Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Once or twice, very early in their married life, Perceval had praised her, and his praise had given Althea exquisite pleasure because it was so rare, so seldom lavished; and this long-lost feeling of joy in her husband's approval came back, filling her eyes with tears. Now at last Althea felt as if she and Perceval Scrope were one, fused in that kindly sympathy and understanding which, being the manner of woman she was, Althea supposed to be the very essence of conjugal love.

As they were clasped together, she, the quick, he, the dead, Althea lost count of time; it might have been a moment, it might have been an hour, when at last the jolting ceased.

As the old man got off the box of his cab, and rang the bell, Big Ben boomed out the quarter-past five.

Since she had last gone through that door a yawning gap had come in Althea's life, a gap which she had herself bridged. Fear had dropped from her; she could never again be afraid as she had been afraid when she, Joan and Perceval had formed for the last time a trinity. The feeling which had so upheld her, the feeling that for the first time she and her husband were in unison, gave her not only courage but serenity of spirit. Althea shrank from acting a lie, but she saw, for the first time, through Perceval Scrope's eyes, and she admitted the necessity.

As the door opened, she remembered, almost with exultation, that Dockett, the butler, was out, and that it was only with Luke, the slow young footman, that she would have to deal. As she saw his tall, thin figure emerge hesitatingly into the street, Mrs. Scrope called out in a strong, confident voice, "Luke—come here! Help me to get Mr. Scrope indoors. He is ill; and as soon as we have got him into the morning room, you must go off for a doctor, at once——"

She waved aside the cabman almost impatiently, and it was Althea, Althea helped by Luke, who carried Perceval Scrope over the threshold of his own house, and so into a small room on the ground floor, a room opening out of the hall, and looking out on to the street.

"He looks very bad, don't 'e, ma'am?" Luke was startled out of his acquired passivity. "I'd better go right off now." She bent her head.

And then Althea, again alone with the dead man, suddenly became oppressed once more with fear, not the physical terror which had possessed her when Joan Panfillen had told her the awful truth, but none the less to her a very agonising form of fear. Althea was afraid that now, when approaching the end of her ordeal, she would fail Scrope and the woman he had loved. What was she to say, what story could she invent to tell those who would come and press her with quick eager questions? She knew herself to be incapable, not only of untruth, but of invention, and yet now both were about to be required of her.

Althea turned out the lights, and wandered out into the hall. She felt horribly lonely; with the exception of the kindly, stupid youth who had now gone to find a doctor, there was not a member of her considerable household in sufficient human sympathy with her to be called to her aid.

She remembered with a pang that this question of their servants had been one of the many things concerning which there had been deep fundamental disagreement between her husband and herself. She had been accustomed to a well-ordered, decorous household, and would even have enjoyed managing such a one; but Perceval—Perceval influenced by Dockett—had ordained otherwise, and Althea had soon become uneasily aware that the order and decorum reigning below stairs were only apparent. Even now there came up from the basement the sound of loud talking, of unrestrained laughter.