“Yes, I know. You’re a good friend. But you’re making your old mistake. I wasn’t thinking just then of what you call the handsome thing. I was thinking of the chance that I gave myself.”
“I never quite understood that,” said I.
She gave a little laugh. “But for that ‘handsome thing,’ he’d certainly have asked me—he’d have had to, poor man—me, and not her. And he’d have done it very soon.”
I assented—not in words, just in silence and cigar smoke.
She looked at me without embarrassment, though she was about to say something that she might well have refused to say to any living being. She seemed to have a sort of pleasure in the confession—at least an impulse to make it that was irresistible. She smiled as she spoke—amused at herself, or, perhaps, at the new idea she would give me of herself.
“If he had,” she went on—“if he had made love to me, I couldn’t have refused him—I couldn’t, indeed. And yet I shouldn’t have believed a word he was saying—not a word of love he said. I should have been a very unhappy woman if I hadn’t given myself that chance. You’ve been a little behind the scenes. Nobody else has. I want you to know that I’m content.” She put her hand in mine and gave me a friendly squeeze. “And to-morrow we’ll get back to business, you and I,” she said.
THE PRINCE CONSORT
I HAD known her for some considerable time before I came to know him. Most of their acquaintance were in the same case; for to know him was among the less noticeable and the less immediate results of knowing her. You might go to the house three or four times and not happen upon him. He was there always, but he did not attract attention. You joined Mrs Clinton’s circle, or, if she were in a confidential mood, you sat with her on the sofa. She would point out her daughter, and Muriel, attired in a wonderful elaboration of some old-fashioned mode, would talk to you about “Mamma’s books,” while Mrs Clinton declared that, do what she would, she could not prevent the darling from reading them. Perhaps, when you had paid half-a-dozen visits, Mr Clinton would cross your path. He was very polite, active for your comfort, ready to carry out his wife’s directions, determined to be useful. Mrs Clinton recognised his virtues. She called him an “old dear,” with a fond pitying smile on her lips, and would tell you, with an arch glance and the slightest of shrugs, that “he wrote too.” If you asked what he wrote, she said that it was “something musty,” but that it kept him happy, and that he never minded being interrupted, or even having nowhere to write, because Muriel’s dancing lesson occupied the dining-room, “and I really couldn’t have him in my study. One must be alone to work, mustn’t one?” She could not be blamed for holding her work above his; there was nothing at all to show for his; whereas hers not only brought her a measure of fame, as fame is counted, but also doubled the moderate private income on which they had started housekeeping—and writing—thirteen or fourteen years before. Mr Clinton himself would have been the last to demur to her assumption; he accepted his inferiority with an acquiescence that was almost eagerness. He threw himself into the task of helping his wife, not of course in the writing, but by relieving her of family and social cares. He walked with Muriel, and was sent to parties when his wife was too busy to come. I recollect that he told me, when we had become friendly, that these offices made considerable inroads on his time. “If,” he said apologetically, “I had not acquired the habit of sitting up late, I should have difficulty in getting forward with my work. As it happens, Millie doesn’t work at night—the brain must be fresh for her work—and so I can have the study then; and I am not so liable to—I mean, I have not so many other calls then.”
I liked Clinton, and I do not mean by that that I disliked Mrs Clinton. Indeed I admired her very much, and her husband’s position in the household seemed just as natural to me as it did to himself and to everybody else. Young Gregory Dulcet, who is a poet and a handsome impudent young dog, was felt by us all to have put the matter in a shape that was at once true in regard to our host, and pretty in regard to our hostess, when he referred, apparently in a casual way, to Mr Clinton as “the Prince Consort.” Mrs Clinton laughed and blushed; Muriel clapped her hands and ran off to tell her father. She came back saying that he was very pleased with the name, and I believe that very possibly he really was. Anyhow, young Dulcet was immensely pleased with it; he repeated it, and it “caught on.” I heard Mrs Clinton herself, with a half-daring, half-modest air, use it more than once. Thus Mrs Clinton was led to believe herself great: so that she once asked me if I thought that there was any prospect of The Quarterly “doing her.” I said that I did not see why not. Yet it was not a probable literary event.
Thus Mr Clinton passed the days of an obscure useful life, helping his wife, using the dining-room when dancing lessons did not interfere, and enjoying the luxury of the study in the small hours of the morning. And Mrs Clinton grew more and more pitiful to him; and Muriel more and more patronising; and the world more and more forgetful. And then, one fine morning, as I was going to my office, the Prince Consort overtook me. He was walking fast, and he carried a large, untidy, brown-paper parcel. I quickened my pace to keep up with his.