Marriage a la mode - Mrs. Humphry Ward (types of ebook readers txt) 📗

/> "Three weeks."

"Had she been staying here before that?"

"Yes--she often stayed here. Daphne! don't look like that! She treated me abominably; and before I married you I had come not to care twopence about her."

"You did care about her when you proposed to me?"

"No!--not at all! Of course, when I went out to New York I was sore, because she had thrown me over."

"And I"--Daphne made a scornful lip--"was the feather-bed to catch you as you fell. It never occurred to you that it might have been honourable to tell me?"

"Well, I don't know--I never asked you to tell me of your affairs!"

Roger, his hands in his pockets, looked round at her with an awkward laugh.

"I told you everything!" was the quick reply--"_everything_."

Roger uncomfortably remembered that so indeed it had been; and moreover that he had been a good deal bored at the time by Daphne's confessions.

He had not been enough in love with her--then--to find them of any great account. And certainly it had never occurred to him to pay them back in kind. What did it matter to her or to anyone that Chloe Morant had made a fool of him? His recollection of the fooling, at the time he proposed to Daphne, was still so poignant that it would have been impossible to speak of it. And within a few months afterwards he had practically forgotten it--and Chloe too. Of course he could not see her again, for the first time, without being "a bit upset"; mostly, indeed, by the boldness--the brazenness--of her behaviour. But his emotions were of no tragic strength, and, as Lady Barnes had complained to Mrs. French, he was now honestly in love with Daphne and his child.

So that he had nothing but impatience and annoyance for the recollection of the visit of the afternoon; and Daphne's attitude distressed him. Why, she was as pale as a ghost! His thoughts sent Chloe Fairmile to the deuce.

"Look here, dear!" he said, kneeling down suddenly beside his wife--"don't you get any nonsense into your head. I'm not the kind of fellow who goes philandering after a woman when she's jilted him. I took her measure, and after you accepted me I never gave her another thought. I forgot her, dear--bag and baggage! Kiss me, Daphne!"

But Daphne still held him at bay.

"How long were you engaged to her?" she repeated.

"I've told you--three weeks!" said the man, reluctantly.

"How long had you known her?"

"A year or two. She was a distant cousin of father's. Her father was Governor of Madras, and her mother was dead. She couldn't stand India for long together, and she used to stay about with relations. Why she took a fancy to me I can't imagine. She's so booky and artistic, and that kind of thing, that I never understood half the time what she was talking about. Now you're just as clever, you know, darling, but I do understand you."

Roger's conscience made a few dim remonstrances. It asked him whether in fact, standing on his own qualifications and advantages of quite a different kind, he had not always felt himself triumphantly more than a match for Chloe and her cleverness. But he paid no heed to them. He was engaged in stroking Daphne's fingers and studying the small set face.

"Whom did she marry?" asked Daphne, putting an end to the stroking.

"A fellow in the army--Major Fairmile--a smart, popular sort of chap. He was her father's aide-de-camp when they married--just after we did--and they've been in India, or Egypt, ever since. They don't get on, and I suppose she comes and quarters herself on the old Duchess--as she used to on us."

"You seem to know all about her! Yes, I remember now, I've heard people speak of her to you. Mrs. Fairmile--Mrs. Fairmile--yes, I remember," said Daphne, in a brooding voice, her cheeks becoming suddenly very red. "Your uncle--in town--mentioned her. I didn't take any notice."

"Why should you? She doesn't matter a fig, either to you or to me!"

"It matters to me very much that these people who spoke of her--your uncle and the others--knew what I didn't know!" cried Daphne, passionately. She stared at Roger, strangely conscious that something epoch-making and decisive had happened. Roger had had a secret from her all these years--that was what had happened; and now she had discovered it. That he _could_ have a secret from her, however, was the real discovery. She felt a fierce resentment, and yet a kind of added respect for him. All the time he had been the private owner of thoughts and recollections that she had no part in, and the fact roused in her tumult and bitterness. Nevertheless the disturbance which it produced in her sense of property, the shock and anguish of it, brought back something of the passion of love she had felt in the first year of their marriage.

During these three years she had more than once shown herself insanely jealous for the merest trifles. But Roger had always laughed at her, and she had ended by laughing at herself.

Yet all the time he had had this secret. She sat looking at him hard with her astonishing eyes; and he grew more and more uneasy.

"Well, some of them knew," he said, answering her last reproach. "And they knew that I was jolly well quit of her! I suppose I ought to have told you, Daphne--of course I ought--I'm sorry. But the fact was I never wanted to think of her again. And I certainly never want to see her again! Why, in the name of goodness, did you accept that tea-fight?"

"Because I mean to go."

"Then you'll have to go without me," was the incautious reply.

"Oh, so you're afraid of meeting her! I shall know what to think, if you _don't_ go." Daphne sat erect, her hands clasped round her knees.

Roger made a sound of wrath, and threw his cigarette into the fire. Then, turning round again to face her, he tried to control himself.

"Look here, Daphne, don't let us quarrel about this. I'll tell you everything you want to know--the whole beastly story. But it can't be pleasant to me to meet a woman who treated me as she did--and it oughtn't to be pleasant to you either. It was like her audacity to come this afternoon."

"She simply wants to get hold of you again!" Daphne sprang up as she spoke with a violent movement, her face blazing.

"Nonsense! she came out of nothing in the world but curiosity, and because she likes making people uncomfortable. She knew very well mother and I didn't want her!"

But the more he tried to persuade her the more determined was Daphne to pay the promised visit, and that he should pay it with her. He gave way at last, and she allowed herself to be soothed and caressed. Then, when she seemed to have recovered herself, he gave her a tragic-comic account of the three weeks' engagement, and the manner in which it had been broken off: caustic enough, one might have thought, to satisfy the most unfriendly listener. Daphne heard it all quietly.

Then her maid came, and she donned a tea-gown.

When Roger returned, after dressing, he found her still abstracted.

"I suppose you kissed her?" she said abruptly, as they stood by the fire together.

He broke out in laughter and annoyance, and called her a little goose, with his arm round her.

But she persisted. "You did kiss her?"

"Well, of course I did! What else is one engaged for?"

"I'm certain she wished for a great deal of kissing!" said Daphne, quickly.

Roger was silent. Suddenly there swept through him the memory of the scene in the orchard, and with it an admission--wrung, as it were, from a wholly unwilling self--that it had remained for him a scene unique and unapproached. In that one hour the "muddy vesture" of common feeling and desire that closed in his manhood had taken fire and burnt to a pure flame, fusing, so it seemed, body and soul. He had not thought of it for years, but now that he was made to think of it, the old thrill returned--a memory of something heavenly, ecstatic, far transcending the common hours and the common earth.

The next moment he had thrown the recollection angrily from him. Stooping to his wife, he kissed her warmly. "Look here, Daphne! I wish you'd let that woman alone! Have I ever looked at anyone but you, old girl, since that day at Mount Vernon?"

Daphne let him hold her close: but all the time, thoughts--ugly thoughts--like "little mice stole in and out." The notion of Roger and that woman, in the past, engaged--always together, in each other's arms, tormented her unendurably.

* * * * *

She did not, however, say a word to Lady Barnes on the subject. The morning following Mrs. Fairmile's visit that lady began a rather awkward explanation of Chloe Fairmile's place in the family history, and of the reasons for Roger's silence and her own. Daphne took it apparently with complete indifference, and managed to cut it short in the middle.

Nevertheless she brooded over the whole business; and her resentment showed itself, first of all, in a more and more drastic treatment of Heston, its pictures, decorations and appointments. Lady Barnes dared not oppose her any more. She understood that if she were thwarted, or even criticized, Daphne would simply decline to live there, and her own link with the place would be once more broken. So she withdrew angrily from the scene, and tried not to know what was going on. Meanwhile a note of invitation had been addressed to Daphne by the Duchess, and had been accepted; Roger had been reminded, at the point of the bayonet, that go he must; and Dr. Lelius had transferred himself from Heston to Upcott, and the companionship of Mrs. Fairmile.

* * * * *

It was the last day of the Frenches' visit. Roger and Herbert French had been trying to get a brace or two of partridges on the long-neglected and much-poached estate; and on the way home French expressed a hope that, now they were to settle at Heston, Roger would take up some of the usual duties of the country gentleman. He spoke in the half-jesting way characteristic of the modern Mentor. The old didactics have long gone out of fashion, and the moralist of to-day, instead of preaching, _ore retundo_, must only "hint a fault and hesitate dislike." But, hide it as he might, there was an ethical and religious passion in French that would out, and was soon indeed to drive him from Eton to a town parish. He had been ordained some two years before this date.

It was this inborn pastoral gift, just as real as the literary or artistic gifts, and containing the same potentialities of genius as they which was leading him to feel a deep anxiety about the Barnes's _menage_. It seemed to him necessary that Daphne should respect her husband; and Roger, in a state of complete idleness, was not altogether respectable.

So,