But marriages that tie the bloods of alien races are not the only mixed marriages. There are mixed marriages of another sort that bring as much, perhaps more, discomfort to the two most directly concerned, although they entail no social inconvenience: marriages of alien individualities. Such his mother’s marriage had proved, and Basil sensed it, and that she winced daily. He had never definitely realized it. He had never thought about it clearly. But he felt it. And this had roused all the angel in him to her defense, and made him very true and knightly to her.
The daughter of a poor Oxford cleric, Florence Grey had married “surprisingly well.” Robert Gregory was rich even then, good-looking, jovial, and to his young and pretty wife indulgent. He was indulgent to her still.
She had married him quite gladly, and for a time been well enough content. But after a year or two the sag had come and the disillusion. What in him had seemed once tonic and individuality came to seem brusque, and even boorish at times. She grew used to silken raiment and spiced meats, used and a little indifferent, though doubtless she would have missed them had she lost them, a tinge contemptuous of them. And often in the whirl of life—in Manchester, in Paris, in Calcutta, and now in gay Hong Kong—she longed a little for the Oxford quiet and Oxford ways, cool, green lanes, a dim old church, a shabby old library, dim too, full of well-worn books, simple usual things—roast mutton, milk pudding, and soft English rain, gray English skies.
But, too, she enjoyed life, and reaped from it with both hands. And her husband had been and was well content. He had married her for love, and he loved her still. But he had had no exultation and no opalescent anticipations. And so, reasonably enough, he had suffered no relapse. Such extremes of feeling, such quiver and ardor as he had ever known, had come to him in office and shipping yard. Business was his cult. And so far he had proved an excellent business man. He was perfectly satisfied with himself; and it never occurred to him that any one else was not. That would be preposterous, and certainly Florence was not preposterous. He was magnificently satisfied with himself, and in a suitably smaller way he was satisfied with his wife.
She had given him no cause to be dissatisfied. And they got on well together. They always had. She wore well. She dressed well. She never tried to understand his business, or to talk to him when he was reading the market reports or the shipping news. She was a handsome creature. People liked her. And she had borne him two children. He would have resented a third; to have had none would have enraged him as much as if he’d been a “Chinaman.”
Yes, Florence had done him very well, and he acknowledged it to himself, and boasted of it to all his cronies. And he had done her well too, by Jove! He was always kind to her. He let her have her own way absolutely when her way did not cross his, and their ways too rarely met (in any soul-sense) to cross often. And he was generous to her. He began that way, and, it is no little to the credit of so busy and business-bound a man, he had always kept it up. They had been married twenty-five years, and he bought flowers for her still. And jewelry he gave her constantly. No woman, unless she was the wife of a rich noble or a millionaire, had more good jewelry.
Mr. Gregory had given his wife some good jewelry for a wedding present. But the handsomest gifts she had received then had been sent her by an acquaintance he had never seen: a Chinese undergrad who had left Oxford the year before—“damned rich Chink,” as Robert Gregory expressed it, when he did not put it even more chastely, “a Rothschild of a nigger.”
The Chinese gift, a bracelet of emeralds and turquoise and jacinths and pearls, still was the most beautiful and the most valuable jewel Basil Gregory’s mother had, and she wore it on every occasion that justified such splendor. And Hilda, watching its green fire and blue softness on their mother’s fine white arm, could but wonder hungrily whether it would become ultimately the possession of herself or of Basil’s wife.
“It is the most beautiful jewel I have ever seen,” John Bradley said when he first saw it.
“Yes, isn’t it?” its owner acquiesced; “but when I have it on, I always feel as if I were wearing a bit of Revelation.”