“But then, you know, I have never seen your husband,” Egidia was saying
to the pretty little woman who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a very
easy chair, her feet upheld to the glow of a North-country fire blazing
away in the very height of summer, as usual, was expatiating in the
sweetest of voices on her matrimonial unhappiness. She was telling
Egidia all the truth, or thought she was, and the novelist, in her
double capacity of friend and gatherer of welcome “copy,” was listening
sympathetically from her sofa.
It was a charming house in the suburbs of Newcastle, the abode of
charming people, where Egidia was staying, and Mrs. Elles deeply
appreciated the friendship with the fashionable lecturer, which had
gained her the entry into this home of modernity and culture.
“Yes, if you once saw Mortimer,” Mrs. Elles went on, “you would
understand all!”
The way she uttered the last word would not have disgraced a tragic
actress.
“I want you to come and dine--will you? What day shall it be? Tell me,
and I’ll fix it. Then you will see him, and judge for yourself.”
“My dear,” said the novelist, slowly, “I will come to your dinner with
pleasure, but I shall not know any more than you have told me.”
“Yes; I have been very, very frank,” said Mrs. Elles. “And there is
another thing”--she sighed vaguely. She was alluding to her husband’s
habit of tippling, to which as a loyal wife she forbore from a more
direct allusion.
“As a general rule,” Egidia went on, a little didactically, in her
capacity of mentor, “no husband understands any wife. If he did, he
wouldn’t have cared to marry her. It is the mutual antagonism between
the sexes which makes them interesting to each other in the beginning.
But, afterwards--if they are unable to play the game--exciting enough, I
should think--of observing, of adjusting, of utilizing their mutual
divergences of character and getting amusement out of them--if she finds
no pleasure in the exercise of tact, if he none in the further analysis
of the feminine vagaries that he began by finding so charming--then,
they begin to jar mutually on each other, and turn that into tragedy
which should be the comedy of life for both of them.”
“I understand,” said Mrs. Elles, humbly; “but then--there is not, and
could not be, any comedy of life with Mortimer, or tragedy either! There
never was. I don’t seem to care to appreciate his character, I know
it--it is quite simple--I see it all spread out before me like a map--of
a country I don’t care to travel over.”
“But perhaps he can say the same of you,” hazarded Egidia.
“No, Mortimer has never understood me, never! I am a sealed book to
him,” said the wife, airily, although Miss Giles’ suggestion had indeed
given her a little shock.
“Don’t flatter yourself, my dear, that you are a sealed book to anyone.
It is the common delusion.” (Another shock to Mrs. Elles!) “One is
always so much less interesting, so much less complicated, so much less
of a sphinx than one thinks.”
“But I have always thought of mine as a very complicated nature,” Mrs.
Elles rejoined, pouting; “I am sure I can’t tell you how many thoughts
pass through my mind in a day, and I seem to have a perfectly new mood
every minute.”
“So we all have, but we don’t take cognizance of them or act on them
all. I should say that you are one of those people who begin with a
radical mistake--that of expecting too much of life. You think you have
a right to be happy. Good Heavens! You seek for midi à quatorze heures,
you love change for its own sake; you positively enjoy hot water. You
would rather have a painful emotion than none at all, you would like to
cry, with Sophie Arnould, ‘Oh, le bon temps, j’etais si malheureuse!’
You have not mastered the great fact, that emotions are not to the
emotional; to them is generally awarded the dreary crux of the
commonplace, and that I think is hardest to bear of all, that one’s
cross should come in the way of material comfort and spiritual
uneventfulness, and when it comes to the point, instead of action to be
taken there is only temper--to be kept!”
“I always scorn to nag,” said Mrs. Elles, “it seems so ungraceful.”
“I am sure, my dear, that whatever you may feel, you always manage to
look decorative!” said the other, smiling. “Still, you expect too much
and give too little to be what I call easy to live with!”
“That is what I say,” cried Mrs. Elles, triumphantly. “I call that being
complicated.”
“Do you?” said the authoress, drily. “I should be tempted to call it
want of social tact--an almost culpable ignorance of the science of give
and take, a--you must really forgive me for my brutal frankness”--she
broke off suddenly and laughed confusedly--“but, you know, you asked me
to speak freely.”
“I love it,” declared Phœbe Elles, adjusting a cushion behind her head.
“I think I like to talk about myself, even if it is disagreeable,” she
added, with unusual frankness.
Egidia smiled irresistibly. It was impossible for her to help liking
this unconscious egotist, who confessed to her failings with such a
grace, and took plain speaking with such aplomb.
“I think,” she said, trying to give a less serious turn to the
conversation, “what you really wanted, in marriage, was a man who would
have dominated you--have beaten you, perhaps.”
“Yes, I do really believe I should,” said Mrs. Elles;
“that is, if I loved him desperately at the time and he loved me
desperately--afterwards! But,” she went on, seriously, “you have given
me your views on marriage, and my marriage in particular, but, now you
know all my life, what do you advise me to do?”
“Do? Do nothing! What can you do? What can any woman do?” asked Egidia,
raising her well-marked eyebrows, and with an air of dismissing an
impracticable subject.
Then, seeing the unmistakable look of disappointment in the eyes of her
feminine Telemachus, she added kindly, “Ah, you see, when we outsiders
come to the domain of practical politics, we are mere theorists--all at
sea, and just as helpless and resourceless as any of you slaves of the
ring can possibly be. I should advise you to make the best of it, and
pray that you may never meet anybody you like better than the man you
have got!”
Mrs. Elles rose to go, it was late. She had had a good time. She had
enjoyed the personal discussion, but there was a wilful twist about her
mouth, as of one which had swallowed much advice, but had swallowed it
the wrong way.
“After this, I must not ask you to come and stop with me in London, I am
afraid,” added Egidia.
“Oh, please do, and I will promise to wear blinkers.”
“Blue spectacles would be nearer the mark!” said the novelist. “Do that,
and I will engage to introduce you to Edmund Rivers with impunity.”
“Well, but you said just now he was incapable of falling in love with
any woman.”
“Yes, but I never implied that women found it impossible to fall in love
with him!” answered Egidia, quite gravely. “He is handsome and
indifferent, and I know of no combination more dangerous to the peace of
our sex!”
* * * * *
Mrs. Elles’ little dinner was arranged; the invitations, written on
beautiful rough note paper with an artistic ragged edge, sent out. Mrs.
Elles had conscientiously consulted her husband’s list of engagements
and saw that he was free, and put down a large cross for the eleventh.
Mortimer would see that he was engaged, and would, as usual, be too lazy
or careless to enquire further. On the evening in question, he would
necessarily see “what was up,” and would grumblingly admit that he was
“let in for one of Phœbe’s confounded dinners” instead of a happy
gathering at the Continental Club with the “fellows.”
His wife would, of course, have got on far better without him, as far as
the success of her party was concerned, only society so far considers
the husband, even if his social capacities are nil, as a necessary
adjunct to the dinner table. He has not yet gone out with the épergne,
and therefore must be tolerated. But with regard to Mrs. Poynder and
Charles, the mistress of the house had put her foot down. She was famous
for her little dinners, the entrain of which the presence of her husband
did not seem, so far, to have materially diminished. But that of the
other two would have been fatally destructive of charm. The pair had
been induced to see the matter in somewhat of the same light--four
members of a family were a little overwhelming--and the question of
economy had weight with Mrs. Poynder. Aunt and nephew were in the habit
of considerately inviting themselves out to high tea at the house of a
relation of Mortimer’s in Newcastle on these occasions. Mrs. Poynder,
indeed, owned to a want of sympathy with the “people Fibby contrived to
get together,” and she was not informed that Miss Giles, for whom she
had developed an unaccountable fancy, was to be of the party.
“My old woman of the sea,” so Mrs. Elles sometimes spoke of her to her
intimates, in whose eyes the ways and speeches of the terrible old lady
amply justified the want of reticence implied in her niece’s indiscreet
sobriquet. Why must she form part of the Elles household? Everybody
wondered, but Mrs. Elles knew.
For on this point the husband was immutable. He saw plainly that on Mrs.
Poynder did his manly bourgeois comfort depend. His wife only attended
to the show side of housekeeping; she saw that there was always plenty
of flowers in the drawing-room, winter and summer--but Mrs. Poynder
attended to his shirts and their proper complement of buttons. Mrs.
Elles ordered dinner, but Mrs. Poynder kept the books and interviewed
the tradesmen. His wife paid the smart calls, but Mrs. Poynder looked up
his dull and important relations, and, in her rough undiplomatic way,
advanced his affairs. She exercised a certain modest supervision over
the whisky bottle, and without saying much, curbed Mortimer’s drunken
tendencies a good deal.
Mrs. Elles herself was vaguely cognizant of the advantages of this
system, and realized that Mrs. Poynder’s presence in the ménage gave her
leisure to attend to the cultivation of the graces of her own mind and
person, and exonerated her from the thankless task of confronting
Mortimer on the tedious matters of servants, wages, and housekeeping and
partial abstention.
“Aunt Poynder goes down into the arena for me, and fights with wild
beasts in the kitchen,” the ungrateful young woman used to say. “She
likes it, I verily believe.--But some of their roughness rubs off on
her,” she would add, and nobody would gainsay her. Mrs. Poynder was the
professed Disagreeable Woman of Newcastle, and people were apt to fly up
side alleys and into shops when they saw her come sailing majestically
down Granger Street.
“Oh, Mortimer, why did you go and have such awful relations?” Mrs. Elles
exclaimed casually to her husband, one afternoon, when she came back
from a visit to Egidia at Jesmond. She was impelled to say it. Mrs.
Poynder’s coarseness and Charles’ roughness seemed now-a-days more
obtrusive by contrast with the pleasant manners of the people with whom,
by the accident of her friendship with Egidia, she had been almost
daily thrown into contact. This had been her farewell visit. Egidia was
going back to town; but, in the course of many and many a long talk, she
had sown a plentiful crop of ideas in this wayward head--a seed whose
harvest was to prove a very different one to that which she had
expected.
Mortimer Elles was not seriously discomposed by his wife’s remark.
“That’s a nice remark to make to a man!” was his not ungentle rejoinder.
He had ceased to expect Phœbe to curb any expression of opinion out of
respect to his feelings, and in return permitted himself his full
measure of brutality towards her.
“Well, aren’t they?” she repeated, yawning; “when is Charles going to
pass his examination and relieve us of his presence? I did not bargain
for Charles as a permanent lodger when I married you, nor Aunt Poynder
indeed, for that matter, but I suppose all is for the worst, in this
dreariest of all possible households!”
She expected no answer. These two always wrangled at cross purposes.
There was very seldom a positive engagement between them. Mrs. Elles
knew that Charles could not leave just yet, knew, too, that Mrs. Poynder
would never go, was not positively sure that she wanted her to go, but
just now, when her normal state of discontent was quadrupled by the new
influences that had lately come into her life, she could not resist a
repetition of an oft-repeated complaint.
She went on in a soft but irritating voice.
“I have no objection to Aunt Poynder’s engaging all the servants and
managing them, but I must say I wish she would let Jane alone. I have
reserved the right of choosing my own parlour-maid, and when I have
succeeded in getting one that suits me, I don’t want her bullied and the
place made impossible for her.”
“Who bullies her? An idle, good-for-nothing trollop of a creature.”
“There, you see, you don’t like her.”
“No, I don’t,” he replied brutally. “I don’t like her style. She copies
you, and you’re not a particularly good model.”
“Ah, how miserable I am!” she exclaimed, irrelevantly. “Mortimer, tell
me, why can’t we get on? It is not my fault, is it?”
“Oh! no,” he replied ironically. “You are always in the right. There is
nothing more tiresome in a woman.”
“You are frank, Mortimer, and almost epigrammatic!”
“Shut up, can’t you?” he exclaimed, in accents of annoyance. “I wonder
why it is that you always contrive to rub me up the wrong way. Here you
are abusing me--abusing my relations--why can’t you let them alone? I
don’t abuse yours.”
“Mine are all dead!” she said, pathetically. “Fair game for you!”
“And a nice lot they were!” said the man, now thoroughly roused to
ill-temper. “That is, if you have told me the truth about them. You’re
pretty good at drawing the long bow, you know.”
At this point in the discussion, Mrs. Elles withdrew. Her relations
were--or had been--a weak point, and Mortimer had suffered--in his
purse--from claims of a ne’er-do-well father-in-law, and a foolish,
extravagant mother. Phœbe had been brought up badly as a child, had been
neglected in her girlhood, and her marriage with Mortimer Elles had been
the making of her--as her people said, and as she had agreed at the
time--but it was a grievance with her that, try as she might, she could
not give her history a romantic turn in her husband’s eyes. He knew all
about her, was full of preconceived notions about her, and she resented
the impossibility of keeping up a consistent pose with him, being one of
those who reverse the proverb and expect to be heroes to their valets de
chambre and heroines to their husbands.
This weakness of hers entailed the other weakness to which her husband
had alluded--her consistent ambiguity of phrase, her frequent lapses
from truth. These lapses were for the most part unconscious, they were
the good face she put on every matter, her artistic presentment of
incidents relating to herself and other people, for, to do her justice,
she applied the same method to her fellow-creatures, and was never known
to retail a spiteful or unpicturesque version of another woman’s
affairs.
She considered herself the soul of honour, it is true; she literally
would not have told a lie to save her life; but to save her pose and her
dramatic presentment from discomfiture, she shrank from no form of
embellishment or extenuation. So she “doctored” facts--served up the
plain “roast and boiled” of everyday existence with a sauce piquante of
her own devising, and thought of herself as one who, compassing under
difficulties the whole duty of woman, makes herself as charming, as
romantic, as mysterious as circumstances will allow.
* * * * *
Half an hour later she looked into the study, where Mortimer was
sitting, a revolting picture of middle-class ease, with his legs on the
table, drinking whisky and water.
“I thought I heard someone crying?”
“So you did. Jane. I have told her to go.”
“What?” she screamed.
“Yes; we’ve had a row, Jane and I. I have sent her packing. I paid her
her wages--told her to pack up and go--not later than to-morrow. She was
cheeky to me--you teach them all to be damned cheeky to me--and I won’t
stand it.” He filled his glass again, pouring with a want of precision
that spoke of many previous attacks on the bottle.
“Jane cannot have meant”--his wife murmured humbly, cowed by the
enormity of the misfortune that had befallen her. Jane was her ally, her
confidante, her all.
“Oh, yes; Jane meant it fast enough. Don’t talk to me about it.
To-morrow she goes!”
He brought his fist heavily down upon the table. His wife started, a
start partly real, partly affected.
“If Jane goes, I go.”
“Nonsense, you are not a servant--I have not dismissed you!”
“Dismiss!” She tossed her head. Then the real, imminent need of
propitiating Mortimer occurred to her. She must keep Jane at the cost of
all humiliation. “Mortimer, listen--it puts me out very much. I have a
dinner party of twelve next week!”
“The deuce you have! What a woman you are for kick-ups! And I don’t
suppose there is a soul coming that I shall care twopence for! Well, you
must put it off, that’s all!”
“One doesn’t do these things!”
“Oh, I do. I’ll write the excuses for you, if you like.”
She stamped her foot. “Mortimer--I will not be put to shame before my
friends! You have no right to do this to me! Oh, what shall I do, what
shall I do, tied to a perfect beast like you for the rest of my life?”
“Grin and bear it, I suppose. You won’t make me any better by swearing
at me!”
“I don’t swear at you! How you speak to me! To me! to me! Your wife! How
dared you marry me, Mortimer?”
“I don’t know about dare,” he said, growing red. “When all is said and
done, I don’t think you did much to prevent me!”
“That’s enough!” she raised her hand with a theatrical gesture as if to
stop him, and, sinking into an armchair, hid her face in her hands.
“Insulting! No--I see now--you never loved me! Never! Never!”
He ostentatiously turned his back on her tragic pose.
“There you go! Always in extremes--always injured--always making the
worst of it! You couldn’t live without a grievance, I do believe! Of
course I married you for love--if you must use the absurd word--and now
you pay me back by plaguing my life out! And then begin to talk damned
sentimental rot about my never having loved you, and so on! Now, really,
don’t you think we are both a bit too old for that sort of thing?”
“Oh, you are--impossible!” she moaned. It was what she felt. It was the
one word which fitted the situation, which was no situation, except to
herself. Mortimer kicked a coal out of the grate savagely with his
carpet-slippered foot, and, her sense assaulted by the sickening smell
of singed wool, she left the room.
* * * * *
Mortimer was drunk--he often was; it was the least heinous of his
crimes. She went upstairs crying, and went to bed, but she knew she
could not sleep that night, and yet she took no bromide or sulphonal.
She wanted to think--she meant to think things out--so she lay, and
thought, and thought, with extreme intensity and vigour, if with little
coherence. So intent was she that she lay quite straight out and still,
and did not toss, while the trains of thought succeeded each other with
extraordinary rapidity. The tall clock on the stairs outside her door
ticked loudly and monotonously, and the whole problem of her life
arrayed itself and measured out its phases to the beat of the pendulum,
which seemed to balance them, as it were.
Mortimer was impossible! He had always been impossible! His conduct this
evening was of a piece with his whole conduct to her, ever since a few
weeks after marriage. Halcyon weeks, which every woman has a right to
expect, while they in no wise concern or affect the life that follows
after. His taunt about the circumstances of her marriage to him she
dismissed, she knew quite well that she had provoked him to it, he had
not meant it, there was no foundation for it. He had wooed and won her
in the usual, commonplace way, been timid and attentive, and had begged
her for locks of her hair. And she had been complaisant and loving, and
had treasured his photograph and made excuses for its ugliness, just
like any other foolish girl with her first sweetheart.
Why had she done all this? Why had she bought that rose-coloured satin
dress last Christmas, that she had taken such a dislike to, since, that
she had only worn it twice? Her marriage was a very nearly parallel
case, only she had been able to afford to throw aside the one bad
bargain, and she had been obliged to abide by the other.
“Yes, I can’t say I did not know my own mind, such as it was, when I
took Mortimer, but, unfortunately, it isn’t the same mind that I have
now. It was a child’s mind. The whole fabric of our bodies alters every
seven years, they say--well, that means our minds, too--body and soul
are one in my creed. It was not this me that was glad to marry Mortimer,
as he so politely put it--” she laughed bitterly. “It was another me,
who had not read Ibsen.” She laughed again. “Books alter one--reading
alters one--life alters one, after all! I married Mortimer like a blind
puppy, not knowing, not seeing. I am nothing wonderful, but I do think I
am too good for him! Why did I not see it then? Why is a girl such a
fool? Why does nobody tell her? It is very hard. They say, as one has
made one’s bed, so one must lie on it.... But suppose I decline to lie
on it?”
She almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this crude presentment of
a new idea. Then she rose, lit a candle and walked out of her room, and
across a landing, and straight into Mortimer’s room. She softly
approached the bed on which he lay, and, like Psyche over again, held
the light up on high, and looked critically down upon her sleeping
husband.
She felt an indefinable pleasure in thus surveying him helpless who was
technically her master. This coarse, clumsy-fibred creature who had yet
his full complement of the shrewdness and acuteness that gave him
dominion over his fellow-men, and made him known as a “tough customer”
in business, slept the sleep--well, if not precisely that of the just,
at any rate that of the man whose balance at his bank is secure and his
investment sound. He slept like a savage who has laid aside his clubs,
and enjoys the dreamless, primitive sleep that he has earned by his
feats of arms. His thick, broad eyelids rested peacefully on the cold,
blue eyes whose empty glare his wife knew and detested. His lips were
closed on his cruel little teeth in a firm, inexpressive line, pacific
and meaningless, and his clumsy hands, with their short, square-nailed
finger tips, lay palm outwards on the coverlet, as innocently as a
child’s.
She might stare at him as long as she pleased, with those burning,
insistent eyes of hers, and not fear to break his sleep; his simple
nervous system would surely withstand the hypnotism of her enquiring
gaze.
But next morning, he would be “all there” as usual; the hectoring,
bantering, exacerbating personality would re-assert itself, and make its
hundred and one demands on her self-control all through the day, till
sometimes it seemed as if she could not look at him or hear his voice
without screaming.
“Why should I bear it? Why should I?” she asked herself, passionately,
aloud; and the pettish exclamation was significant of the great
revulsion that was taking place in her, a result of the passionate,
elucidating fortnight she had passed.
She went back to her room and lay down again, but she closed her eyes no
more that night, and by the time the pallid dawn of Newcastle had begun
to filter through the window curtains, a whole plan of action had shaped
itself in her mind. She came down punctually to the eight o’clock
breakfast which was exacted by Mortimer and which he had never allowed
her to forego, putting some constraint on herself to appear perfectly
composed, for her heart was beating violently, and she felt the
suspicious flush mounting to her cheek, which had so often given unkind
friends occasion to say that she painted. But Mrs. Poynder, who was
presiding over the tea and coffee, looked her over with some approval.
“Now, that’s the first decent dress I have seen you in, Fibby, for many
a long day!” she observed, contemplating the plain dress of blue
serge--not very new, not very smart--in which Mrs. Elles had chosen to
array herself.
“I am glad you are pleased, Aunt Poynder,” replied her niece, demurely,
gracefully accepting her cup of coffee from the stout, red fingers where
the submerged wedding-ring, planted there by the late Mr. Poynder,
glittered. Charles Elles, who could get more noise out of a cup of
coffee than anybody, was drinking his and enjoying it thoroughly. Mrs.
Poynder somehow contrived to knock her knife and fork together on the
rim of her plate with vigour every time she took a morsel. Mortimer’s
carpet slippers, and the dish of bacon which his aunt had set down by
the fire to keep warm for him, stood by the fire in grotesque
proximity.
“I am going to put off my dinner on the thirty-first,” Mrs. Elles
announced, quietly. “Jane is going, and I couldn’t attempt it with a new
parlour-maid.”
“I am glad, Fibby, to see you in such a peaceable frame of mind,” Mrs.
Poynder rejoined. “Mortimer says you were fairly put out at first about
his sending Jane away.”
“So I was, Aunt, but---- ”
“Ye’re quite right, Fibby, to take it calm. Husbands must have their
way. I never thought much of the girl myself; she’s lazy and wears far
too much fringe. Besides, a man must be master in his own house, and if
he can’t send away his own housemaid when it pleases him---- ”
“Yes, Aunt.” Mrs. Elles was playing at meekness, and the sensation was
so unusual that she found it rather amusing so far. Mrs. Poynder could
not make it out at all.
“Are ye ill, my dear?” she enquired, with some show of solicitude. “To
look at ye, I should say that your digestion was not in just apple-pie
order.”
“I am all right, Aunt,” replied Mrs. Elles, with forced composure,
stamping her foot, however, under the table. Her colour was high, as
Mrs. Poynder had remarked, but very clear and bright, and she looked
quite ten years younger. Her aunt continued to make little onslaughts of
this kind on her through breakfast, but she did not retort. Her lips
formed themselves every now and again into the words, “I am going--I am
going--I am going!” as a kind of secret satisfaction. When her husband
came down, she actually got up and fetched the terribly plebeian dish of
bacon from the fender and put it down in front of him. He thanked her
drily.
“If you will excuse me,” she said to them all, “I will go and write some
notes that have to be attended to at once.”
She left the room, and the scratching of a feverish pen within the
drawing-room was heard for the next twenty minutes through the open
door, while Mortimer Elles, having eaten an enormous breakfast in the
short time he had devoted to that purpose, went into the hall and began
to rummage for his stick and hat and struggle into his coat. His wife
knew the sound well.
“Good-bye, Mortimer!” she called out. There was a slight suspicion of
mockery in her tone that he perceived and resented. He did not answer
her, but went out, banging the door behind him loudly and aggressively.
“Helmer bangs the door; not Nora!” she smiled to herself. She felt
extraordinarily gay. The more serious aspects of the step she was taking
were not obvious to her at the present moment. She was for the time
merely possessed by an irrepressible zeal for the assertion of self, and
its disassociation from all trammelling human responsibilities.
Presently Mrs. Poynder went out too, to attend some Busybodies’
committee meeting, and Mrs. Elles took three five-pound notes out of a
drawer in her desk, locked it, and, going downstairs, ordered lunch and
dinner very carefully. This duty accomplished, she went up to her room,
and presented Jane, whom she found there, with a very handsome cloth
dress she had hardly worn, and her blessing. The affectionate and
devoted Jane wept, and it was with difficulty that her mistress
prevented herself from crying too.
Then Jane went about her business, and Mrs. Elles locked herself in. She
undid the complicated arrangement of her hair and with a comb parted it
as severely as she could resign herself to do, and with a brush dipped
in water smoothed out the little curls on her forehead, sighing deeply
the while. Then she went to a cupboard, and from its most recondite
recesses produced a box containing a pair of blue spectacles--her
husband’s. She put them on, and standing resolutely in front of a cheval
glass, surveyed her appearance.
“Good God, can I bear it?” she said aloud, in tones of the very deepest
anguish. Her face grew sombre for the first time since the conception of
flight had become an established fact in her mind. She desperately
tugged down a lock and disposed it becomingly on her forehead as usual,
and then put it back again.----
“No!... Yes!... I must do it like this.... It is the only way I can do
it without blame.... It shows that my intentions are honourable.... I
am going away to be free, not to flirt.... I must make all that an
absolute impossibility!”
She flung a lace scarf over the glass and busied herself with a few
necessary preparations. She got out a Gladstone bag--just the size she
could manage to carry herself--and threw in a few clothes, including a
fine white muslin dress she had worn at her “at home” that day, so fine
that it would go through a ring almost and took up no room to speak of.
A rather valuable sapphire ring she put on her finger, and on second
thoughts added a diamond one. Then she opened the door of her room, and
leaning over the banisters called out, “Jane!”
Jane replied.
“Jane, will you go and draw down those blinds in the drawing-room--all
of them--half down. The sun is getting so strong. And then, will you
take the heap of letters you will see lying on the bureau, and go and
post them at once.”
She put on a sailor hat and a white lace veil over her blue spectacles,
and was downstairs and out in the street before Jane had got to the
fourth blind of the drawing-room, which happened to look out on the back
of the house. Nora was gone!