“Not these, I am afraid. There are many in England quite as keen as I am on first editions.”
She explored those large ingenuous orbs. Hers was not a jealous nature, and she had been given ample opportunity to observe how little his devoted manner and challenging eyes meant, had often laughed at the girls who took him seriously. So the possibility of a feminine magnet in London she rejected with disdain, but a sensation of antagonism took possession of her. It angered her that she could not understand him better, that he never really deferred to her, that he must be eternally “managed.” Still more did it incense her that he was indifferently depriving himself of several days of her society. But she could think of no ruse to keep him at home unless she whipped up a storm, and against this indulgence she had been warned by the doctor. As for tears, better reserve them until the Continent threatened again. Much to his surprise, she lay back in her pillows and said in the grand manner:
“Nothing that I could say will hold you back if you have made up your mind to go. I never expect to have the slightest influence over you.”
“I wish you would not say such things!” He looked as uncomfortable as she intended he should feel. “How can you? I shall be gone only four days. Please do not make me feel a brute.”
“Four days will seem very long.”
She uttered these artistically simple words with a quiver of her little pink mouth, which was not altogether deliberate, for although she was determined not to be commonplace, those four days without her husband unrolled before her in an endless procession. He felt very contrite, and kissed her fondly; but he did not retreat from his purpose. The next night saw him in London, enjoying himself hugely at the theatre, from which he had been divorced for nearly three months. It so happened that there were a number of good plays on, and Hans Richter was out of town when he arrived. Mabel received long impassioned telegrams and brief impassioned notes, apologies and explanations that would have hoodwinked a wronged and suspicious wife; but the castle did not see him again for ten days. Then he was so charming, so repentant, so indignant at a cruel destiny, and so unfeignedly happy in being with his lovely little wife once more, that he was not only forgiven, but Mabel, in her joy at having him again after that dreary watch, was persuaded to move up to London a month earlier than she had intended.
XLVIII
THE GREAT PRIZES
The hopes that rise insistent in the cold discouraging mind when the first shock and depression have run their course have their origin, no doubt, in the subterranean chambers of the brain; mean, when it is a case of outraged love, that the soul is continuing its eternal struggle for completion with another soul. These are immemorial rights, and do not endure disintegration and change every seven years.
Margarethe had passed through many phases, not only since the night she had heard of Ordham’s engagement, but since the beginning of her deliberate correspondence with him. As is commonly the case, she found more satisfaction in the writing of her own letters than in the reading of his; although that excited, hopeful, terrified, tremulous, forlorn waiting for the post was a new and astounding experience. Men, the cleverest of them, are indifferent letter writers, and Ordham was no exception. A woman lets her pen run on with a freedom and felicity which conscious art but intensifies, the while it exercises selection and restraint. But men are prone to say what they have to say in the fewest possible words, rather rejecting all subjects but the essential than wandering afield in search of others that might make their compositions interesting.
Although Styr, in a manner, enjoyed this correspondence even more deeply than her personal intercourse with the man who had strolled into her inner kingdom and taken possession (for it gave her a sense of greater intimacy, liberated her imagination), she was too wise to give alarm to his limited amount of masculine endurance by writing him twenty pages when she was artistically capable of packing news, gossip, personalities, disquisitions upon books, the opera, the drama, and politics, into ten. Nor, although she longed to write daily, did she gratify this new passion oftener than once a week; and even so, she cultivated a certain irregularity, that the assured appearance of a too familiar envelope on his morning tray might not in time inspire him with that nervous irritability which so often takes shape in ennui. Not for nothing had she been forced to accept man as her chief study before Wagner transposed her from life to art; but she hated these restraints, longed to be natural. She knew, however, that, given a man of Ordham’s temperament, only nature heightened by art could hold him, never nature unbridled and ingenuous.