“Exactly,” murmured the Actor. “Fire ahead.”
“It was about four years before the war,” commenced the Barrister, “that I was stopping for a few nights at a certain house in Park Lane. It was in the middle of the season—June, to be accurate—and I was waiting to get in here. My wife was in the country, and, as I was more or less at a loose end, I accepted the offer of staying at this house. My hostess—shall we call her Granger, Ruth Granger—had been an old school pal of my wife’s; in later years she had become a real, intimate friend of us both.
“At the time of which I speak she was a lovely girl of twenty-six, with the suffering of six years of hell in her eyes. At the age of twenty she had married Sir Henry Granger, and that fatal mistake had been the cause of the hell. Henry Granger was one of the most loathsome brutes it has ever been my misfortune to run across. He had not one single instinct of a gentleman in him, though he did happen to be the tenth baronet. How her parents had ever allowed the marriage beat me completely. Perhaps it was money, for Granger was rich; but whatever it was she married him, and her hell began.
“Granger was simply an animal, a coarse and vicious animal. He drank heavily without getting drunk, which is always a dangerous sign, and he possessed the morals—or did not possess the morals, whichever you prefer—of a monkey. He was unfaithful to her on their honeymoon—my wife told me that; and from then on he made not the slightest attempt to conceal his mode of life.”
The Barrister carefully removed the ash from his cigar. “I won’t labour the point,” he went on with a faint smile. “We have all of us met the type, but I’d like to emphasise the fact that I, at any rate, have never met any member of that type who came within a mile of him. Most of ’em have some semblance of decency about ’em—make some attempt to conceal their affairs. Granger didn’t; he seemed to prefer that they should be known. Sometimes since then I have wondered whether he was actuated by a sort of blind rage—by a mad desire to pierce through the calm, icy contempt of his wife; to make her writhe and suffer, because he realised she was so immeasurably his superior.” He paused thoughtfully. “He made her suffer right enough.”
“Did she never try for a divorce?” asked the Soldier.
“No, never. We discussed it once—she, and my wife and I; and I had to explain to her our peculiar laws on the subject. His adultery by itself was, of course, not sufficient, and for some reason she flatly refused to consider a mere separation. She wouldn’t face the scandal and publicity for only that. I said to her then: ‘Why not apply for a restitution of conjugal rights. Get your husband to leave the house, and if he doesn’t return in fourteen days——’
“She stopped me with a bitter laugh.
“ ‘It seems rather fatuous,’ she said slowly, ‘getting a lawyer to ask my husband to do what he is only too ready to do—return to me.’
“ ‘But surely,’ I began, not quite taking her meaning.