The Mating of Lydia

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Mr. Tyson, the agent, came to the house as seldom as he could, that he might not quarrel with his employer before it was to his own interest to do so. Netta discovered that he pitied her; and once or twice, drawing on the arts of flirtation, with which the Florentine woman is always well acquainted, she complained to him of her loneliness and her husband's unkindness. But his north-country caution protected him from any sentimentalizing, however innocent. And before the end of the winter Netta detested him. Meanwhile she and Anastasia lived for one hope only. From many indications it was plain that Melrose was going south in March. The women were determined not to stay behind him. But, instinctively, they never raised the subject, so as not to risk a struggle prematurely.

Meanwhile Melrose passed a winter wholly satisfactory to himself. The partial unpacking of his collections was an endless source of amusement and pleasure. But his curious egotism showed itself very plainly in the business. He made no attempt at artistic arrangement, though there was some classification. As fast as one room was filled—the vacant packing-cases turned on their sides, serving to exhibit what they had once contained—he would begin upon another. And woe to Mrs. Dixon or Thyrza if they attempted any cleaning in one of his rooms! The collections were for himself only, and for the few dealers or experts to whom he chose to show them. And the more hugger-mugger they were, the less he should be pestered to let people in to see them. Occasionally he would rush up to London to attend what he called a "high puff sale"—or to an auction in one of the northern towns, and as he always bought largely, purchases kept arriving, and the house at the end of the winter was in a scarcely less encumbered and disorderly condition than it had been at the beginning. The few experts from the Continent or America, whom he did admit, were never allowed a word of criticism of the collections. If they ventured to differ from Melrose as to the genuineness or the age of a bronze or a marble, an explosion of temper and a speedy dismissal awaited them.

One great stroke of luck befel him in February which for a time put him in high good-humour. He bought at York—very cheaply—a small bronze Hermes, which some fifteenth-century documents in his own possession, purchased from a Florentine family the year before, enabled him to identify with great probability as the work of one of the rarest and most famous of the Renaissance sculptors. He told no one outside the house, lest he should be plagued to exhibit it, but he could not help boasting of it to Netta and Anastasia.

"That's what comes of having an eye! It's worth a thousand guineas of it's worth a penny. And those stupid idiots let me have it for twenty-two pounds!"

"A thousand guineas!" Gradually the little bronze became to Netta the symbol of all that money could have bought for her—and all she was denied; Italy, freedom, the small pleasures she understood, and the salvation of her family, now in the direst poverty. There were moments when she could have flung it passionately out of the window into the stream a hundred feet below. But she was to find another use for it.

March arrived. And one day Anastasia came to tell her mistress that she had received orders to pack Mr. Melrose's portmanteaus for departure.

Netta brooded all day, sitting silent and pale in the window-seat, with some embroidery which she never touched on her knee. Outside, not a sign of spring! A bitter north wind was blowing which had blanched all colour from the hills, and there was ice on the edges of the streams. Thyrza was away in Carlisle, helping an aunt. There was no one in the house but Mrs. Dixon, and a deaf old woman from one of the labourer's cottages; attached to the farm, who had come in to help her. The poor babe had a cold, and could be heard fretfully crying and coughing in her nursery.

And before Netta's inward eye there stretched the interminable days and weeks ahead, no less than the interminable weeks and months she had already lived through, in this discomfort of body, and this loneliness of spirit.

After supper she walked resolutely into her husband's littered study and demanded that she and Anastasia and the baby should go with him to the Continent. He, she understood, would stop in Paris. She and the child would push on to Florence, where she could stay the summer with her people, at no greater cost than at the Tower. The change was necessary both for her and Felicia, and go she would.

Melrose flatly and violently refused. What did she want better than the Tower? She had as much service, and as much luxury as her antecedents entitled her to; and he neither could nor would provide her with anything more. He was heavily in debt, and had no money to spend on railway tickets. And he entirely disapproved of her relations, especially of her father, who might any day find himself "run in" by the Italian authorities for illicit smuggling of pictures out of the country. He declined to allow his child to become familiar with such a circle.