Men and Wives (30 page)

“You can hardly regard it as not enough,” said Kate.

“Well, whatever it is, I am glad to feel he won't have to go home and face the rarefied atmosphere of Lady Hardisty, without the memory of something a little more human to leaven it with,” said Agatha, suddenly seeming to thrust out her words. “I can just imagine him working himself up to greet her. And I think it is so hard on him at this point of his young experience.”

Gregory met Rachel without making any effort on her behalf, and she began to speak herself.

“Gregory, Ernest and Griselda are in the library, and I can hear Griselda crying. And it is not the sort of crying that goes with to-day. She left that off when she heard he was coming. What is the good of his stopping one kind to start another? Can he be saying anything out of his own head about your mother?”

“What makes you think that? Have you been listening at the door?”

“I could not go quite up to the door. Buttermere might have come along.”

“I should have been inclined to go in and interrupt them.”

“But they would have known I had been listening, and I should not have heard the rest. I thought Ernest was wearing his own religious look when he came in.”

Bellamy had arrived and greeted his betrothed, unaware of his betrayal of himself.

“We are to have a time to ourselves, we two! That is perfect of everyone who has planned it. People always are
perfect in times of stress, and they must have been especially so to you. This is what my heart was crying out for. I felt I could bear no one but you to-day. I am a little drained out after the service. I put the whole of myself into it. Did anyone tell you about it? I had almost thought you would be there, as I was to give the address. I had half hoped it would comfort you. I thought of you in every word I wrote.”

“I shall like to read it some time,” Griselda said.

“You could not get an impression from my few rough notes. I jot down a word, and then get into the pulpit, and out it comes with a rush. I just want a hieroglyphic to start me off.”

“Ernest, what made Mother go away alone and do it, go away alone? What did she feel when she did it, all by herself? All by herself, poor Mother, poor Mother, by herself!”

“Oh, come, come now,” said Bellamy, “you must think of me, my Grisel. I cannot bear too much. You have not taken the strongest man for a husband: you must have a care for the man you have chosen. I have lived these last days in thought of you. I have thrown the whole of myself into my words of your mother, weighed every syllable I uttered, to give her only respect and compassion at this time which is a trial of our own strength. You know very little has gone well with me in my life; and now into this vista of hope and light there is come this shadow of darkness, the hint of hanging of the head; and it is getting to be much. You must remember I am a man and weak, and you are a woman and strong.”

“Your share in this is nothing to mine,” said Griselda, lifting her eyes. “It is my family who has had a tragedy, not yours. You make me feel how apart our lives are. Of course all lives must be. There is nothing to hang the head over in my mother's being ill and helpless, unless for people who are used to hanging the head.”

“Ah, who is to be used to it, and who is not? It is not
I who would say. Even her helplessness will be thrown at us. Family taints and what not will be bandied about our heads. But I am not to be the first to swirl the whispers about you. My part will be to stand on guard.”

“It has all come to me beforehand through you,” said Griselda, breathing deeply.

“Did not I tell you what my part would be? My whimperings were to throw my true self up in relief. Tell me you guessed their purpose. I am such a play-actor that I like the light and shade. Come, you are learning to know me. You must learn. Think how I have learned to know you.”

Griselda stood with her head down, and Rachel and Gregory found it the moment to enter the room.

“Lady Hardisty, Griselda has been trying to quarrel with me, and making such a gallant effort that she has almost succeeded. She cannot get used to my posing ways, and cannot teach me not to bring them out before her. But you will let me stay to dinner, and be one of the family, and her heart will be softened when she sees me making a personal sacrifice, and pronouncing grace as if it were a difficult and important duty.”

“Yes, yes, my boy, stay and be with us on this first evening of our new life,” said Godfrey, crossing the room with a progressively widening step. “It still seems it can't be much of a life to us; but we may pull up and get going as we did before, as my dear wife would wish. Now, do you know, here is a thing to be told! If there is any one of her children who feels this, it is Matthew. He is simply laid on the ground by it, he of all of them! I hadn't an inkling he cared for his mother so much. It shows how blind we can be. Well, now the thing is, he is not coming down to dinner. He is to remain alone in his room. My heart rose and sank at the same time. I would give a good deal if his mother could have realised how he felt for her. There doesn't seem any point in it now. Of course there is more point in it than ever. She looks down on us and
knows more about us than we know ourselves, and for any mortal frailty makes more excuse than we should dare to make.”

“That will be a great advantage for you,” said Rachel. “It is really very nice of Harriet. So many people in her place seem so different, from what people say, and expect too much. They are sometimes quite a strain. Making more excuse than we dare to make is superhuman, because all has been done that can be done. Of course Harriet is that now.”

“Ah, yes, we shall appreciate our wife and mother as never before,” said Godfrey.

Mrs. Christy, Sitting at a business interview with Dominic Spong, perceived from her window the sight familiar to her of a young man anxiously awaiting admission at her door.

“Now, Matthew, it is a long time since you paid a visit to your future mother-in-law. It is a good thing that my love does not alter when it alteration finds, that in that respect I am at one with the poet. Now if I come to the door I must not shirk what the duty involves. You will have a woman quite without false pride for your wife's mother. ‘Be proud of what you can do, not of what you can't,' is my motto. ‘Thank you,' I say, ‘my dignity is safe.' Not that practical matters take the whole of my attention. I have come from quite an abstruse discussion with Mr. Spong. My money matters make no very great demand, but he always accuses me of having quite a man's mind. It is a most unfeminine thing to plead guilty to, but I must take my stand where he places me.”

“Can I see Camilla,” said Matthew, in a quick, harsh voice.

“If you will adjust your position a little, Matthew,” said Dominic from the background, his measured tone suggesting entertainment, “you will have no reason to find fault with the evidence of your senses.”

Matthew turned and laid his hand on Camilla's arm.

“Any more than,” proceeded Dominic, “your betrothed appeared to have to find it with that of hers, when her ears informed her of your arrival. I think, Mrs. Christy, that you and I will discover ourselves Monsieur and Madame de Trop, unless we remove ourselves from the threat of that position.”

“We will give the lovers the back room to themselves, and continue our researches into my financial mysteries in the large one, Mr. Spong.”

“I suspect that, in spite of our advantage in the matter of the room, they are at a time when they are more to be envied than we are,” said Dominic in a moved tone, as he followed.

“You don't give any sign that supports Mr. Spong's suspicions, Matthew,” said Camilla. “Your voice would break on a different note in touching on this moment. The sooner it passes, the sooner I shall leave behind my perilous youth. You and Gregory have the same tastes. Your father is the natural man, bless him. And I have left it farther behind than you. So give up glowering, and tell me why you have come to watch me keeping the home fires burning. Do you want to add to our romance by surveying me as the beggar-maid?”

Matthew stood with his eyes, sunken and bright from sleeplessness, fixed on her face.

“Matthew, don't frighten me by that pose. Don't begin to show me what you will be like when we are married. I warn you not to do it. It is dangerous.”

Matthew stood silent.

“Matthew, do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Camilla. The question is, will you hear me? I have come to ask you one thing, and to have an answer, to know if I am the one man in the world to you, as you are to me the one woman. That is what I will be. And I live in doubt, I sleep in doubt, or I should if I could sleep. I am tormented by too many things for rest. I ask to be at peace about that one.”

“You ask too much,” said Camilla. “Of course you are not the one man in the world to me. The world is too full of too many men for that, and I am the one woman to too many. The dear old world!” She sang the last words and clapped her hands.

“Has any one of them ever done anything for you?”

“Oh, yes, everything, all of them. Betrayed people, played their parents false, got into debt for me. Each one of them according to his lights.”

“I suppose not one of them has put an end to his mother's life for you?”

“Put an end to his mother's life! What are you talking of? Of course not. What a question!”

“That is what I found you were worth.”

“Matthew, you should not say things to coerce and scare me. It is a most unmanly way to behave. None of the others has done that. And it is in very bad taste to drag in your mother's misfortunes. If you helped to drive her to what she did by harping on me, when she did not like me for your wife, it was cowardly and wrong, when she had just returned from her illness; and I like you less for it; I do. And I believe you did. You worried her about me and drove her to it, and I shall always feel it was my fault that she died.”

“It was your fault,” said Matthew. “You made me feel that your love for me would stand very little, and she might have given it much to stand. You see it was your fault.”

Camilla stood staring at him.

“You don't mean anything?” she said.

“I mean what I say.”

“You don't mean you did it?”

“I mean I did it. I put the fatal tablet with those she took to make her sleep. I put it out for her with one of her own, that last night. I did it because of you, for fear she might take you from me. She was getting you into her power.”

“Matthew, Matthew! My poor darling Matthew! My poor, helpless, driven boy! I will do all I can to make up to you. I will give myself to you, body and soul. You shall not have done it for nothing. And your poor, poor mother! We both loved her. We will go on loving her together. I will see it does not get on your mind. I will show you it was
my fault. It was utterly mine. You shall never think it was yours. I will live to see that you can't.”

“Hush! There is your mother coming,” said Matthew, in a normal, gentle voice. “People must not hear. They must not know. It must never be found out. They would take me away from you.”

“Camilla, why are you getting upset like this? We heard your voice through the wall. Matthew, you must be careful not to excite her. Poor children, this waiting time is a strain.”

“Oh, all right, Mother, a last lover's scene. We are not going to break it off or never speak again or do anything agitating. We were only vowing eternal faithfulness, and sealing our vows with tears. Our sentiments were much to our credit, especially mine. You would have got a different idea of me, if you had heard. Yes, I certainly think I came out best.”

“Well, I think Matthew must go now. And I shall be glad when your wedding day is fixed. Matthew's dear mother would not wish to stand in your way. You will go through your lives remembering her together.”

“Stop, Matthew, or I shall scream. Yes, Matthew, go home and arrange with your father for us to be made one. He is eager to have me for his daughter.”

“I will fetch you for dinner to-morrow night,” said Matthew. “I can call for you on my way home from my work.

“I don't think I want to see you in your own home again just yet, your home where I used to see your mother. And on your way home from your work, that is to end in keeping people alive! I am somehow getting a dislike to your work. I think meeting here is better. It is the man who ought to have the trouble of coming and going. Oh yes, I know you attend me to and from my door. I know it, I know it. I don't mean anything. I mean nothing, nothing. I only mean I prefer to see you here. We have had enough embracing for to-day. Do make way for me to take a step in front of me.”

Camilla walked with an upright head into the other room, where Dominic sat at the table.

“Mother, don't stare at me; don't peer about as if you wanted to ferret something out. It is such an odious habit. What kind of thing do you think you can read in my eyes? I shouldn't show it, if there was anything there. Oh, oh, don't gaze at me like that.”

“My dear, I am not gazing at you. There is nothing I want to ferret out. You must not take yourself so seriously. We don't want to probe your little secrets.”

Camilla flung herself across the table, and buried her head in her arms.

“My child, what is it? I could tell there was something. I thought Matthew seemed very moody when I let him in. It is only that his mother's death has upset him. It was enough to unnerve him, its happening in that tragic way. Think what it must have been to him, when it was so much to you and me. You will come to see that the trouble is nothing.”

“Oh, yes, it is nothing,” said Camilla, in a strange, light, bitter tone. “It is not worth speaking about. I will not say anything about it. I will go on and keep it to myself, and lock it all up, and get older and older knowing it. And I can't do it, Mother. I can't hide it all in my own heart. Think what it must have been to him, you say, his mother's death! Think of that! Think of that!” She broke into alternate fits of tears and laughter, and Dominic rose to his feet.