"Well, what I thought when I came this morning was, that a man like you, on secret service of some kind, knowing the ropes of most things, and speaking every known lingo, might be able to get at this beast, Mosson, and square him. Fake up some rot, as you did to those poor women. Bluff."
"My dear boy, there's only one way of squaring the Spider, and that is by paying him in full. Yes, I was hard on that poor fool of a girl. But a tongue like that! And think of the other, the slandered woman. By George! I could hardly keep my hands off the little liar. But the Spider. He's quite another matter. What the Spider doesn't know of the seamy side of life is not knowable. The only argument with him is hard cash down on the nail."
"But how to get it?" sighed the boy once more. And even as he sighed the fury of the Pole and the terror of the two women suddenly came before his mind in such an absurd light that he burst into a roar of light-hearted laughter. "My word! but you made that poor girl sit up," he shouted. "You couldn't have gone for her worse if the other woman had been your sister or mother."
Chapter XV
An Italian Lesson
With all her childishness and perversity, Ermengarde was not destitute of judgment and critical taste. Long before she reached the end of "Storm and Stress" she perceived that it was a really fine work, giving evidence of power and imagination and a knowledge of human nature, hitherto dormant and unsuspected in her husband. There was humour in it, unexpected flashes, that occasionally made little bursts of laughter startle the quiet of her room, and pathos poignant enough to bring hot, sudden tears to her eyes. She read on and on through the night, too much engrossed in the drama to think of the writer till overcome by sleep; and, when she woke, shivering in the cool dawn, read on to the end instead of going to bed.
Then she remembered that all this moving drama of intense thought and feeling, of insight into character, and vital, insoluble problems, came from the mind and heart of the man at whose side she had lived so long and so blindly, who had misunderstood her, and whom she had misunderstood, with whose real inward life and thought she had never once been in touch.
The man had lived a double life; he possessed two distinct selves, one of which was entirely strange to her. The Arthur she knew, the humdrum, irritating, fireside being of everyday life, could never have written "Storm and Stress"; he was absolutely devoid of the fire, the passion, and the imagination, the tenderness and poetry, the refined humour and delicate fancy, contained in that fine novel. He had never remotely hinted to her of the existence of these intricate social and political questions, so forcibly presented in this picture of actual life. And what could he know of the inner workings of a mother's heart—he who had misunderstood and wounded those of his own child's mother? Arthur, that cold, sarcastic being, that ambulant wet blanket upon all enthusiasms? No; she had married two men, and one was a stranger; she had unthinkingly mated with a genius, and never found it out; she was the wife of a man carrying a dark lantern that was always turned away from her.
It was humiliating; it was exasperating, the more so from the vague and haunting sense of remorse it kindled within her. Yet she was pleased, and in a way proud, to discover this rich mine of powerful imagination and intellectual vigour in the man so near her. But the thought that she was shut out and allowed no part in it chilled and cut her to the heart, even while conscience asked rather grimly why the publisher's parcel had remained so long unopened, receiving no adequate reply.
She came down late to her open-air breakfast, and found a table in a solitary corner, where she could take her coffee and roll unobserved of the few late lingerers on the sunny terrace, whose voices came clear upon the still and flower-scented air to her unheeding ears.