The Mistress of Shenstone

by Florence L. Barclay

In the days which followed, Jim Airth suffered all the pangs which come to a man who has made a decision prompted by pride rather than by conviction.

It had always seemed to him essential that a man should appear in all things without shame or blame in the eyes of the woman he loved. Therefore, to be obliged suddenly to admit that a fatal blunder of his own had been the cause, even in the past, of irreparable loss and sorrow to her, had been an unacknowledged but intolerable humiliation. That she should have anything to overlook or to forgive in accepting himself and his love, was a condition of things to which he could not bring himself to submit; and her sweet generosity and devotion, rather increased than soothed his sense of wounded pride.

He had been superficially honest in the reasons he had given to Myra regarding the impossibility of marriage between them. He had said all the things which he knew others might be expected to say; he had mercilessly expressed what would have been his own judgment had he been asked to pronounce an opinion concerning any other man and woman in like circumstances. As he voiced them they had sounded tragically plausible and stoically just. He knew he was inflicting almost unbearable pain upon himself and upon the woman whose whole love was his; but that pain seemed necessary to the tragic demands of the entire ghastly situation.

Only after he had finally left her and was on his way back to town, did Jim Airth realise that the pain he had thus inflicted upon her and upon himself, had been a solace to his own wounded pride. His had been the mistake, and it re-established him in his own self-respect and sense of superiority, that his should be the decision, so hard to make—so unfalteringly made—bringing down upon his own head a punishment out of all proportion to the fault committed.

But, now that the strain and tension were over, his natural honesty of mind reasserted itself, forcing him to admit that his own selfish pride had been at the bottom of his high-flown tragedy.

Myra’s simple loving view of the case had been the right one; yet, thrusting it from him, he had ruthlessly plunged himself and her into a hopeless abyss of needless suffering.

By degrees he slowly realised that in so doing he had deliberately inflicted a more cruel wrong upon the woman he loved, than that which he had unwittingly done her in the past.

Remorse and regret gnawed at his heart, added to an almost unbearable hunger for Myra. Yet he could not bring himself to return to her with this second and still more humiliating confession of failure.

His one hope was that Myra would find their separation impossible to endure, and would send for him. But the days went by, and Myra made no sign. She had said she would never send for him unless assured that coming to her would mean happiness to him. To this decision she quietly adhered.

In a strongly virile man, love towards a woman is, in its essential qualities, naturally selfish. Its keynote is, “I need”; its dominant, “I want”; its full major chord, “I must possess.”