Loosening her hands as quickly as he had grasped them, he raised his hat and stood bare-headed in the shadowy evening light, gazing at her as a man might gaze who was looking his last on life itself. Then he turned swiftly and was gone.
For a moment Delicia remained passively watching his retreating figure, her hand on the collar of Spartan, who manifested a wild desire to bound after him and bring him back. Then, shuddering a little, she went into the house and shut herself up alone in her bedroom for an hour. When she came out again her eyes were heavy with the shedding of tears; but such an expression was on her face as might be on the radiant features of an angel. And she was very quiet all that evening, sitting at her window and watching the clouds gradually clear, and the great stars shine out above the sea.
CHAPTER IX
The next day she received her husband's letter, the letter in which he had excused himself altogether and started a complaint against her instead. She glanced over it with a weary sense of disgust, and smiled disdainfully as she thought what a mountain he was trying to make out of the mole-hill of the paragraph in Honesty.
'As if any one of the lying tongues of journalism wagging against me could do me such wrong as his open infidelity,' she mused. 'God! How is it that men manage to argue away their own vices as if they were nothing, and yet take every small opportunity they can find for damaging an innocent woman's reputation!'
She flung aside the letter and turned over the morning paper. There she found, under the heading of 'Scene at a London Club,' an account of Aubrey Grovelyn's horse-whipping at the hands of Paul Valdis. The exposé of the so-called 'poet,' who, as Mr Brown, had been steadily booming himself, was cautiously hinted at in darkly ambiguous terms—no journal likes to admit that it has been cleverly fooled by one of its own staff. And great editors, who are anywhere and everywhere except where they should be, namely, in the editorial room, are naturally loth to make public the results of their own inattention to business. They do not like to confess that, in their love of pleasure and their devotion to race-meetings and shooting-parties, it often happens that the very porters guarding the doors of their offices know more about the staff than they do. The porter can tell exactly the hour that Mr B—— comes in to the office at night, the shortness of the time he stays there, and the precipitate hurry with which he goes home to bed. The porter knows that Mr B—— is paid five hundred a year for doing hard work at that office during a certain number of hours, and that Mr B—— seldom looks in for more than one hour, having other work on other papers, about which he says nothing. And that, therefore, Mr B—— is distinctly 'doing' his editor and proprietor. But as long as editors and proprietors prefer to caper about at the heels of 'swagger' society instead of attending strictly to their duties and to the grave responsibilities of journalism, so long will the British Press be corrupted by underlings, and 'used' for purposes which are neither honourable nor national, nor in any way exact, as reflecting the real current of public opinion. Delicia knew all this of old, hence her indifference to the press generally. She had always been entertained and surprised at the naïve delight with which certain society 'belles' had shown her descriptions of themselves in certain fashionable journals, where their personal attractions were enumerated and discussed as if they were nothing more than cattle in a market. She could never understand what pleasure there was in the vulgar compliments of the cheap paragraphist. And in the same way she never thought it worth while to attach importance to the scurrilities that appeared in similar quarters concerning all those women who stood aloof from self-advertisement and declined to 'give themselves away' by consenting to the maudlin puffery of the 'ladies' paper.' So that the lofty tone of injury her husband assumed in his letter not only struck her as mean, but infinitely grotesque as well. She did not answer him, nor did he write again; and she passed a quiet fortnight at Broadstairs, finishing some literary work she had promised to her publishers at a certain date, and trying to think as little as possible of herself or her private griefs. When she was not engaged in creative composition, she turned to the study of books with almost as much ardour as had possessed her when, at the age of twelve, she had preferred to shut herself up alone and read Shakespeare to any other form of entertainment. And gradually, almost unconsciously to herself, the tone and temper of her mind changed and strengthened; she began to reconcile herself to the idea of the lonely lot which would henceforward be her portion. Turning the matter practically over in her mind, she decided that the best course to adopt would be that of a 'judicial separation.' She would make her husband a suitable 'allowance' (she smiled rather bitterly as she thought what a trouble he would make of it, and how he would fret and fume if he had to do without his four-in-hand and his tandem turn-out), and she herself would travel all over the world and gain fresh knowledge and experience for her literary labours. Or, if constant travel proved to be too fatiguing, she would take some place in the remote Highlands of Scotland, or the beautiful sequestered valleys of Ireland, and make a little hermitage among the hills, where she could devote herself to work and study for the remainder of her days.
'I daresay I shall manage to be at least content, if I am not happy,' she said to herself; 'though, of course, society will reverse the position in its usual eminently false and disgusting way, and will whisper all sorts of lies about me, such as, "Oh, you know a literary woman is impossible to live with! It is always so; poor, dear Carlyon could not possibly stand her, she was so dreadful! Clever, but quite dreadful! Yes, and so they are separated. Such a good thing for Carlyon! He looks ten years younger since he got rid of her! And they say she's living down in the country somewhere not too far from town; not so far but that Paul Valdis knows where to find her!" Oh, yes, I can hear them all at it,—croaking harpies!' and her small hand clenched involuntarily. 'The vultures of society can never understand anyone loving the sweet savour of truth; they only scent carrion. No man is true in their estimation, no woman pure; and chastity is so far from being pleasing to them that they will not even believe it exists!'
On the last afternoon of her stay at Broadstairs, she spent several hours strolling by the sea, listening to its solemn murmur and watching the sunlight fall in golden lines over its every billow and fleck of foam. With the gravity of her thoughts, her face had grown more serious during the last few days, though it had lost nothing in sweetness of expression; and as she paced along the sand, close to the very fringe of the waves, with Spartan bounding now and then into the water and back with joyous, deep barks of delight, a sudden, inexplicable sense of pain and regret surprised her into tears. Gazing far out beyond the last gleam of the ocean line with longing eyes, she murmured,—
'How strange it is! I feel as if I should never look upon the sea again! I am growing morbid, I suppose, but to my fancy the waves are saying, "Good-bye, Delicia! Good-bye for ever, and still good-bye!" like Tosti's old song!'
She stood silent for a little while, then turned and went homeward, resolutely battling with the curious foreboding that had suddenly oppressed her brain and heart. Spartan, shaking the wet spray from his shaggy coat, trotted by her side in the highest spirits; he was untroubled by any presentiments; he lived for the moment and enjoyed it thoroughly—a habit of mind common to all animals except man.