“But I was jolly sick, I can tell you. If you’d only let me know a week ago that you were coming, I should have refused the invitation.”
“My dear Edward, I’m so unpractical, I never know my own mind, and I’m always doing things on the spur of the moment, to my own inconvenience and other people’s. And I should never have expected you to deny yourself anything for my sake.”
Bertha, perplexed, almost dismayed, looked at her husband with astonishment. She scarcely recognised him. In the three years of their common life Bertha had noticed no change in him, and with her great faculty for idealisation, had carried in her mind always his image, as he appeared when first she saw him, the slender, manly youth of eight-and-twenty. Miss Ley had discerned alterations, and spiteful feminine tongues had said that he was going off dreadfully. But his wife had seen nothing. And the separation had given further opportunities to her fantasy. In absence she had thought of him as the handsomest of men, delighting over his clear features, his fair hair, his inexhaustible youth and strength. The plain facts would have disappointed her even if Edward had retained the looks of his youth, but seeing now as well the other changes, the shock was extreme. It was a different man she saw, almost a stranger. Craddock did not wear well; though but thirty-one, he looked much older. He had broadened and put on flesh, his features had lost their delicacy, and the red of his cheeks was growing coarse. He wore his clothes in a slovenly fashion, and had fallen into a lumbering walk as if his boots were always heavy with clay; and there was in him, besides, the heartiness and intolerant joviality of the prosperous farmer. Edward’s good looks had given Bertha the keenest pleasure, and now, rushing, as was her habit, to the other extreme, she found him almost ugly. This was an exaggeration, for though he was no longer the slim youth of her first acquaintance, he was still, in a heavy, massive way, better looking than the majority of men.
Edward kissed her with marital calm, and the propinquity wafted to Bertha’s nostrils the strong scents of the farmyard, which, no matter what his clothes, hung perpetually about him. She turned away, hardly concealing a little shiver of disgust. Yet they were the same masculine odours as once had made her nearly faint with desire.
Chapter XXIV
BERTHA’S imagination seldom permitted her to see things in anything but a false light; sometimes they were pranked out in the glamour of the ideal, while at others the process was quite reversed. It was astonishing that so short a break should have destroyed the habit of three years; but the fact was plain that Edward had become a stranger, so that she felt it irksome to share the same room with him. She saw him now with jaundiced eyes, and told herself that at last she had discovered his true colours. Poor Edward was paying heavily because the furtive years had robbed him of his locks and given him in exchange a superabundance of fat; because responsibility, the east wind, and good living, had taken the edge off his features and turned his cheeks plethoric.
Bertha’s love, indeed, had finally disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen, and she began seriously to loathe her husband. She had acquired a certain part of Miss Ley’s analytic faculty, which now she employed with destructive effect upon Edward’s character. Her absence had increased the danger to Edward in another way, for the air of Paris had exhilarated her and sharpened her wits so that her alertness to find fault was doubled and her impatience with the commonplace and the stupid, extreme. And Bertha soon found that her husband’s mind was not only commonplace, but common. His ignorance no longer seemed touching, but merely shameful; his prejudices no longer amusing but contemptible. She was indignant at having humbled herself so abjectly before a man of such narrowness of mind, of such insignificant character. She could not conceive how she had ever passionately loved him. He was bound in by the stupidest routine. It irritated her beyond measure to see the regularity with which he went through the varying processes of his toilet. She was indignant with his presumption, and self-satisfaction, and conscious rectitude. Edward’s taste was contemptible in books, in pictures, and in music; and his pretentions to judge upon such matters filled Bertha with scorn. At first his deficiencies had not affected her, and later she consoled herself with the obvious truism that a man may be ignorant of all the arts, and yet have every virtue under the sun. But now she was less charitable. Bertha wondered that because her husband could read and write as well as most board-scholars, he should feel himself competent to judge books—even without reading them. Of course it was most unreasonable to blame the poor man for a foible common to the vast majority of mankind. Every one who can hold a pen is confident of his ability to criticise, and to criticise superciliously. It never occurs to the average citizen that, to speak modestly, almost as much art is needed to write a book as to adulterate a pound of tea; nor that the author has busied himself with style and contrast, characterisation, light and shade, and many other things to which the practice of haberdashery, greengrocery, company-promotion, or pork-butchery, is no great key.
One day, Edward, coming in, caught sight of the yellow paper-cover of a French book that Bertha was reading.
“What, at it again?” said he. “You read too much; it’s not good for people to be always reading.”
“Is that your opinion?”