Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

Things being as they were—that is to say, I being the quiet and uninteresting person that I was—I did not see that I was justified in taking away from Fay any legitimate source of pleasure and interest in her life which might in some way make up for my limitations and deficiencies.

So having carefully weighed Annabel's most unpalatable suggestions, I decided to take no notice of them—at any rate, for the present: but to leave my darling to go her own sweet way, unfettered by the rules and restrictions of a middle-aged husband.

CHAPTER XV
DARKENING SKIES

Although I had made up my mind to ignore Annabel's warning as far as action went, I could not altogether ignore it in thought, and I was convinced in my own mind that she was right as to Frank. I could not close my eyes to the fact that he was using his influence over Fay—which undoubtedly was very great—to draw her away from me.

He had, not unnaturally, been jealous of me ever since his sister began to care more for me than she did for him. I think most brothers—and especially most twin-brothers—would have felt the same in the circumstances; and I, for one, did not blame him as I—in my turn—was jealous of him. But with most brothers it would have stopped there: few would have taken the awful responsibility of endeavouring to come between their married sisters and those sisters' husbands. But that was where Frank Wildacre differed from the ordinary run of mortals; that was where the elfin strain in him came in. His utter lack of any sense of responsibility, and his absolute disregard of consequences, sometimes seemed to me hardly human: just as his husky, girlish voice and his delicate complexion made it impossible to realise that he was now less of a boy than of a man, and therefore ought to think as a man, and to put away childish things. He must have known—for he was no longer a child, although he behaved as such—that a permanent estrangement between Fay and myself could only end in misery for her, and therefore, indirectly, for him. For my feelings in the matter I did not expect him to show any regard; although I had been sincerely attached to and attracted by him, I had sufficient acuteness to perceive that he had no real affection for me, or indeed for anybody except himself—unless, perhaps, for his sister; and his love for her was entirely a selfish love. I do not believe he cared an atom about her happiness, except in so far as it ministered to his own: but I should have credited him with sufficient sense to realise that Fay's marriage was, on the whole, a good thing for him as well as for her from a worldly point of view: and Frank was certainly not accustomed to look at anything from an altruistic standpoint.

Had his jealousy goaded him to oppose Fay's marriage in the first instance, I could have understood it. But it did not. It was only when the thing was a fait accompli and my darling's fate was sealed that—with Puck-like perversity—he set about making her dissatisfied with it.

Herein he was—as might have been expected—the exact opposite of Annabel. Before I had asked Fay to marry me, my sister tried her utmost to dissuade me from so doing: but when once we were married, she did all in her power—even to the point of nearly quarrelling with me—to prevent us from drifting apart. But then there was nothing impish or Puck-like about Annabel.

I admit that I watched Frank's veiled antagonism to myself with increasing uneasiness. I realised the strength of the call of kinship too fully to be able to defy its influence: and as I gradually came to understand that this influence was hostile to my life's happiness, I trembled at what suffering might be in store for myself, and for Fay who was dearer to me than myself.

Although I would not have admitted it to Annabel for worlds, I could no longer shut my eyes to the fact that this passion for everything connected with the stage was gradually coming between my wife and myself: and—now that Annabel had told me of Fay's former ambition to take up acting as a profession—I was haunted by a horrible suspicion that my wife had returned to her first love, and now wished that she had chosen the stage instead of me.