Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

At the time Althea had tried to smile, but the words her husband had used had hurt her, horribly, for they had seemed to cast a reflection on her father—the father who thought so much of education, and who had been at such pains to obtain for his motherless only child an ideal chaperon-governess, a lady who had always lived with the best families in Newcastle. Miss Burt would certainly have made her pupil read Dickens if Dickens were in any real sense an educating influence, instead of writing, as Althea had always understood he did, only about queer and vulgar people.

Not educated? Why, her father had sent her away from him for a whole year to Dresden, in order that she might learn German and study music to the best possible advantage! True, she had not learnt her French in France, for her father had a prejudice against the French; he belonged to a generation which admired Germany, and disliked and distrusted the French. She had, however, been taught French by an excellent teacher, a French Protestant lady who had lived all her life in England. Of course Althea had never read a French novel, but she could recite, even now, whole pages of Racine and Corneille by heart.

And yet, even in this matter of languages, Perceval was unfair, for some weeks after he had said that cruel thing to her about education, and when they were at last settling down in their own house, arranging the details of their first dinner party, he had said to her with a certain abrupt ill-humour, "The one language I thought you did know was menu-French!"

Joan Panfillen was also disappointed in Althea. Scrope's Egeria had hoped to convert Scrope's wife, not into a likeness of herself—she was far too clever a woman to hope to do that—but into a bright, cheerful companion for Perceval Scrope's lighter hours. She had always vaguely supposed that this was the rôle reserved to pretty, healthy young women possessed of regular features, wavy brown hair, and good teeth....

But Mrs. Panfillen had soon realised, and the knowledge brought with it much unease and pain, that she had made a serious mistake in bringing about the marriage. And yet it had been necessary to do something; there had come a moment when not only she, but even Scrope himself, had felt that he must be lifted out of the class—always distrusted and despised in England—of political adventurers. Scrope required, more than most men, the solid platform, nay, the pedestal, of wealth, and accordingly his Egeria had sacrificed herself and, incidentally, the heiress, Althea.

But, as so often happens to those who make the great renouncement, Joan Panfillen found that after all no such thing as true sacrifice was to be required of her.

After his marriage, Scrope was more often with her than he had ever been, and far more willing, not only to ask but to take, his Egeria's advice on all that concerned his brilliant, meteoric career. He seldom mentioned his wife, but Mrs. Panfillen knew her friend far too well not to know how it was with him; Althea fretted his nerves, offended his taste, jarred his conscience, at every turn of their joint life.

There were, however, two meagre things to the good—Althea's fortune, the five thousand a year, which now, after four years, did not seem so large an income as it had seemed at first; and the fact that Scrope's marriage had extinguished the odious, and, what was much more unpleasant to such a woman as was Joan Panfillen, the ridiculous, jealousy of Joan's husband.

Thomas Panfillen greatly admired Althea; he thought her what she was—a very lovely young woman, and the fact that he had known her father made him complacently suppose that he had brought about her marriage to the peculiar, he was told the remarkably clever, if rather odd, Perceval Scrope.

Baulked of certain instinctive rights, the human heart seeks compensation as surely as water seeks its level. Althea, unknown to herself, had a compensation. His name was John Bustard. He was in a public office—to be precise, the Privy Council Office. He lived in rooms not far from his work, that is, not far from Delahay Street, and he had got into the way of dropping in to tea two, three, sometimes even four times a week.