The bridegroom wrote one letter, and only one, of explanation. It was to Mr. Jagenal, the family solicitor.
'To so old a friend,' he wrote, 'the fullest explanations are due concerning things which may appear strange. Until the day before yesterday there were still existing certain family reasons which rendered it absolutely necessary for us to conceal our marriage and to act with so much prudence that no one should so much as suspect the fact. This will explain to you why we lent ourselves to the little harmless—perfectly harmless—pretence by which my wife appeared in the character of a widow. It also explains why she was unwilling—while under false colours—to go into general society. The unexpected disappearance of these family reasons caused her to abandon her charge hurriedly. I had not learned the fact when you called yesterday. Now, I hope that we may receive, though late, the congratulations of our friends.—A. F.'
'This,' said Mr. Jagenal, 'is an explanation which explains nothing. Well, it is all very irregular; and there is something behind; and it is no concern of mine. Most things in the world are irregular. The little windfall of which I told him yesterday will be doubly welcome now that he has a wife to spend his money for him. And now we understand why he was always dangling after Armorel—because his wife was with her—and why he did not fall in love with that most beautiful creature.'
He folded up the note; put it, with a few words of his own, into an envelope, and sent it to Philippa. Then he went on with the cases in his hands. Among these were the materials for many other studies into the workings of the feminine heart and the masculine brain. The solicitor's tin boxes: the doctor's notebook: the priest's memory: should furnish full materials for that exhaustive psychological research which science will some day insist upon conducting.
In the afternoon of the same day was the Private View of the Grosvenor Gallery. There was the usual Private View crowd—so private now that everybody goes there. It would have been incomplete without the presence of Mr. Alec Feilding.
Now, at the very thickest and most crowded time, when the rooms were at their fullest, and when the talk was at its noisiest, he appeared, bearing on his arm a young, beautiful, and beautifully dressed woman. He calmly entered the room where half the people were talking of himself and of his marriage, concealed for three years, with as much coolness as if he had been about in public with his wife all that time: he spoke to his friends as if nothing had happened: and he introduced them to his wife as if it was by the merest accident that they had not already met. Nothing could exceed the unconsciousness of his manner, unless it was the simple and natural ease of his wife. No one could possibly guess that there was, or could be, the least awkwardness in the situation.
The thing itself, and the manner of carrying it through, constituted a coup of the most brilliant kind. This public appearance deprived the situation, in fact, of all its awkwardness. No one could ask them at the Grosvenor Gallery what it meant. There were one or two to whom the bridegroom whispered that it was a long and romantic story: that there had been a bar to the completion of his happiness, by a public avowal: that this bar—a purely private and family matter—had only yesterday been removed: nothing was really explained: but it was generally felt that the mystery added another to the eccentricities of genius. There was a something, they seemed to remember dimly, about the marriages and love-passages of Shelley, Coleridge, and Lord Byron.
Mrs. Feilding, clearly, was a woman born to be an artist's wife: herself, artistic in her dress, her manner, and her appearance: sympathetic in her caressing voice: gracious in her manners: and openly proud of a husband so richly endowed.
Alec presented a great many men to her. She had, it seemed, already made acquaintance with their works, which she knew by name: she betrayed involuntarily, by her gracious smile, and the interested, curious gaze of her large and limpid eyes, the genuine admiration which she felt for these works, and the very great pleasure with which she made the acquaintance of this very distinguished author. If any of them were on the walls, she bestowed upon them the flattery of measured and appreciative praise: she knew something of the technique.