Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

But he had been unsuspecting, utterly unsuspecting, and even now he hardly knew what he did suspect.

The horrible things he had heard Mrs. Bliss say about other people acted and reacted on Germaine's imagination. If these things were true, then the world in which he and Bella lived was corrupt and rotten; and, as even Oliver Germaine knew by personal experience, pitch defiles. If Daphne Slade did the things Mrs. Bliss implied she did, Bella must know it,—know it and condone it. Bella was far too clever to be taken in, as he, Oliver, had been taken in, by Mrs. Slade's pretty pathetic manner, and appealing eyes. If Mrs. Slade took money from men, what an example, what a model——Germaine's mind refused to complete the thought.

Certain of Oliver's and Bella's old acquaintances—people whom they were too kind to drop, but of whom they couldn't see as much now as they had once done, in the days before Bella became a famous beauty—would sometimes hint darkly as to the wickedness of some of the people they knew. Even Fanny had told him bluntly that Bella had got into a very fast set. "Fast" was the word his sister had used, and it had diverted him.

But was it possible that these people, whom he had thought envious and silly—and that Fanny, his rather narrow-minded and old-fashioned sister,—had been right after all? Was it possible that like so many husbands of whom he had heard, for whom he had felt contempt and pity, he had—as regarded his own cherished wife—lived in a fool's paradise?

Germaine now remembered several things that he had known—known and thought forgotten—for they had been completely apart from his own life. He recalled the case of a man in his own regiment who had shot himself three days after his wife's death. It had been publicly given out that the poor fellow had been mad—distraught with grief; but there had been many to mutter that the truth was far other, and that the man had made a shameful discovery among his dead wife's papers....

Concerning any other woman than Bella, Germaine would have admitted, perhaps reluctantly,—but still, if asked the plain question, he would have admitted, that women are damned tricky creatures, and that—well, that you never can tell!

Again, out of the past, there came back to him, with horrid vividness, the memory of a brief episode which at the time had filled him with a kind of pity, even sympathy.

It was at a ball; he was quite a youngster, in fact it was the year after he had joined, and a woman sitting out with him in a conservatory had fallen into intimate talk, as people so often do amid unfamiliar surroundings. There came a moment when she said to him, with burning, unhappy eyes, "People think I'm a good woman, but I'm not." And she had hurried on to make the nature of her sinning quite clear; she had not passion for her excuse—only lack of means and love of luxury. He had been startled, staggered by the unasked-for confidence—and yet he had not thought much the worse of her; now, retrospectively, he judged her with terrible severity.

But Bella? The thought of Bella in such company was inconceivable; and yet, deep in Oliver Germaine's heart, there grew from the seed sown by Mrs. Bliss a upas tree which for the moment overshadowed everything. He was torn with anguished jealousy, which made him forget, excepting as affording a proof of what he feared, the sordid, horrible question of the money.

Germaine had already been jealous of Bella, jealous before their marriage, and jealous since, but that feeling had been nothing, nothing to that which now held him in its grip.