from
destruction.
“Throw the beastly thing on the fire!” he growled out, without looking
up. “This house is far too full.”
A gong sounded.
“I am going up to dress for dinner,” she said, aggressively, standing in
front of him. “Shan’t you, Mortimer?”
“There’s nobody coming, is there?”
“No--unfortunately--but I like to dress.”
“Dress if you like, but don’t bother me!”
“Oh, I do wonder what you married me for, Mortimer?” she complained with
plaintive savageness.
“I do wish you wouldn’t talk nonsense!” he answered. “What has marriage
to do with dressing for dinner?”
“Perhaps more than you think,” she murmured still in a low key, as she
walked past him and opened the door. She crossed the hall slowly, like a
somnambulist. It was true the conversation of Egidia and of the poet,
who was no fool, and who had been brought out by the tact of the London
woman, had set her thinking, and her mind travelling in a new direction.
She trod on her gown going upstairs, and picked it up with the
tragically careless gesture of a Joan of Arc going to the stake. She
made herself the effect of a prisoner in a strange land--an alien
princess in the hands of the Saracens--the Lady of “Comus” among the
rabble rout. She was a delicate piece of porcelain among rough
earthenware pots--a harp played upon by unknowing boors. She muttered to
herself phrases of philosophy and resignation that she did not feel--her
whole soul was in revolt against the conditions of her life.
“Oh, it is all so ugly!” she murmured.
She paused on the landing and looked down. Charles, her step-son, had
just come in and hung up his hat and clattered down every other hat in
the hall.
“Hallo, Mater!” he shouted up, “don’t commit suicide over the banisters
and make a mess! Hurry up and get ready for dinner!”
“I am glad I did not have a child,” she said to herself. “He might have
been half like that!”
She dressed for dinner, in a very handsome, vaporous tea-gown, drank a
little sal-volatile, read a couple of verses of Omar Khayam, and sailed
into the dining-room, determined to be resigned, pathetic and amiable.
Her husband’s untidy, baggy shooting jacket, and Charles’s abominable
“blazer,” gave her the usual jar, while Mrs. Poynder’s cheap white lace
tippet with pink ribbons was only another item in the general tale of
the inappropriateness and disgust. She pouted, and dropped gracefully
into her accustomed seat, looking like a piece of thistledown suddenly
lighted on the dull leather-covered mahogany chair.
The mild, provincial dinner proceeded. “What’s this?” asked Mortimer,
when a dish came round to him. “Put it on the table, can’t you?”
“Chicken croquettes. I like things handed!” she pleaded.
“Do you? I don’t. I like to have what I am eating in front of me. You
won’t take any, Phœbe? Oh, very well. You want to get scraggier than you
are. A lean wife is a standing reproach to a fellow.”
“Fibby is afraid of spoiling her fashionable figure!” observed Mrs.
Poynder, drawing herself up, to show her own to the best advantage. It
was of a certain solid merit, not to be gainsaid.
With these, and other family amenities, was the time of dining
enlivened. Mrs. Elles’ attitude was one of faintly raised eyebrows, but
she did not allow herself to say anything to-day, that a heroine might
regret. She was not generally so circumspect. As soon as dinner was
over, she rose and followed Mrs. Poynder out of the room. Mrs. Poynder
liked to go first, and she was allowed to do so when no one was there.
Mortimer Elles, who was by no means in a bad humour, moved his chair a
little to make way for his wife.
“Do you call that a gown?” he said, fingering a fold of the shining
satin. “And pray, what may that have cost me?”
“Don’t!” she said, drawing it away.
“Surely I may touch it if I am to have the privilege of paying for it?”
“It is not very nice of you, Mortimer, to remind me that I haven’t a
penny of my own, and must depend on your bounty!”
“And a good job, too!” he said, laughing; he was certainly in a very
good humour. “It’s the only hold I’ve got on you--the only way I have of
keeping you in order.”
“Mortimer--I am not a child!”
“No, by Jove, not quite! Let me see, you were nineteen when I married
you--we have been married ten years--that makes you out--?”
“You needn’t trouble to go on,” she replied haughtily, “I can’t say that
the subject interests me--one only counts birthdays when one is happy.”
She escaped to her room, tore off the gauzy tea gown, and put on a black
one which she reserved for occasions like this, when the mood of gloom
preponderated. It was a little affectation of hers to dress as far as
possible in character with her mood of the moment.
Yes, she was very wretched--had been for the last ten years. She
wondered how she had borne it so long, and if she could go on bearing
it. The time had surely come for her to do something--what? She would
go, to-morrow, and call on Egidia in the big house where she was staying
at Jesmond Dene, and talk it all over with her. Egidia, being a
professed searcher into the secrets of the heart, would be able to
understand, and perhaps offer some solution of her dreadful predicament.
She might even take a professional interest in it. “She can put me in a
novel if she likes,” Phœbe Elles said to herself, wearily, “but I must
speak or I shall die!”
Die of dullness, die of disappointment, die of inanition, or, what was
worse, lose her looks. “They are the silent griefs that cut the
heart-strings,” she quoted, from Heaven knows what recondite Elizabethan
play, “and dull the complexion,” she added on her responsibility. She
always read everything more or less with reference to herself, and
twisted the most impassioned utterances of poetry and the drama into apt
coincidence with her own affairs.
Up till now, she had sedulously preserved the one virtue of neglected
wives--she had never “peached.” She had scrupulously disdained the
common vulgarity of confidences, the petty relief of expansion, and no
one had ever heard her abuse her husband. She had learned to speak of
him with an amused tolerance, whose undercurrent of contempt was not
necessarily apparent to the merely superficial observer. It was a point
of honour with her; but deep below her graceful reticence lay the point
of vanity--she wanted people to think, if possible, that Mortimer, whom
she had ceased to care for, was still desperately in love with her.
She had read many French novels, and she knew that, socially speaking,
there was one modus vivendi to be adopted by a woman in her position.
She might create for herself some outside interest--she might get up the
harmless, necessary flirtation, by which women, circumstanced as she
was, are apt to console themselves.
Without the remotest intention of actually pursuing it, she began to
cast about in her mind for a possible coadjutor in such a course of
action. She began to count heads, to consider all the eligible
flirtations that Newcastle afforded, with a drear little smile at the
paucity of attractions, at the inferiority of the subject material which
presented itself to her mind.
The poet! He was handsome, clever, romantic; he admired her much, but
only on condition that she returned his compliment and admired him more!
That would not do. Besides, her present pose to him was that of a
mother--a very young mother of course--and promoter of his incipient
predilection for the handsome and “horsey” Miss Drummond, Atalanta-Diana
as he was pleased to call her; the girl of strong physique and mannish
tastes, who was the complement of his own nature. Then there was Dr.
Moorsom, who lived next door--“The man whose business it would be to
doctor me if I fell ill!” she sneered to herself. Everyone was supremely
uninteresting--as uninteresting as Mortimer. That was the worst of
it--Mortimer was odious, but then, so was everybody else.
No, better be “straight” and a martyr, than set herself, at the cost of
her reputation, perhaps, to wrest from society a merely nominal
happiness, and court a catastrophe that would have none of the elements
of grandeur or romance about it. She would go back to her
“dream-lives”--to the literary simulacra of existence which, till the
epoch-making advent of the South-country novelist, had sufficed her, and
had been as the mirror Perseus held up before Andromeda, affording her
the harmless vision of the Gorgon’s head with the snaky horror of its
looks that may stand for life and the hideous complications thereof.