"That's the right view to take, dear. That's just exactly what it is—all about nothing! Now let's try and be happy, and not think about it. John!—where are you? Do come and let's be off! I hope it isn't raining."
"Pavement was dry enough when I came in," was Mr. Eldridge's testimony. To corroborate it he went out in the front garden and gazed upwards, open-mouthed. "Oh no—it's not raining, fast enough," said he. Which seemed to imply that perhaps something else was.
Marianne went back into her parlour and rang the bell for Elizabeth Barclay to come and take away the tea-things, because Harmood was out for her holiday. She looked and felt flushed and irritated, but could not have said whether it was with Charlotte Eldridge, with herself, or with this showy girl at Royd. With all her stupidity—and she had plenty—she was not wanting in loyalty to her husband; although it may be a good deal of this loyalty was only a form "proper pride"—that is to say, amour propre—took. How one wonders that commonplace, uninteresting people should have any amour propre—should love those insipid selves of theirs at all! But they have it—the dullest of them.
As she sat there in the growing dusk, watching the slow-combustion stove economizing its coal, and making attempts to consume its own smoke, her soul was doing battle on its own behalf against the insidious siren Jealousy, who came and came and came again each time she thrust her contemptuously away. Had she, perhaps, despised her a little too roundly when her first whispers were audible? Had she treated them too much as an absurdity when her husband's first great success had been followed by a sudden uplifting of him into a world she resented—resented because the only part she could play in it had been a very minor one? Had she taken it too easily for granted that no harm would come if he went his way and she hers—she, who didn't mean to be patronized, whoever else did! Might it not have been really wiser to brace herself up to the bearing of one or two slights and humiliations, to laugh them off and acknowledge that a homely, uneducated woman of her sort must needs fall contentedly into a back rank, rather than to refuse indignantly to march with the army at all? She was not going to be tolerated, and made allowances for, not she!—that was her attitude. That Arkroyd woman would have been just civil to her in time, no doubt; but how about all the affronts and indignities she would have had to put up with during apprenticeship? No—it was best as it was: Titus to go his way and she hers! Besides, her being constantly hatching him would do no good, if there were—that is to say, if there had been—any truth in this nonsense of Charlotte's. But, really, it was all so idiotic. As if she couldn't trust Titus for five minutes away from her apron-strings! Of course, Titus was to be trusted!... Was he?
She got up and walked about the room in the flickering firelight, conscious of her heart-beats, and half-inclined to cry, if she could have chosen. But her eyes felt dry over it, as a matter of fact. She caught herself beginning to feel angry with Titus, convicted herself of it, and reprimanded the culprit severely. Idiot that she was, to be affected by mere unfounded gabble! For she was far from believing, all the while, that Charlotte had any faith in her own insinuations. She fully recognized that her friend's pleasure in dwelling on the constructive relations of Paul and Virginia, Paolo and Francesca, Adam and Eve, for that matter—anywhom male and female, anywhere—was only human sympathy, leavened with hysteria. Had she not helped her, lubens et ex animo, when the improper study of mankind seemed good to their hours of leisure? The study, that is, of man and womankind in braces, selected by the student? But when the model suggested for study was her own husband, in leash with a strange young lady, whom she had not seen, she felt the position of a philosophical analyst uncongenial.
Why could she not be angry with Charlotte? That might have seemed the most natural safety-valve. Marianne had never read "Othello"—or much to speak of else—but she had seen it at the play. So she may easily have recalled Iago's cautions against the green-eyed monster that doth make the meat it feeds on, and compared it with the way her friend had somehow contrived to appear a warning voice, crying beware! to a suspicious soul adrift in a wilderness of its own unreason. She was not so very unlike the Moor in her ready acceptance of the character her Iago had claimed for herself. Of course, Charlotte was a fool, and fanciful; but, equally of course, she was no mischief-maker. Why, see what a perfect faith she had in Titus's integrity! Marianne was angry with herself for allowing a doubt of it, without having the shrewdness to see that she never would have felt one if it had not been for Charlotte. In fact, left to herself in the growing darkness, to brood over her own scarcely fledged suspicion, she could not for the life of her have said what on earth began it all. She forgot all details of her conversation with Charlotte, and only knew that something in it had made her feel very uncomfortable.
Really, one is sometimes inclined to believe that imps of darkness hang about, to run and help whenever they see a little bit of mischief brewing.