“How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?”
Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of the room, shut the door, and locked it.
They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all? What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her husband had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and curiosity fought within her; and she became conscious of an excitement such as she had never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got into bed and lay there listening to the noises made by her husband in his dressing-room. She could just hear them faintly through the door. Presently they ceased. A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa in the dressing-room. Could he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing seemed incredible to her. For Lord Holme, although he could rough it when he was shooting or hunting, at home or abroad, and cared little for inconvenience when there was anything to kill, was devoted to comfort in ordinary life, and extremely exigent in his own houses. For nothing, for nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to allow himself to be put out.
She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room, when she heard a noise as if something—some piece of furniture—had been kicked, and then a stentorian “Damn!”
Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House. If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine dignity—that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own proper peril—it disappeared. The “poor old Fritz” feeling, which was the most human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity as she realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the short sofa, the pent-up fury—fury of the too large body on the too small resting-place—which found a partial vent in the hallowed objurgation of the British Philistine.
With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing Fritz. She nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs luxuriously. How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled her husband’s words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had spoken to Carey. He had called her “a damned shameful woman.” That was of all the worst offence. She told herself that she ought to, that she must, for that expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then, immediately, she knew that she had forgiven it already, without effort, without thought.
She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd boyishness that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind to give words their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of torture, or the pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but by the mind that sends them forth. Fritz’s exclamation might have roused eternal enmity in her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from Fritz it won its pardon easily by having a brother, “Damn.”
She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of outrage.
Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation, then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned on her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in bed. Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.
Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed upon her husband’s immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the morning.