Mrs. Arthur; vol. 2 of 3

by Mrs. Oliphant

“That is just what I said. I tell Arthur, if he were to stick up for me as he ought, nobody would dare to treat me like that. I consider,” said Nancy, “that we paid those Eagles a great compliment going; and to meet the Curate! as if we were not good enough to sit down with the finest folks in this wretched little hole of a place.”

“The Curate is a very nice young man,” said Sarah Jane. “I should not mind him a bit. I call him handsome; but then he’s married,” she added with lessened satisfaction. “And so are you married, so it comes to the same thing. I dare say they thought as you were both young couples—”

“I wish you would think a little what you’re saying,” said Nancy. “Me! and her! a bit of a girl in white muslin! with a hundred and fifty a year, at the outside, to live on; and obliged to work hard among the poor, as hard as if she was a curate too—and me!”

“Yes, indeed, there is no comparison,” said Mrs. Bates. “For shame, Sarah Jane! But, Nancy, you mustn’t forget that your sister has chosen her lot very different. John Raisins is an excellent young man; but he can’t open the doors of high life to her, as Arthur can open them to you. And it’s best that she should make up her mind to what she can have—not hanker after what she can’t. It’s very different, my darling child, with you.”

“I am sure I don’t know if it’s different,” said Nancy. “He hasn’t opened many doors to me yet, and I think he’d shut your door if he could, which is the only one that’s left. Oh, why do girls marry? they are a deal better, if they could only think it, at home.” And with this Nancy began to cry.

Arthur heard everything in the next room. He had himself felt the change in his position sorely on the previous night; and Mr. Eagles’ sharp, yet somewhat mournful adjurations to him not to lose his time, to go on with his work, to do something, had intensified the effect. He had come upstairs early enough to hear the style of Nancy’s conversation with the two ladies, and this also had touched him deeply. What is more painful than to see those whom we love giving what, to our eyes, is a false representation of themselves to the outside world, which does not know them? Arthur felt this tingle to his very finger-points—a painful shame; her foolish rudeness, and the wrong which she did herself by this misrepresentation had made him miserable. If they could but see her as he knew her—as she was on other occasions? This, he said to himself, was not Nancy; it was a foolish braggart of the village, the type of the Bates family, not his wife, who was as much above the Bates in fine taste and perception as she was in beauty. To be sure, her taste had not lately told for very much. But that had been the influence of the uncomfortable position in which she had felt herself, or of her connections, whom she had so unfortunately insisted on coming back to. The pain had been exquisite with which Arthur watched his bride through this first appearance in society. It brought back to him the feelings which he had tried to forget, with which he had come in upon the violent termination of her interview with Mrs. Anthony Curtis. Was there nothing he could do, or say, which would persuade her that this was not the way to meet strangers who might turn out to be friends? He was sitting unhappy enough over his fire, having taken out a book or two, which lay on the table beside the “Times,” the usual occupation of his aimless morning. He had been trying to “read” as Mr. Eagles understood reading; but what were Demosthenes and Cicero to him? He could not go back now, and toil over the intricacies of language and argument which wanted all his attention ceaselessly, with happy ease of mind, not with painful pre-occupation of it, as he had pursued those studies in their earlier stages. He had never been a hard student, and why should he read now? What good would it do him? Would all the reading in the world, or his degree, when he had taken it, restore him to the world in which his wife could not accompany him, and would not try to accompany him, and where he could not go without her? He had been sitting dreamily over the fire, thinking it all over. The vague plan in his mind had been when Nancy was a little better prepared for it, a little more likely to incline in her own mind towards it, and willing to try to make the experiment successful, to take her home and present her to his father and mother, hoping that the surprise and the pleasure of his own return might procure them a welcome; this is what he had thought of even when he had written formal letters to Sir John, and those brief notes to Lucy or his mother, in which there was no reference to Nancy. When he could get her guided to that point—when he could feel that she could bear the trial, then to go. It had been his hope all through, a something vaguely looked forward to, though never brought down to any settled moment of time. But, alas! it had receded before him point by point. Nancy was not willing to do anything to please. She was of opinion that by herself, without any effort, she ought to rule easily over a subject world. She felt herself—not as he did, to be upon the painful threshold of an unexplored country, full of perils, in which all her efforts were needed to find herself a place—but rather to have conquered all that could be put in her way and attained every object—with the exception of the homage of those “stuck up” and disagreeable people, who were envious of her, and therefore would not pay her the attention to which she had a right, and whom Nancy would scorn to do anything to conciliate. What a difference between their points of view! And he who ought to have been the strongest, who was infinitely better educated, and more reasonable than Nancy, he was powerless to convey any other conviction to her mind; although she succeeded in agitating his with all sorts of tumults, with shame that she should show her worse qualities, and earn the disapproval she incurred—yet with hot resentment towards those who disapproved of her. Such sentiments are not unusual in human bosoms. Husbands feel so for their wives, and wives for their husbands, and parents for their children. Why will they show themselves at their worst to make strangers laugh, or wonder, or despise; and at the same time, how do they dare, these strangers, to despise, or laugh, or wonder? A more painful conflict of feeling cannot be.

This was what Arthur was thinking, sitting drearily, not among the ruins of his domestic happiness, but before the sunny, common-place, too trimly new and flimsy altar of those capricious deities who rule the hearth. He had not yet been six months married: but how the bloom had gone off all his hopes, and with how little confidence he regarded the future, which once had seemed to him so bright! And as he sat there, with his books thrown down at his elbow, and the “Times” thrust away from him upon the table, with a sort of loathing in his mind both of the studies which could now, he thought, do him no good if he returned to them, and of the public life, once certain, which now seemed to have become impossible and undesirable, he heard Mrs. Bates and Sarah Jane come in and the conversation that followed. Even now Arthur had sense enough (and it was creditable to him) to throw himself into no vulgar vituperation of his mother-in-law. The woman was well enough; she was kind, and almost fierce in independence, taking nothing from him, giving not receiving hospitality, and in no way disposed to encourage his wife in anything disagreeable to him. It was not Mrs. Bates that was in fault, but Nancy herself—she who had seemed to him such a lily of grace and sweetness among all these common-place people. She was so still, he believed; she was not like them, who were natural to their sphere, and suggested nothing better. He was faithful notwithstanding all imperfections to his first ideal of her; but her words thrilled through and through him, scarring him as with burning arrows. “He had not opened any doors to her. Oh, why did girls marry!” was this what his wife asked after five months of marriage with him? Arthur’s veins seemed to fill full as if some essence of pain had been poured into them. He darted up overcome by sharp misery and shame, and a passionate resentment which he could not restrain. It took him but a moment to throw open the folding doors. If one minute more had elapsed, it would have brought a second thought, but there was no interval in which this was possible. He threw open the door and stood looking at her, for the moment too tremulous and agitated to speak. She had put shame upon him before those women who were the only visitors she cared for. When she saw him, Nancy jumped up too and confronted him.

“Well?” she said, loudly, with a sharp and tremulous voice of interrogation. What had he to say for himself? She had said nothing which she was not ready to stand to, which she would not defend with all her powers. No one had ever known Nancy to flinch. However hot and hasty had been her assertions, however lightly said, she had always stood up for them; and to such a palpable challenge and trumpet call to conflict, it was not likely she would give in now.

He stood and looked at her for a moment almost wavering. It was not the first time she had said such things, why should he resent it so much more than usual?

“Did you mean that?” he said. “Do you really think that I have closed doors but opened none, and that girls would not marry if they knew—”