The Osbornes

by E. F. Benson

As if by a conjuring trick, he produced from under the table cloth an all-round tiara of immense diamonds, which had been previously balanced on his knees.

Mrs. Osborne had had no idea of this; that part of the ceremony had been kept from her.

“Put it on, Maria, my dear,” he said, “and if there’s a peeress in the land as better deserves her coronet than you, I should be proud to meet her. Let the Honourable Claude settle it comfortable for you, my dear. Claude, my boy, I’m jealous of you because you’re an honourable, which is more than your poor old dad ever was.”

The deft hands of the Honourable adjusted the tiara for her and she got up to salute the donor.

“If it isn’t the measure of my head exactly!” she said. “Well, I never, and me not knowing a word about it!”

Meantime, as June drew to its close, in this whirl of engagements and socialities, the estrangement between Dora and Claude grew (though not more acute in itself) more of a habit, and the very passage of time, instead of softening it, rendered it harder to soften. Had they been alone in their flat, it is probable that some intolerable moment would have come, breaking down that which stood between them, or in any case compelling them to talk it out; or, a thing which would have been better than nothing, bringing this cold alienation up to the hot level of a quarrel, which could have been made up, and which when made up might have carried away with it much of the cause of this growing constraint. As it was, there was no quarrel, and thus there was nothing to make up. Claude, on his side, believed that his wife still rather resented certain remarks he had made to her at Venice and here on the subject of her attitude toward his father, contrasting it unfavourably with the appreciation and kindness which his family had shewn hers. In his rather hard, thoroughly well-meaning and perfectly just manner he examined and re-examined any cause of complaint which she could conceive herself to have on the subject, and entirely acquitted himself of blame. He did not see that he could have done differently: he had not been unkind, only firm, and his firmness was based upon his sense of right.

But in this examination he, of course, utterly failed to recognize the real ground of the estrangement, which was, as Dora knew, not any one particular speech or action of his, but rather the spirit and the nature which lay behind every speech, every action. This she was incapable of telling him, and even if she had been able to do so, no good end would have been served by it. She had married him, not knowing him, or at the least blinded by superficialities, and now, getting below those, or getting used to them, she found that there were things to which she could not get used, but which, on the contrary, seemed to her to be getting every day more glaringly disagreeable to her. He, not knowing this, did his best to remove what he believed had been the cause of their estrangement by praise and commendation of what he called to himself her altered behaviour. For there was no doubt whatever that now, at any rate, Dora was behaving delightfully to his parents. She took much of the work of entertaining off Mrs. Osborne’s hands; made but few engagements of her own, in order to be more actively useful in the house; and was in every sense the most loyal and dutiful of daughters-in-law. She also very gently and tactfully got leave to revise Mrs. Osborne’s visiting list, and drew a somewhat ruthless lead pencil through a considerable number of the names. For in the early days to leave a card meant, as a matter of course, to be asked to the house. This luxuriant and exotic garden wanted a little weeding.

All this seemed to Claude to be the happy fruits of his criticism, and the consciousness of it in his mind did not improve the flavour of his speeches to Dora. They were but little alone, owing to the high pressure of their days; but one evening, about a fortnight after they had moved into Park Lane, he found her resting in her sitting room before dressing.

“There you are, dear,” he said. “How right of you to rest a little. What have you been doing?”

“There were people to lunch,” said she; “and then I drove down with Dad to the House. He was not there long, so I waited for him, and we had a turn in the Park. Then a whole host of people came to tea, and I—I multiplied myself.”