Her life was such a whirl, it may well be that she had no time to wonder whither she was flying. At any rate, she marked neither time nor direction, nor was aware that her friends were remarking on both. If you had checked her suddenly with the question, Was she happy? she would have stared before she answered you, Of course!
From day to day she hardly saw her husband alone. He breakfasted, as of old, in his room; his secretary came at ten, and stayed to luncheon. He had a nap after that, and went down to the House at four. He might return to dinner, he might join her at a party in time to take her home; but by then he would be so tired that he would drop asleep in the carriage. She may have known, or she may not, that his eyes were often upon her, intensely observant of her gaiety and appreciative of her good manners; she can hardly have known that she was seldom out of his thoughts. It must be confessed that he was not more than a perfunctory guest in hers: she wore his name in her prayers as she wore it abroad—in that world of his to which he had enlarged her, where she now fluttered her happy wings. She paid him, in fact, the service of lip and eye which we pay to God in church. He was, no doubt, the Author of her being. “My husband says”—“My husband thinks—”: she never used such a phrase without the little reverential hush in her voice, or without a momentary curtsey of the eyelids. When he showed himself in a room she went instantly to his side; when he was present at a dinner-table her tones were lower, her laughter less infectious. He was Disposer Supreme: he was secure of that dignified but remote office. It was one which he was well qualified to fill; and it was, unfortunately for him, the only one about her person which was then at his service. Nobody knew this better than the poor Stoic himself, nobody knew it less than the engrossed little lady.
It was not until the end of April, or, as Lord Gunner had ascertained it, the beginning of May that she became aware of the fact that she had been seeing Duplessis every day since the short Easter recess. It was forced upon her notice by this other, that for those days he was absent, and that she missed the homage of his knit brows. They were more to her, she found, than Horace Wing’s postures or Palmer Lovell’s placid contemplation of her charms. Yet each of these rising statesmen was much more her servant than Tristram could care to be. Lovell used to advise her about her gowns: it had got to that. His aunt, Lady Paynswick, had a shop—so that it was reasonable. Mr. Wing took each new apparition of her as an occasion for poetry—surface poetry, so to speak, which a more experienced subject might have found pert; but it sounded very well at the time. Duplessis did none of these things, neither saw, nor admired: he simply frowned. But she liked to be frowned at in that sort of way—she had always liked it. It meant, “You sting me. I have no rest. You could cure my scowls, but you won’t. I detest you, because I love you.” It was a tribute, implied power—and how could she help liking that? One of the great joys of power is that you can sit back at your ease, twiddle your thumbs and say to yourself, “An I would, I could—!” You must needs feel charitable to him who puts you in the way of that.
After his three days’ truantry, when he returned to her side, she showed him that she was glad to see him. Generous, but mistaken: it made him crosser than ever. He could be abominably rude when he chose—and he chose to be so now. She was at the Opera, alone in her box. He came in after the first act, nodded and sat down. This she forgave, even to the extent of offering her hand. “You’ve been away—it is nice of you to come. I’m all alone, you see.”
He said, one must go somewhere. She laughed that off. What had been the favoured country? He named Paris, as if it hurt him horribly. Paris! She had been there once—on her way home from Madrid. Some day she must be taken there again. It had been extraordinary—had seemed like walking on light. Duplessis said that it hadn’t been like that at all, but like walking in smells among a leering populace. All this was far from gay; but she was very good-tempered.
It would seem that he had come there to quarrel with her; for that is what he did. After an act and an interval of monosyllabic answers, spells of brooding, moustache-gnawing, and other symptoms of the devil, she roundly asked him what ailed him. He affected blank astonishment. Ailed him? Ailed? What on earth should ail him?
“Then,” said she, with colour, “I think you might be civil.” He stared, and met a pair of stormy eyes.
“Am I to understand—?” he began.
“You are to understand,” she told him, “that you are making me very uncomfortable. I have done you no harm.”
Her ancestry, you see, must peep out. She was preparing a scene—and what can one do then?