“It was,” Mary said. “And I told him all about it.”
Mrs. James started. “I told him,” Mary said, “on the night he died. He quite understood.”
“It is horrible to me,” cried Mrs. James, “that he was kept in the dark so long.”
“He wasn’t at all in the dark,” Mary said. “That is plain now. I wish that I had known it before.”
“You may well say so. Apart from candour, apart from sincerity, surely it is the sacred duty of a married woman to have no secrets from her husband.”
Mary looked up. She had the eyes of a woman acquainted with grief. “I am not a married woman,” she said. “I fancy that you must know it.”
XVI
WINGS
The tale of Germain’s posthumous disposition of his chattels ran, as such tales will, all about town, and lost nothing in the running. Women took it complacently, after their kind. Of course it was odd; and yet, in its way, was it not a tribute? One or two pretty young wives told each other that it was touching; a Miss Lavender shed tears. In the clubs they said plainly that Duplessis had been bought off. Palmer Lovell, with his back to the fireplace, cried out in his strident boy’s voice, “If that’s not compounding a felony, it’s compounding a felon. But what the devil of a right has old Germain, alive or dead, to whip his wife in public?” No clubman had an answer to this. The best thing of all was said by Lord Kesteven in Paris: “God be good to us, what Turks we all are! Here’s old Germain taking the harem-key into the grave with him.”
That keen-faced old lord came to London and called on Mary in Hill-street. He observed her pale in her black weeds, but with a haunted kind of beauty upon her which she had never had before. Her eyes were enormous, he said. She was very quiet in her manner, seemed dazed, but not cowed—apprehensive, you might think. She looked up at him in a mutely expectant way, as if she expected him momentarily to hit her, and was too tired even to flinch at the impending blow. He felt deeply for her—all sorts of things, and after his manner, therefore, was more bluff and direct than usual. “Well, my young friend, and what are you going to do with yourself? I should advise you to get out of this. No woman can be expected to stand it.”
She flushed at the bold attack, but did not avoid it. “I hear nothing of what is being said. I am sure he did not mean to be unkind. That is not like him. I was to blame.”