She never admitted to herself that she did wrong; much less had she ever permitted anyone else to hint that she did so. A bad woman! Ladies like herself can no more conceive such a phrase being used to describe them than a winner of the Oaks could imagine herself between a costermonger’s shafts. All that they do is ticketed under pretty or pleasant names on the shelves of their memories; tact, friendship, amusement, sympathy, convenience, amiability, health, one or other of these nice sounding words labels every one of their motives or actions. To class themselves with “bad people” never enters their minds for a moment; Messalina would certainly never have dreamed of being classed with the horizontales of the Suburra. What made it worse was that she was still fond of him, though he often bored her. She would have given ten years of life to have had his face under her foot and to have stamped it into blurred ugliness as she had stamped the wheelbarrow into atoms. But these fierce simple pleasures, alas! are only allowed to the women of the Haymarket and the Rat Mort.
She had done incalculable harm to Harry; she had worried, enslaved, and tormented the best years of his life; she had impoverished him utterly, she had stripped him of the little he had ever possessed, she had driven him into debt which would hang about his neck like a millstone to the day of his death; she had turned a simple and honest nature into devious and secret ways; she had made him lie, and laughed at him when he had been ashamed of lying; she had done him a world of harm, and in return he had only said five little rude words to her. But his offence seemed to her so enormous that if she had possessed the power she would have had him beaten with rods or roasted at a slow fire. That she had been his worst enemy she would never have admitted for one instant, never have supposed that anyone could think it. She considered that she had made him supremely happy during a very long period, that if she had ever given him cause for jealousy he had never known it, which is all that a well-bred man should expect; and that he had enjoyed the supreme felicity of being associated in her home life, of knowing all her worries and annoyances, and of being allowed to make an ass of himself in the nurseries in a simili-domestic fashion which was just suited to his simple tastes as a simili-bronze of a classic statuette is suited to the narrow purse of a tourist. His ingratitude seemed to her so vile, so enormous, that the immensity of her own wrongs made her submit to bear them in silence out of admiration of her own magnanimity and the serenity of her own certitude that she would avenge herself somehow or other to the smallest iota.
She rang the bell, which was answered by a colleague of the young philosopher in powder of the anteroom. “The dogs have torn up this bonbon thing,” she said, pointing to the wreck of the ruined wheelbarrow. “Take it away and bring me some luncheon in here; only a quail and some plover eggs and some claret; order the carriage for three o’clock.”
She felt exhausted from the extreme violence of her anger and the infamy of the affront she had received; and were Phedre or Dido or Cleopatra living on the brink of the twentieth century no one of them would any day go without her luncheon. They would know that their emotions “took it out” of them, that their nervous system was in danger when their affections are disturbed; they would know all about neurasthenia and marasma, and however angry or unhappy for Hippolytus, for Æneas, or for Anthony, would remember that they were organisms very easily put out of order, machines which require very regular nutrition; they would be fully conscious of the important functions of their livers, and would regulate their passions so as not to interfere with their digestions.
CHAPTER XXIII.
When she had ended her repast with two hothouse nectarines, her brother was announced, to her great vexation. She never saw Ronnie very willingly and now less willing than ever, for his position with regard to her and her children was one which could not have made him a persona gratâ even had he been less outspoken and uncompromising than he was. At the present moment he was especially unwelcome to her; but as he had come upstairs disregarding the servants’ endeavors to induce him to wait while they inquired their mistress’s pleasure, he had entered the room before she had quite finished her second nectarine, and it was impossible to order him to go away as he came. He had come on business.
There was a great deal of business concerning little Jack’s succession, the many burdens already laid thereon, and the various projects which were in consideration for turning to the best account the long minority. Then there were her own jointure, her own rights and claims, her own debts. The views which he had been afforded from time to time of hers and Cocky’s affairs had been but partial; nothing had ever been completely divulged to him, neither Cocky or she could ever tell the exact truth—it was not in them. Therefore, although Hurstmanceaux had known a good deal of their embarrassments he had not known many matters which now appalled him when they came before him in the dry, cold prose of legal fact, and he had not spared his sister the complete expression of his supreme amazement and supreme disgust.
Their interviews were therefore neither gay nor cordial, and she did not assume a contentment which she was so far from feeling, as his entrance made the claret seem corked and the nectarine seem sour.
After the statement of the especial piece of legal business which had brought him there that morning, the letting on a long lease of the dower-house at Staghurst, for which her signature was necessary, Hurstmanceaux, standing on the hearth in the same attitude he had assumed when he had recommended Black Hazel, said very simply and very curtly to her:
“You let the dower-house instead of living in it. Will you tell me where you do mean to live?”