'She came to our rooms several times for sittings, as she had gone to his studio before he married me. But she found it was too far to come—Bayswater being so much farther than Jermyn Street from Kensington Palace Gardens!—and he had to finish the picture in her house. How the world swam round me, and my brain hammered in my head on those dreadful days when I knew he was with her, glancing at her with those very glances which used to set my heart on fire and make me silent with deep passionate happiness. I had seen him look at her like that when he gave her those few sittings which she found so tiresome because, I suppose, of my jealous eyes. I never said anything—I didn't, indeed, Mr. Maude, for I knew he was the man, and I was only the woman, and I must be patient; but the misery and disappointment began to eat into my soul when I found that those looks I had loved and cherished so were never to be given to me again. At first I thought it would be all right when this portrait was painted and done with; this brilliant lady's caprice of liking for my clever husband would be over, and I should have, not only the careless kindness which never failed, but the old glowing warmth that I craved like a child starving in the snow. But it never came back.' A dull hopelessness was coming into her voice as she continued speaking, and her great eyes looked yearningly out over the feathery larches in the avenue to the darkening sky. 'When that picture was finished there were other pictures, and there were amateur theatricals to be superintended, where the "eye of a true artist" was wanted, but where there was no use at all for a true artist's wife. And there were little scented notes to be answered, and their writers to be called upon; and as I had from the first accepted Fabian's assurance that an artist's marriage could be nothing more than an episode in his life, and that the less it interrupted the former course of his life the happier that marriage would be, there was nothing for me but to submit, and to live on, as I told you, outside.'
'But you were wrong, you should have spoken out to him—reproached him, moved him!' I burst out—jumping up, and playing, in great excitement, with the things on the mantelpiece, unable to keep still.
'I did,' she answered sadly. 'One night, when he was going to the theatre to act as usual—he had just got an engagement—he told me not to sit up, he was going to the Countess's to meet some great foreign painter—I forget his name. The mention of her name drove me suddenly into a sort of frenzy; for he had just been sweet to me, and I had fancied—just for a moment, that the old times might come back. And I forgot all my caution, all my patience. I said angrily, "The Countess, the Countess! Am I never to hear the last of her? What do you want in this idle great lady's drawing-rooms when your own wife is wearing her heart out for you at home?" Then his face changed, and I shook and trembled with terror. For he looked at me as if I had been some hateful creeping thing that had suddenly appeared before him in the midst of his enjoyment. He drew himself away from me, and said in a voice that seemed to cut through me, "I had no idea you were jealous." I faltered out, "No, no," but he interrupted me. "Please don't make a martyr of yourself, Babiole. Since you desire it, I shall come straight home from the theatre."'
'He ought to have married Miss Farington!' said I heartily.
Babiole went on: 'I called to him not to do so; begged him not to mind my silly words. But he went out without speaking to me again. All the evening I tortured myself with reproaches, with fears, until, almost mad, I was on the point of going to the theatre to implore him to forgive and forget my wretched paltry jealousy. But I hoped that he would not keep his word. I was wrong. Before I even thought the piece could be over he returned, having come as he said, straight home. I don't think he can know, even now, how horribly cruel he was to me that night. He meant to give me a lesson, but he did not know how thorough the lesson would be. Seeing that he had come back, although against his wish, I tried my very utmost to please, to charm him, to show him how happy his very presence could make me. He answered me, he talked to me, he told me interesting things—but all in the tone he would have used to a stranger, placing a barrier between us which all my efforts could not move. In fact he showed me clearly once for all that, however kind and courteous he might be to me, I had no more influence over him than one of the lay figures in his studio. That night I could not sleep, but next morning I was a different woman. A little water will make a fire burn more fiercely; a little more puts it out. Even Fabian, though he did not really care for me, could not think the change in me altogether for the better; but his deliberate unkindness had suddenly cleared my sight and shown me that I was beating out my soul against a rock of hard immovable selfishness. He was nicer to me after a while, for he began to find out that he had lost something when I made acquaintances who thought me first interesting and presently amusing. But he never asked me for the devotion he had rejected, he never wanted it; he is always absorbed in half a dozen new passions; a Platonic friendship with a beauty, a furious dispute with an artist of a different school, a wild admiration for a rising talent. And so I have become, as I was bound to become, loving him as I did, just what he said an artist's wife should be—a slave; getting the worst, the least happy, the least worthy, part of his life, and all the time remaining discontented, and chafing against the chain.'
'Yet you have never had cause to be seriously jealous?'
Babiole hesitated, blushed, and the tears came to her eyes.
'I don't know. And—I know it sounds wicked, but I could almost say I don't care. I am to my husband like an ingenious automaton, moving almost any way its possessor pleases; but it has no soul—and I think he hardly misses that!'
'But that is nonsense, my dear child; you have just as much soul as ever.'
'Oh yes, it has come to life again here among the hills. But when I go back to London——'