A MATRIMONIAL TALE
Before Geoffrey Bingham dropped off into a troubled sleep on that
eventful night of storm, he learned that the girl who had saved his
life at the risk and almost at the cost of her own was out of danger,
and in his own and more reticent way he thanked Providence as heartily
as did Owen Davies. Then he went to sleep.
When he woke, feeling very sick and so stiff and sore that he could
scarcely move, the broad daylight was streaming through the blinds. The
place was perfectly quiet, for the doctor’s assistant who had brought
him back to life, and who lay upon a couch at the further end of the
room, slept the sleep of youth and complete exhaustion. Only an
eight-day clock on the mantelpiece ticked in that solemn and aggressive
way which clocks affect in the stillness. Geoffrey strained his eyes to
make out the time, and finally discovered that it wanted a few minutes
to six o’clock. Then he fell to wondering how Miss Granger was, and to
repeating in his own mind every scene of their adventure, till the
last, when they were whirled out of the canoe in the embrace of that
white-crested billow.
He remembered nothing after that, nothing but a rushing sound and a
vision of foam. He shuddered a little as he thought of it, for his
nerves were shaken; it is not pleasant to have been so very near the
End and the Beginning; and then his heart went out with renewed
gratitude towards the girl who had restored him to life and light and
hope. Just at this moment he thought that he heard a sound of sobbing
outside the window. He listened; the sound went on. He tried to rise,
only to find that he was too stiff to manage it. So, as a last
resource, he called the doctor.
“What is the matter?” answered that young gentleman, jumping up with
the alacrity of one accustomed to be suddenly awakened. “Do you feel
queer?”
“Yes, I do rather,” answered Geoffrey, “but it isn’t that. There is
somebody crying outside here.”
The doctor put on his coat, and, going to the window, drew the blind.
“Why, so there is,” he said. “It’s a little girl with yellow hair and
without a hat.”
“A little girl,” answered Geoffrey. “Why, it must be Effie, my
daughter. Please let her in.”
“All right. Cover yourself up, and I can do that through the window; it
isn’t five feet from the ground.” Accordingly he opened the window, and
addressing the little girl, asked her what her name was.
“Effie,” she sobbed in answer, “Effie Bingham. I’ve come to look for
daddie.”
“All right, my dear, don’t cry so; your daddie is here. Come and let me
lift you in.”
Another moment and there appeared through the open window the very
sweetest little face and form that ever a girl of six was blessed with.
For the face was pink and white, and in it were set two beautiful dark
eyes, which, contrasting with the golden hair, made the child a sight
to see. But alas! just now the cheeks were stained with tears, and
round the large dark eyes were rings almost as dark. Nor was this all.
The little dress was hooked awry, on one tiny foot all drenched with
dew there was no boot, and on the yellow curls no hat.
“Oh! daddie, daddie,” cried the child, catching sight of him and
struggling to reach her father’s arms, “you isn’t dead, is you,
daddie?”
“No, my love, no,” answered her father, kissing her. “Why should you
think that I was dead? Didn’t your mother tell you that I was safe?”
“Oh! daddie,” she answered, “they came and said that you was drownded,
and I cried and wished that I was drownded too. Then mother came home
at last and said that you were better, and was cross with me because I
went on crying and wanted to come to you. But I did go on crying. I
cried nearly all night, and when it got light I did dress myself, all
but one shoe and my hat, which I could not find, and I got out of the
house to look for you.”
“And how did you find me, my poor little dear?”
“Oh, I heard mother say you was at the Vicarage, so I waited till I saw
a man, and asked him which way to go, and he did tell me to walk along
the cliff till I saw a long white house, and then when he saw that I
had no shoe he wanted to take me home, but I ran away till I got here.
But the blinds were down, so I did think that you were dead, daddie
dear, and I cried till that gentleman opened the window.”
After that Geoffrey began to scold her for running away, but she did
not seem to mind it much, for she sat upon the edge of the couch, her
little face resting against his own, a very pretty sight to see.
“You must go back to Mrs. Jones, Effie, and tell your mother where you
have been.”
“I can’t, daddie, I’ve only got one shoe,” she answered, pouting.
“But you came with only one shoe.”
“Yes, daddie, but I wanted to come and I don’t want to go back. Tell me
how you was drownded.”
He laughed at her logic and gave way to her, for this little daughter
was very near to his heart, nearer than anything else in the world. So
he told her how he was “drownded” and how a lady had saved his life.
Effie listened with wide set eyes, and then said that she wanted to see
the lady, which she presently did. At that moment there came a knock at
the door, and Mr. Granger entered, accompanied by Dr. Chambers.
“How do you do, sir?” said the former. “I must introduce myself, seeing
that you are not likely to remember me. When last I saw you, you looked
as dead as a beached dog-fish. My name’s Granger, the Reverend J.
Granger, Vicar of Bryngelly, one of the very worst livings on this
coast, and that’s saying a great deal.”
“I am sure, Mr. Granger, I’m under a deep debt of gratitude to you for
your hospitality, and under a still deeper one to your daughter, but I
hope to thank her personally for that.”
“Never speak of it,” said the clergyman. “Hot water and blankets don’t
cost much, and you will have to pay for the brandy and the doctor. How
is he, doctor?”
“He is getting on very well indeed, Mr. Granger. But I daresay you find
yourself rather stiff, Mr. Bingham. I see your head is pretty badly
bruised.”
“Yes,” he answered, laughing, “and so is my body. Shall I be able to go
home to-day?”
“I think so,” said the doctor, “but not before this evening. You had
better keep quiet till then. You will be glad to hear that Miss
Beatrice is getting on very well. Hers was a wonderful recovery, the
most wonderful I ever saw. I had quite given her up, though I should
have kept on the treatment for another hour. You ought to be grateful
to Miss Beatrice, Mr. Bingham. But for her you would not have been
here.”
“I am most grateful,” he answered earnestly. “Shall I be able to see
her to-day?”
“Yes, I think so, some time this afternoon, say at three o’clock. Is
that your little daughter? What a lovely child she is. Well, I will
look in again about twelve. All that you require to do now is to keep
quiet and rub in some arnica.”
About an hour afterwards the servant girl brought Geoffrey some
breakfast of tea and toast. He felt quite hungry, but when it came to
the pinch he could not eat much. Effie, who was starving, made up for
this deficiency, however; she ate all the toast and a couple of slices
of bread and butter after it. Scarcely had they finished, when her
father observed a shade of anxiety come upon his little daughter’s
face.
“What is it, Effie?” he asked.
“I think,” replied Effie in evident trepidation, “I think that I hear
mother outside and Anne too.”
“Well, dear, they have come to see me.”
“Yes, and to scold me because I ran away,” and the child drew nearer to
her father in a fashion which would have made it clear to any observer
that the relations between her and her mother were somewhat strained.
Effie was right. Presently there was a knock at the door and Lady
Honoria entered, calm and pale and elegant as ever. She was followed by
a dark-eyed somewhat impertinent-looking French _bonne_, who held up
her hands and ejaculated, “Mon Dieu!” as she appeared.
“I thought so,” said Lady Honoria, speaking in French to the _bonne_.
“There she is,” and she pointed at the runaway Effie with her parasol.
“Mon Dieu!” said the woman again. “Vous voilà enfin, et moi, qui suis
accablée de peur, et votre chère mère aussi; oh, mais que c’est
méchant; et regardez donc, avec un soulier seulement. Mais c’est
affreux!”
“Hold your tongue,” said Geoffrey sharply, “and leave Miss Effie alone.
She came to see me.”
Anne ejaculated, “Mon Dieu!” once more and collapsed.
“Really, Geoffrey,” said his wife, “the way you spoil that child is
something shocking. She is wilful as can be, and you make her worse. It
is very naughty of her to run away like that and give us such a hunt.
How are we to get her home, I wonder, with only one shoe.”
Her husband bit his lip, and his forehead contracted itself above the
dark eyes. It was not the first time that he and Lady Honoria had come
to words about the child, with whom his wife was not in sympathy.
Indeed she had never forgiven Effie for appearing in this world at all.
Lady Honoria did not belong to that class of women who think maternity
is a joy.
“Anne,” he said, “take Miss Effie and carry her till you can find a
donkey. She can ride back to the lodgings.” The nurse murmured
something in French about the child being as heavy as lead.
“Do as I bid you,” he said sharply, in the same language. “Effie, my
love, give me a kiss and go home. Thank you for coming to see me.”
The child obeyed and went. Lady Honoria stood and watched her go,
tapping her little foot upon the floor, and with a look upon her cold,
handsome face that was not altogether agreeable to see.
It had sometimes happened that, in the course of his married life,
Geoffrey returned home with a little of that added fondness which
absence is fabled to beget. On these occasions he was commonly so
unfortunate as to find that Lady Honoria belied the saying, that she
greeted him with arrears of grievances and was, if possible, more
frigid than ever.
Was this to be repeated now that he had come back from what was so near
to being the longest absence of all? It looked like it. He noted
symptoms of the rising storm, symptoms with which he was but too well
acquainted, and both for his own sake and for hers—for above all things
Geoffrey dreaded these bitter matrimonial bickerings—tried to think of
something kind to say. It must be owned that he did not show much tact
in the subject he selected, though it was one which might have stirred
the sympathies of some women. It is so difficult to remember that one
is dealing with a Lady Honoria.
“If ever we have another child——” he began gently.
“Excuse me interrupting you,” said the lady, with a suavity which did
not however convey any idea of the speaker’s inward peace, “but it is a
kindness to prevent you from going on in that line. _One_ darling is
ample for me.”
“Well,” said the miserable Geoffrey, with an effort, “even if you don’t
care much about the child yourself, it is a little unreasonable to
object because she cares for me and was sorry when she thought that I
was dead. Really, Honoria, sometimes I wonder if you have any heart at
all. Why should you be put out because Effie got up early to come and
see me?—an example which I must admit you did not set her. And as to
her shoe——” he added smiling.
“You may laugh about her shoe, Geoffrey,” she interrupted, “but you
forget that even little things like that are no laughing matter now to
us. The child’s shoes keep me awake at night sometimes. Defoy has not
been paid for I don’t know how long. I have a mind to get her
_sabots_—and as to heart——”
“Well,” broke in Geoffrey, reflecting that bad as was the emotional
side of the question, it was better than the commercial—“as to
‘heart?’”
“You are scarcely the person to talk of it, that is all. I wonder how
much of yours you gave _me_?”
“Really, Honoria,” he answered, not without eagerness, and his mind
filled with wonder. Was it possible that his wife had experienced some
kind of “call,” and was about to concern herself with his heart one way
or the other? If so it was strange, for she had never shown the
slightest interest in it before.
“Yes,” she went on rapidly and with gathering vehemence, “you speak
about your heart”—which he had not done—“and yet you know as well as I
do that if I had been a girl of no position you would never have
offered me the organ on which you pretend to set so high a value. Or
did your heart run wildly away with you, and drag us into love and a
cottage—a flat, I mean? If so, _I_ should prefer a little less heart
and a little more common sense.”
Geoffrey winced, twice indeed, feeling that her ladyship had hit him as
it were with both barrels. For, as a matter of fact, he had not begun
with any passionate devotion, and again Lady Honoria and he were now
just as poor as though they had really married for love.
“It is hardly fair to go back on bygones and talk like this,” he said,
“even if your position had something to do with it; only at first of
course, you must remember that when we married mine was not without
attractions. Two thousand a year to start on and a baronetcy and eight
thousand a year in the near future were not—but I hate talking about
that kind of thing. Why do you force me to it? Nobody could know that
my uncle, who was so anxious that I should marry you, would marry
himself at his age, and have a son and heir. It was not my fault,
Honoria. Perhaps you would not have married me if you could have
foreseen it.”
“Very probably not,” she answered calmly, “and it is not _my_ fault
that I have not yet learned to live with peace of mind and comfort on
seven hundred a year. It was hard enough to exist on two thousand till
your uncle died, and now——”
“Well, and now, Honoria, if you will only have patience and put up with
things for a while, you shall be rich enough; I will make money for
you, as much money as you want. I have many friends. I have not done so
badly at the Bar this year.”
“Two hundred pounds, nineteen shillings and sevenpence, minus
ninety-seven pounds rent of chambers and clerk,” said Lady Honoria,
with a disparaging accent on the sevenpence.
“I shall double it next year, and double that again the next, and so
on. I work from morning till night to get on, that you may have—what
you live for,” he said bitterly.
“Ah, I shall be sixty before that happy day comes, and want nothing but
scandal and a bath chair. I know the Bar and its moaning,” she added,
with acid wit. “You dream, you imagine what you would like to come
true, but you are deceiving me and yourself. It will be like the story
of Sir Robert Bingham’s property once again. We shall be beggars all
our days. I tell you, Geoffrey, that you had no right to marry me.”
Then at length he lost his temper. This was not the first of these
scenes—they had grown frequent of late, and this bitter water was
constantly dropping.
“Right?” he said, “and may I ask what right you had to marry me when
you don’t even pretend you ever cared one straw for me, but just
accepted me as you would have accepted any other man who was a
tolerably good match? I grant that I first thought of proposing to you
because my uncle wished it, but if I did not love you I meant to be a
good husband to you, and I should have loved you if you would let me.
But you are cold and selfish; you looked upon a husband merely as a
stepping-stone to luxury; you have never loved anybody except yourself.
If I had died last night I believe that you would have cared more about
having to go into mourning than for the fact of my disappearance from
your life. You showed no more feeling for me when you came in than you
would have if I had been a stranger—not so much as some women might
have for a stranger. I wonder sometimes if you have any feeling left in
you at all. I should think that you treat me as you do because you do
not care for me and do care for some other person did I not know you to
be utterly incapable of caring for anybody. Do you want to make me hate
you, Honoria?”
Geoffrey’s low concentrated voice and earnest manner told his wife, who
was watching him with something like a smile upon her clear-cut lips,
how deeply he was moved. He had lost his self-control, and exposed his
heart to her—a thing he rarely did, and that in itself was a triumph
which she did not wish to pursue at the moment. Geoffrey was not a man
to push too far.
“If you have quite finished, Geoffrey, there is something I should like
to say——”
“Oh, curse it all!” he broke in.
“Yes?” she said calmly and interrogatively, and made a pause, but as he
did not specially apply his remark to anybody or anything, she
continued: “If these flowers of rhetoric are over, what I have to say
is this: I do not intend to stay in this horrid place any longer. I am
going to-morrow to my brother Garsington. They asked us both, you may
remember, but for reasons best known to yourself, you would not go.”
“You know my reasons very well, Honoria.”
“I beg your pardon. I have not the slightest idea what they were,” said
Lady Honoria with conviction. “May I hear them?”
“Well, if you wish to know, I will not go to the house of a man who
has—well, left my club as Garsington left it, and who, had it not been
for my efforts, would have left it in an even more unpleasant and
conspicuous fashion. And his wife is worse than he is——”
“I think you are mistaken,” Lady Honoria said coldly, and with the air
of a person who shuts the door of a room into which she does not wish
to look. “And, any way, it all happened years ago and has blown over.
But I do not see the necessity of discussing the subject further. I
suppose that we shall meet at dinner to-night. I shall take the early
train to-morrow.”
“Do what suits you, Honoria. Perhaps you would prefer not returning at
all.”
“Thank you, no. I will not lay myself open to imputations. I shall join
you in London, and will make the best of a bad business. Thank Heaven,
I have learned how to bear my misfortunes,” and with this Parthian shot
she left the room.
For a minute or two her husband felt as though he almost hated her.
Then he thrust his face into the pillow and groaned.
“She is right,” he said to himself; “we must make the best of a bad
business. But, somehow, I seem to have made a mess of my life. And yet
I loved her once—for a month or two.”
This was not an agreeable scene, and it may be said that Lady Honoria
was a vulgar person. But not even the advantage of having been brought
up “on the knees of marchionesses” is a specific against vulgarity, if
a lady happens, unfortunately, to set her heart, what there is of it,
meanly on mean things.