CHAPTER VIII
MORNICE JUNE
Eliphalet Cardomay stretched himself luxuriously on a green-painted arm-chair by the Achilles Statue in Hyde Park.
He was wearing a new broad-brimmed grey felt hat, and the seasonableness of his attire spread to a pair of dark felt spats, below which the bright spring sunshine reflected itself on the surface of his well-blacked boots.
It was pleasing to lounge under the new-foliaged plane trees and watch fashionable London sedately disporting itself on the gravel paths—to see the riders cantering in the Row, and to hear the “clot-clot” and pleasant jingle of harness as the smart people drove by. Something in the pageantry of it all appealed to his dramatic sense. Piccadilly—the Strand—Oxford Street—awoke no sympathetic chords in his being—he was more at ease and happier in any of the great thoroughfares of Manchester, Leeds or Glasgow, but this great meeting-place of England’s noblest-born stirred him strangely.
The tide of well-dressed men and beautifully-gowned women set his mind upon a sad train of thought. They were not for him, these select; his poster on a hoarding they would pass by without a second glance. They belonged to the great ones of the London stage—that mighty little clique whose doors were barred to such as he. That very morning he had seen a few of the upper theatrical ten walking in the Park, and, even as the thought crossed his mind, Sir Charles Cleeve, an actor knight, and his fashionable wife, drove past in a high phaeton drawn by a pair of piebalds. A real live duchess turned in her carriage to smile a greeting to them. (Eliphalet knew she was a duchess, for he had often seen her portrait in the illustrated weeklies, hanging on Smith’s book-stalls in the Midland stations.) A clever woman Sir Charles’s wife. All the world knew that the high ground he now held unchallenged had in part been won for him by her tireless energy, tact and charm.
It was a great thing for an actor to possess such a wife. He fell to wondering whether, had his choice been as happy, he, too, might not have been a member of the Garrick Club, a driver of phaetons, a recipient of smiles from duchesses. He could hardly refrain from smiling at the thought of the figure his wife would have cut in polite society. Yet she had been an able enough actress in her day. Poor Blanche—poor, empty-headed, self-centred, easy-virtued Blanche. It required an effort to reconstruct her picture in his mind. Twenty-seven years is a long time, and even pleasant pictures had faded in less. Once he had loved her, like a very Romeo, and set her on a pinnacle higher than any balcony. He shivered, as with horrible clarity he saw the night when, returning late from the theatre (there had been a rehearsal after the show), he had found her in their wretched little parlour, drinking a wretched brand of champagne with Harrington May, the leading-man. The same Harrington May who had fled from the field of honour—to return later, as a fly returns to a pot of jam.
Everyone has supper with everyone else on the provincial stage. It is one of the best and friendliest traditions of the Road, and Eliphalet, born and bred of the Boards, would have thought no ill to find her entertaining one or a dozen men at any hour of the night. But this was different. It was not the friendly little repast with its scrambled eggs and rattle of theatrical shop; it was frankly a carouse. There were empty tinselled bottles on the table, and those down whose throats the liquid had passed were drunk—Harrington May dully, and his wife stupidly. She had her head on the man’s shoulder, and was laughing in a loose, trumpery way.
It was useless to talk to them, for May was not in a state to distinguish between flattery and abuse, while she was in a mood to say things no man would desire a third person to hear. Accordingly, he postponed his observations until next morning, and when that came it appeared she had the more to say. With bitter emphasis she stated that, as a husband, Eliphalet fell far short of her ideals. Apart from the miserable salary he earned, which, in itself, was an insult to a woman who was earning a larger one (for Blanche was playing the villainess and he the juvenile, and in those days virtue was cheaper than crime), she abhorred his studious nature, his ridiculous name, and his attitude towards life in general. She was of a lively temperament—a temperament calling for plenty of sparkle and sunshine (he had thought of those empty bottles downstairs), and accordingly had decided to leave him for good.
Eliphalet offered little or no opposition. He had known for a long while that sooner or later their ill-assorted union would come to an end.
“Very well,” he had said; “I won’t stand in the way of your happiness. You shall have a divorce as soon as it can be arranged.”