"Those were his very words, my dear. And that cool! I stared at him. I'd no mind to make excuses for you, Gawd knows; but, for all that, one's own flesh and blood wasn't going to be talked about like niggers in my hearing. When I got my wits together, I said, 'It seems to me I'd be sorrier for you, Mr. Heriot, if you took it different.' 'Oh,' said he in his superior way, 'would you? We needn't discuss my feelings, madam. Perhaps you'll stay and dine?' I was so angry that I couldn't be civil to him. 'I thank you,' I said, 'I will not stay and dine. And I take the opportunity, Mr. Heriot, of telling you you're a brute!' With that I came away; but there was much more in between that I've forgotten. About the divorce it was. He said he had 'a duty to himself,' and that the man could marry you when you were divorced; which I suppose he would have done if he had lived? though whether your sin would have been any less, my dear, if an archbishop had performed the ceremony is a question that I couldn't undertake to decide. You must begin your life afresh, now that it's all 'absolute'—which I learn is the proper term—and you'll never be in a newspaper any more. Pray to Heaven for aid, and take heart of grace! And if it will relieve you to speak sometimes of those sinful months with—with the other one in Paris, why, you shall talk about them to me, my dear, and I won't reproach you."
Mamie was no longer listening. An emotion that she did not seek to define was roused in her as she wondered if Heriot could indeed have taken the blow so stoically as her aunt declared. She scarcely knew whether she wished to put faith in his demeanour or not, but the subject was one that filled her thoughts long after Mrs. Baines's departure. It was one to which she constantly recurred.
With less delay than might have been anticipated, the widow found a house in Balham to fulfil her requirements, and the removal was effected several months before No. 20, Lavender Street was sub-let.
The houses of this class differ from one another but slightly. Excepting that the one in Balham was numbered "44," and that the street was called "Rosalie Road," Mamie could have found it easy to believe that she was re-installed in Wandsworth. It seemed to her sometimes as if the van that had removed the furniture had also brought the ground-floor parlour, with the miniature bay window overlooking the shrubs and the plot of mould. The back yard with the clothes prop, and the neighbours' yards with the continuous clatter, they too might have been transferred from Lavender Street; and so abiding was the clatter that even if she felt sleepy at nine o'clock, it was useless to go to bed before eleven. In view of this unintermittent necessity for back yards, she wondered how the inmates of more expensive houses for which back yards were not provided managed to support the deficiency. The women that she viewed, from the bedroom, among the clothes lines, or across the plot of mould, as they went forth with string bags, might have been the Lavender Street tenants. And were they not the Lavender Street children, these who on week-days swung, unkempt, on the little creaking gates along the road, and on Sundays walked abroad in colours so grotesquely unsuited to them?
Such houses are, for the most part, happily, the crown of lives too limited to realise their limitations—too unsuccessful to be aware that they have failed. To Rosalie Road, Balham, with her Aunt Lydia for companion, the divorced woman at the age of twenty-six retired to remember that she had once hoped to be an artist, and had had the opportunity of being happy.
To-day she hoped for nothing. There was no scope for hope. If she could have awakened to find herself famous, her existence would have been coloured a little—though she knew that fame could not satisfy her now as it would once have done—but the ability to labour for distinction was gone. She was apathetic, she had no interest in anything. When six months had passed, she regarded death as the only event to which she could still look forward; when she had been here a year, a glimmer of relief entered into her depression—the doctor who had attended her, and sounded her lungs, told her that she "must take care of herself."
Sometimes a neighbour looked in, and spoke of dilapidations and the indifference of the landlord; of the reductions at a High Road linendraper's, and the whooping-cough. Sometimes a curate called to sell tickets for a concert more elementary than his sermons. In the afternoon she walked to Tooting Bec and stared at the bushes; in the evening she betook herself to the "circulating library," where Lady Audley's Secret and The Wide, Wide World were displayed and the proprietor said he hadn't heard of Meredith—"perhaps she had made a mistake in the name?" God help her! She was guilty and she had left a husband desolate; but the music that she had dreamed of was the opera on Wagner nights; the books that she had expected were copies containing signatures that were the envy of the autograph-collector; the circle that had been her aim was the world of literature and art. She lived at Balham; she saw the curate, and she heard about the dilapidations in the neighbour's roof. One year merged into another; and if she lived for forty more, the neighbour and the curate would be her All.
CHAPTER XI
When five years had passed after the divorce, the Liberal Party came into power again, and George Heriot, Q.C., M.P., was appointed Solicitor-General. His work and ambitions had not sufficed to mend the gap in his life; but it had been in work and ambition that he endeavoured to find assuagement of the wound. Perhaps eagerness had never been so keen in him after his wife went as while he was contesting the borough that he represented now; perhaps he had never realised the inadequacy of success so fully as he did to-day when one of the richest prizes of his profession was obtained. Conscious that the anticipated flavour was lacking, the steps to which he might look forward still lost much of their allurement. Were he promoted to the post of Attorney-General, and raised to the Bench, he foresaw that it would elate him no more than it elated him now, as Sir George Heriot, and a very wealthy man, to recall the period when, as a struggling Junior, he had sat up half the night to earn a guinea.