"You had better divorce me and marry Francis Symeon," he said, "and cultivate spookism together."
The natural sequel to a scene like that was a little dinner at Claridge's with Mrs. Bellenden, and an evening at the silliest musical comedy to be seen and heard in London.
His wife had given him a letter of license. She had ceased to love him. He made himself so disagreeable to Mrs. Bellenden by dinner-time that the meal was eaten in sullen silence; and the Magnum of Veuve Pommeroy was hardly enough for two, for when Mrs. Bellenden was in a rage her glass had to be filled very often, and the waiters at the smart hotels knew her ways. The waiters worshipped her. "She tips as handsome as she tipples," had been said of her by one of them.
CHAPTER XXIX
Everything was dead. That had been Vera's answer when Claude asked despairingly if love was dead. The words were in her mind now as she stood alone in the room where her poets, and her actors, and her philosophers, looked at her from the white walls, and where the sound of the great hall door closing heavily as her husband shut it behind him was still in her ears.
Had he gone for ever? Was it indeed the end? Could love that had begun in ecstasy close in this grey calm? She felt neither sorrow nor anger. Everything was dead. She stood among the ruins of her life, feeling as a child might feel when the house she has built of cards shatters suddenly and falls at her feet. Everything was over. She had no thought of building another house; no desire to patch up a broken life and begin again. Perhaps her husband loved her still, and it was the gloom of this haunted house that had driven him to seek distraction in a baser love. It was her fault, perhaps, and she ought to be sorry for him. Poor Claude! She remembered his gaiety. The airy mockery that had enchanted her, the quick wit that had struck fire and light out of dull things. She remembered the joyous nature, the light laughter, the inexhaustible energy which made difficult things—in the way of sport—seem easy. Yes, they had been happy, utterly happy in the life of the moment, shutting out every thought that was irksome, every memory that hurt. And it was all over and dead, and she had nothing left but the shadows in this room, the dead faces, the words of those who were not. That scriptural phrase had always moved her. "He was not."
Her afternoons in Mr. Symeon's library had been all she had cared for in the season that was ending. She had gone wherever her husband asked her to go, and had given the entertainments he wanted her to give; but through all that brilliant summer she had gone about like "a corpse alive." That dreary simile had been in her mind sometimes when she thought of herself, sitting in her victoria, dressed as only the well-bred English woman with unlimited money can be dressed, lovely in her fragile fairness, admired and talked about. She had gone about, and held her own, in a quiet way, among crowds of clever men and women, and her life had seemed to her like the end of a long dream. Her only vital interest had been in the voices she heard in Francis Symeon's shadowy room. Those voices were of living men and women; but the words were the words of the dead.
She was not utterly unhappy. The past was past, and she had left off grieving over it, for now she had a transcendent hope in the near future—the hope of death. She would soon have passed the river that they had passed, Giulia and her father. The gate through which they had gone to a higher stage in the upward path of life would open for her; and no matter by what slow ascent, no matter with what feeble steps, she would climb the mountain up which they had gone, those emancipated spirits.
She had known for a long time that she was marked for death. She had no specific ailment, but in this last season she had felt her vanishing life, felt the painless ebb of vitality, and had measured, by a flight of stairs, by a pathway in the Park, where she walked sometimes in the early morning, the waning strength of limbs and heart. The dreadful sleeplessness of the first year of her widowhood had returned; and her nights were almost entirely spent in thought and reading, her brain never resting, her heart seldom quiet.