VI
“It all depends upon what you mean by a successful marriage,” Lady Walton had remarked earlier in the day. “You have now, my dear Edith, been married ten years; you look ten years younger than you are; your husband spends all his evenings at home, and you have an excellent staff of servants. I really do not see what more you can ask!”
“I don’t suppose we often see why other people should ask more than they have,” Edith replied. “Other people ought to be satisfied, and yet other people aren’t.”
“I don’t wish to talk metaphysics,” said Lady Walton; “it reminds me of the time when I fell downstairs on the back of my head and had concussion of the brain. I suppose you mean you haven’t any children? Neither had I, and I have never regretted it.”
Lady Walton was one of those people who always thought that what she did not object to was not objectionable; she felt this very strongly.
“My own faults, which I can excuse quite easily and always see reasons for,” she went on after a pause, “would annoy me excessively in a younger generation--even my virtues would seem weak and tame imitation in some pudding-faced young girl. I should have known better what to do with a boy who would have been certain to die if he had been satisfactory, and equally certain to live if he was not. No, my dear Edith, let us be thankful we have both been spared a tiresome and difficult vocation. An unhappy marriage is often made bearable by such additions, but a really happy marriage can dispense with them.”
“Oh, a really happy marriage!” Edith had murmured.
“My dear,” her aunt had replied briskly, “you are one of those unfortunate people who ask too much, and do not take steps to get it. You should do one or the other. What your husband needs is something to shake him. It is a pity you are not a delicate woman; you might try nerves. I suppose you are too high and mighty to stoop to flirtation.”
“I should do it so badly,” said Edith, laughing, “and besides I’m forty.”
“You have such a tiresome habit of remembering your own age,” her aunt replied; “it even makes me remember mine. I will take a nap.”
Edith had left her and gone home. It was something, she reflected, to have a home, and--every one would have agreed--such a comfortable home.
She had had a difficult life these past ten years; she had not only to make her husband happy which had been her unswerving purpose from the first, but she had had to watch her failure, and accept the lower level of opportunity allowed to her--and make him contented; she had, at least, done this.
Miss Lestrange had taken Leslie slowly and vaguely away; there was still a talk of his return home--there would always be a talk of it. Meanwhile the boy, his aunt, and an excellent tutor (almost as amenable as Mr. Flinders) divided their time between Mallows and Brighton. The boy had been definitely delicate; a determined effort to send him to Harrow failed, and he was taken away once more by his aunt and tutor. Oxford remained; he was now quite strong enough for Oxford. Still Miss Lestrange held him back; she could not follow him to Oxford.
From time to time he visited his father. The tie between them had never ceased to be strong; but for Edith there had never been a second chance. The boy was beautiful as his mother had been, and suspicious with all the hard, cramping suspicion of a weak nature. Edith’s unvarying sweetness and companionableness roused a sharp antagonism in him; she was “trying to get round him,” as his aunt had said. He fought Edith because he could so easily have loved her; he pushed her away from him because he wanted to confide in her. He treated her with a studied polite insolence which made her dumb before him.
Horace Lestrange looked from one to the other wistfully; something was wrong. Etta said it was Edith’s fault, and Edith said nothing, and the boy said nothing; so it ended in Horace saying nothing too. He merely went down by himself for week-ends to Mallows, and felt that his marriage had been, not a failure exactly, but not very definitely a success.
He had indeed frequently felt tenderness for his wife, and he always felt friendship. She was his most delightful fireside and holiday companion; they read the same books, laughed at the same things; but they hardly lived the same life. He missed his boy with a kind of dull ache that would have been difficult to fathom; and if it wasn’t Edith’s fault--well--it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for her. Edith stood with her hand on the mantelpiece gazing into the study fire; on one side of it sat her husband, glancing through the evening paper; and, on the other, the boy on one of his occasional visits (lately they had been much more frequent) to his London home. He was half-smoking cigarette after cigarette, and as Edith turned her attention to him she was struck afresh by the expression in his eyes. It was the tyrannical selfish face of a pleasure-seeker. She compared it, with a sharp pang of disappointment, to the controlled, honest manliness of her husband’s expression. Couldn’t they have made his boy more like him--have put something better than hungry discontent into Leslie’s beautiful eyes?
“I’m going out,” said the boy suddenly.
His father looked up from his paper with evident disappointment.
“I thought Esdaile was coming in for bridge?” he said quickly.
“I think, if you will excuse me, I’ll go out,” his son repeated, with a politeness which did not conceal his evident intention.
His father eyed him curiously for a moment, then he said:
“Musical comedy?”
The boy flushed scarlet.
“Do you wish to know where I am going, sir?” he asked with angry irony.
Edith interposed quickly.
“If you are going, Leslie,” she said, “would you mind telephoning for me, to Esdaile, not to come? It’s no use his coming if we aren’t going to play bridge.”
Leslie never willingly looked at Edith; he did not do so now. He merely raised his eyebrows, because he was annoyed at being asked to do anything for anybody else, and replied:
“Most certainly, if you wish it.”
His father returned to the newspaper; the boy stalked in a turmoil of offence and pricked conscience out of the room. If you want to be very angry, people who attempt to meet you with patience and kindness are mere fuel for the flame. Leslie had broken up a bridge four; he was going to do something wrong; and nobody told him not to, or attempted to interfere with him in any way. It was all extremely tiresome.
The two left together exchanged a long look of sympathy and understanding.
“He’s very young,” said Edith softly. “That’s all, Horace--only very young.”
“He’s confoundedly cool,” said his father gloomily, “spoiling a bridge four like that, and got up specially because he said he wanted it! It’s so deuced difficult to know what the fellow does want nowadays.”
“What made him blush like that, Horace, when you said ‘musical comedy’?” said his wife, sitting opposite him, and holding up a fire-screen between her face and the fire.
“Oh, it’s some nonsense Etta’s been writing me; she thinks he comes up here to meet a woman. No doubt he’s got some queer boy adoration in his head, but it can’t be anything serious at his age.”
“Is it a--what kind of a woman?” asked his wife.
“Oh, some wonderful American beauty, old enough to be his mother--the star of some touring company. It seems she has turned the heads of all the London youths together. I told Etta she’d far better leave the matter alone. It isn’t as if the boy’s prospects were dazzling; he’ll have plenty, of course, in time, but he’s got nothing now but his mother’s money, and this person isn’t likely to marry him for five hundred a year. In three years’ time, well--he’ll have forgotten her name.”
“But--but her influence mightn’t be good?” Edith persisted.
“I don’t know,” said Horace reflectively. “Some of her type are quite unscrupulous, no doubt, but not all of them. Anyhow, I did do something; I sent her a note, just giving the facts of the boy’s expectations quite plainly, and asking her what she meant to do about it. I might have called to see her--Etta wanted me to--but I didn’t see the good. Musical comedy ladies are not in my line.”
“And you didn’t tell me, Horace?”
Edith lifted the fire-screen a little; he could not see her face; in her voice there was a touch of reproach, not more--the friendly reproach of a comrade who has been left out of a consultation.
“No. I don’t know why I told you now, but it seemed natural somehow when you asked.”
“I am glad it seemed natural,” said Edith quietly.
In most married lives there is one who understands, and one who is content to be understood. Edith read her husband’s mind as if it were a well-known book. She knew his motives, his honest scruples, his studious chivalry, his quiet reticence. She knew when he suffered because the marks of it were on her own heart; she knew when he was contented, puzzled, worried, or pleased; and he knew nothing whatever about her, except that she was always sweet to him, and only occasionally (as we are told all women are) unreasonable. That he was sitting opposite a woman now whose heart was very nearly broken, who had fed in secret on sharp misery and long, ineffectual pain, had never even dimly touched his imagination.
Lady Walton had supposed that Edith might have a difficult time, but that the quiet routine of married life would soon stifle the unnatural hunger of her heart. Nothing had been stifled except expression. Edith had thrust her own pain out of sight with strong hands; she had shut love and anguish out of her eyes--she had schooled her lips not to quiver and held her voice steady against the invasions of emotion; she had taken stones for bread, and received them with pleased acquiescence, as if, after all, her preference had always been for stones.
But when it came to Horace’s pain, to the unstilled longing of his heart, which she could have stilled; to the silent, patient endurance, which she could have stirred into something resembling passionate joy; then her life rose up against her, and the bitter waters of intense and heavy anguish passed over her soul. Ah, the sickening pressure of those hours! While he lay beside her sleeping quietly, she clenched her hands, and quivered with the sobs she dared not free. And then with haggard eyes she watched the slow day dawn over London, the day which would be--as all other days to her--the resetting of her life to sober pain. He thought her a sensible, level-headed, unemotional woman, and she was a creature born of flame and tears!
The hand that held the fire-screen shook a little.
“You mustn’t let yourself worry about it,” said Horace kindly, “or I shall be sorry I’ve told you. Honestly, I don’t think it will become a serious matter. There’s the evening post. I rather imagine that extremely fancy envelope may be from the lady herself. My correspondents are usually less stimulating in their notepaper.”
He read it, frowned in a puzzled way, and tossed it over to Edith. It ran:
My Dear Sir,--Thank you for your simple, explicit statement of the case. You gave me a great deal of amusement, and no pain. I wish your son had copied your style. I daresay he has told you that he meant to marry me; but though an imaginative child, I don’t suppose he can ever have said to you that I meant to marry him. I don’t make promises, and unless any unforeseen circumstance should arise, I am not likely to undertake the experiment. As to my moral influence (which I notice you have done me the honor not to mention), I have always made it my invariable rule to leave boys alone. I laugh at them, but I do not hurt them.
Yours sincerely,
Anastasia Falaise.
“Well, what do you make of that, my dear?” said Horace Lestrange, feeling after his matches. “Seems to let us out, doesn’t it?”
Edith let the paper fall into her lap and looked into the fire.
“Poor woman!” she said very gently. “Do you know, Horace, she reminds me just a little of Helen of Troy. Helen used to talk like that, as if the soul had been eaten out of her words. I think a woman must be very unhappy to write like that.”
“It is time you went to bed, Edith; you look tired,” said her husband. “Just throw that letter on the fire, will you?”
She threw the letter on to the fire and watched it burn.
“Poor woman!” she whispered to herself again. “Poor woman!”
Horace got up and opened the door for her. He was very much relieved, but he felt a pang of compunction at the same time. He had been a fool to tell Edith; it seemed to upset her; the facts of life--love’s tragedies--ought to be kept from good women. Then he went back to his paper.