It is a trying age for the “grown-up”; but Jim, not having too much of it, enjoyed it, and enjoyed watching Monimé’s handling of the situation.
Her attitude towards himself during the first days, however, was the cause of many a heartache. There was a curious expression on her face as she watched him playing with the boy: it was at first as though she did not recognize his parental position, nor regard him as being in any way essential to the domestic alliance. She seemed to be anxious as to his influence upon the child, and when once he made the jesting assertion that parents should not try to be a good example to their offspring, but rather an awful warning, she did not laugh.
The possession of a son was the source of the most intense satisfaction to him; but Monimé seemed at first to be endeavouring to check his belated enthusiasm. Sometimes she appeared to him, indeed, as a lioness protecting her cub from an interfering lion, and cuffing the intruder over the head with a not too gentle paw. She seemed to claim the boy as her own exclusive property, and she allowed Jim no free access to the nursery, nor indeed to the house. There were days upon which the door was closed to him on one pretext or another; and at such times he experienced a variety of emotions, all of which were violent and passionate.
“People will talk,” she would say, “if you come here so often, Jim. I am not independent of the world as I used to be: I have the boy to consider.”
She had called the child Ian, which, she said, was the name of her father; and the fact that she had thus excluded him from a nomenclatural identity with the boy was a source to him of recurrent mortification. His son should have been James, or Stephen, or Mark, like his ancestors before him: it filled his heart with bitter remorse that the little chap should be merely “Ian Smith.”
Gradually, however, Monimé became more accustomed to his association with the boy; and at length there came a memorable occasion on which they sat together beside his cot for the best part of the night and nursed him through an alarming feverish attack. It was then that Jim saw in her face an expression of tenderness towards him which was like water to the thirsty.
“You know,” he said to her, as they walked in the garden together in the cool of the daybreak, “this is the first time you have let me feel that I have anything to do with Ian. I have been very hurt.”
She turned on him vehemently. “Oh, don’t you understand,” she said, “that your coming back into my life like this is very hard for me to bear? I don’t want you to feel yourself tied down. I am perfectly capable of looking after myself and my boy without your help. You have set a struggle going in my mind that is distracting me. There is one side of me which resents your interference, because you are just a wanderer, perfectly capable of walking off once more with hardly a farewell. There is another side which finds a sort of sneaking comfort in your presence, and endows you with virtues you probably don’t possess. I was self-reliant until you came. Now I am swayed this way and that. At one moment I think I was wrong, and that we ought to be married and ought to go to some country where we are unknown, so that we can explain our child by pretending our marriage took place secretly four years ago. At another moment I remember that you have not suggested marriage to me, and that therefore you probably realize as well as I do your unfittedness for the rôle of husband. And then there’s the constant feeling of the unfairness of making you share, at this stage, the responsibilities I undertook of my own free will at Alexandria.”
“It was my doing as much as yours,” he replied.
“No,” she answered, with a smile. “Any woman worth her salt handles those sorts of situations, and makes up her own mind. Man proposes, woman disposes. The whole thing is in the woman’s hands: to think otherwise is to insult my sex. Men and women are both pieces in Nature’s game; but Nature is a woman, and she works out her plans through her own sex.”