The fact remains, however, that they are dead. One despises them for dying, but beyond that it is difficult to hold them personally responsible for the heroine’s subsequent misdeeds. The argument takes to itself new shape. Is it Fate that is to blame? The lady herself would seem to favour this suggestion. It has always been her fate, she explains, to bring suffering and misery upon those she loves. At first, according to her own account, she rebelled against this cruel Fate—possibly instigated thereto by the people unfortunate enough to be loved by her. But of late she has come to accept this strange destiny of hers with touching resignation. It grieves her, when she thinks of it, that she is unable to imbue those she loves with her own patient spirit. They seem to be a fretful little band.
Considered as a scapegoat, Fate, as compared with the father, has this advantage: it is always about: it cannot slip away and die before the real trouble begins: it cannot even plead a scientific head; it is there all the time. With care one can blame it for most everything. The vexing thing about it is, that it does not mind being blamed. One cannot make Fate feel small and mean. It affords no relief to our harrowed feelings to cry out indignantly to Fate: “look here, what you have done. Look at this sweet and well-proportioned lady, compelled to travel first-class, accompanied by an amount of luggage that must be a perpetual nightmare to her maid, from one fashionable European resort to another; forced to exist on a well-secured income of, apparently, five thousand a year, most of which has to go in clothes; beloved by only the best people in the play; talked about by everybody incessantly to the exclusion of everybody else—all the neighbours interested in her and in nobody else much; all the women envying her; all the men tumbling over one another after her—looks, in spite of all her worries, not a day older than twenty-three; and has discovered a dressmaker never yet known to have been an hour behind her promise! And all your fault, yours, Fate. Will nothing move you to shame?”
She has a way of mislaying her Husband.
It brings no satisfaction with it, speaking out one’s mind to Fate. We want to see him before us, the thing of flesh and blood that has brought all this upon her. Was it that early husband—or rather the gentleman she thought was her husband. As a matter of fact, he was a husband. Only he did not happen to be hers. That naturally confused her. “Then who is my husband?” she seems to have said to herself; “I had a husband: I remember it distinctly.”
“Difficult to know them apart from one another,” says the lady with the past, “the way they dress them all alike nowadays. I suppose it does not really matter. They are much the same as one another when you get them home. Doesn’t do to be too fussy.”
She is a careless woman. She is always mislaying that early husband. And she has an unfortunate knack of finding him at the wrong moment. Perhaps that is the Problem: What is a lady to do with a husband for whom she has no further use? If she gives him away he is sure to come back, like the clever dog that is sent in a hamper to the other end of the kingdom, and three days afterwards is found gasping on the doorstep. If she leaves him in the middle of South Africa, with most of the heavy baggage and all the debts, she may reckon it a certainty that on her return from her next honeymoon he will be the first to greet her.
Her surprise at meeting him again is a little unreasonable. She seems to be under the impression that because she has forgotten him, he is for all practical purposes dead.
“Why I forgot all about him,” she seems to be arguing to herself, “seven years ago at least. According to the laws of Nature there ought to be nothing left of him but just his bones.”
She is indignant at finding he is still alive, and lets him know it—tells him he is a beast for turning up at his sister’s party, and pleads to him for one last favour: that he will go away where neither she nor anybody else of any importance will ever see him or hear of him again. That’s all she asks of him. If he make a point of it she will—though her costume is ill adapted to the exercise—go down upon her knees to ask it of him.
He brutally retorts that he doesn’t know where to “get.” The lady travels round a good deal and seems to be in most places. She accepts week-end invitations to the houses of his nearest relatives. She has married his first cousin, and is now getting up a bazaar with the help of his present wife. How he is to avoid her he does not quite see.