“There’s the point, for instance, that if I look down on Staithley Mills every morning from my bedroom I ought to feel less scared of them.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Mary and, kissing him, some hundreds of the things they hadn’t said seemed lustrously expressed. She found no insincerities in him now; the gesture and the bravado and the air that it was all something he was doing for a wager—these had gone and in their place was his task acknowledged and approached with humility. It was a beginning and she thought so well of his beginning that she had time to think of herself.
He turned the car towards the Hall, and the thought that she was going there was no longer heady. He had spoken contemptuously of “this family gang”; he had said, and she adored him for it, that she was different. They had, perhaps, some comfort for Gertrude; they were going to her with a message which should reconcile her to the news she would have heard from William; but, for all that, Mary was daunted at her coming encounter with Gertrude Hepplestall.
“Rupert,” she said, “you must help me to-night. Your aunt, and all the Hepplestalls, your family—and me.”
He frowned. “Well?” he said.
“There’s the tradition, and you married me. You married into musical comedy.”
“Hasn’t it dawned on you that you’re my wife, Mary?” But that was precisely what had dawned upon her and his question made her wonder if he saw what was implied. In London, he was all but explicitly the husband of Mary Arden; in Staithley she was no longer Mary Arden, she was the wife of Sir Rupert Hepplestall. That might not mean that the foundations of their relationship had shifted, but it certainly meant a vital difference in its values above the surface. She was Cæsar’s wife and people ought not to be able to remember against Cæsar that he had married an actress.
“Yes, your wife, Rupert. Your wife who was an actress.”
“Are you making the suggestion that you are something to be ashamed of?”
“I’ve the conceit to believe I’m not. You love me and I’ve the right to be conceited. But it isn’t what I think of myself, it’s what Staithley will think of me. London’s inured to actresses. Staithley—”