“Politics and science are stern masters,” he answered gaily.
“They leave little time for your mistress,” she rejoined meaningly.
“Who is my mistress?”
“Well, I am not greatly your wife,” she replied. “I have the dregs of your life. I help you—I am allowed to help you—so little, to share so little in the things that matter to you.”
“Now, that’s imagination and misunderstanding,” he rejoined. “It has helped immensely your being such a figure in society, and entertaining so much, and being so popular, at any rate until very lately.”
“I do not misunderstand,” she answered gravely. “I do not share your real life. I do not help you where your brain works, in the plans and purposes and hopes that lie behind all that you do—oh, yes, I know your ambitions and what positions you are aiming for; but there is something more than that. There is the object of it all, the pulse of it, the machinery down, down deep in your being that drives it all. Oh, I am not a child! I have some intellect, and I want—I want that we should work it out together.”
In spite of all that had come and gone, in spite of the dead mother’s words and all her own convictions, seeing trouble coming upon him, she wanted to make one last effort for what might save their lives—her life—from shipwreck in the end. If she failed now, she foresaw a bitter, cynical figure working out his life with a narrowing soul, a hard spirit unrelieved by the softening influence of a great love—even yet the woman in her had a far-off hope that, where the law had made them one by book and scrip, the love which should consecrate such a union, lift it above an almost offensive relation, might be theirs. She did not know how much of her heart, of her being, was wandering over the distant sands of Egypt, looking for its oasis. Eglington had never needed or wanted more than she had given him—her fortune, her person, her charm, her ability to play an express and definite part in his career. It was this material use to which she was so largely assigned, almost involuntarily but none the less truly, that had destroyed all of the finer, dearer, more delicate intimacy invading his mind sometimes, more or less vaguely, where Faith was concerned. So extreme was his egotism that it had never occurred to him, as it had done to the Duchess of Snowdon and Lord Windlehurst, that he might lose Hylda herself as well as her fortune; that the day might come when her high spirit could bear it no longer. As the Duchess of Snowdon had said: “It would all depend upon the other man, whoever he might be.”
So he answered her with superficial cheerfulness now; he had not the depth of soul to see that they were at a crisis, and that she could bear no longer the old method of treating her as though she were a child, to be humoured or to be dominated.
“Well, you see all there is,” he answered; “you are so imaginative, crying for some moon there never was in any sky.”
In part he had spoken the truth. He had no high objects or ends or purposes. He wanted only success somehow or another, and there was no nobility of mind or aspiration behind it. In her heart of hearts she knew it; but it was the last cry of her soul to him, seeking, though in vain, for what she had never had, could never have.