Mrs. Thompson Part 26

"Do you think Mr. Charles--or his family--would be kind enough to use influence?"

"Yes, mother dear, I'll make them--if possible." Enid had leant forward; and she shyly took her mother's hand, and gently squeezed it. "But now I must go. I do hope I haven't increased your headache."

"No, my dear, you have done me good."

Enid rose, b.u.t.toned her coat, and began to pull on her grey reindeer gloves.

"Mother! My old room--is it empty, or are you using it for anything?"

"Oh, d.i.c.k uses that, dear."

"And the dressing-room?"

"He uses that, too."

"Would you mind--would he mind if I went in and looked round?"

"No.... Of course not."

"Only for a peep. Then I'll come back--and say good-bye."

But she was a long time in the other rooms; and when she returned Mrs.

Marsden saw and affected not to see that she had been crying.

The warmth of the fire after the cold of the street, or the sight of her old home after a few months in her new one, had properly thawed elegant, long-nosed Enid. She sank on her knees by the sofa, flung her arms round the neck of her mother, and kissed her again and again; and Mrs. Marsden felt what in vain she had waited for during so many years--her child's heart beating with expansive sympathy against her breast.

"Mother, how good you were--oh, how good you were to me!" And she clung and pressed and kissed as in all her life she had never done till now.

"Enid--my darling."

When she had gone, Mrs. Marsden lay musing by the fire. It was impossible not to divine the very simple cause of this immense alteration in Enid. Already poor Enid had learnt her lesson--she knew what it was to have a rotten bad husband.

XIV

But not so bad as her own husband. No, that would be an impossibility.

She did not want to think about it; but just now her control over her thoughts had weakened, while the thoughts themselves were growing stronger. She was subject to rapid ups and downs of health, the victim of an astounding crisis of nerves, so that one hour she experienced a queer longing for muscular fatigue, and the next hour laughed and wept in full hysteria. At other times she felt so weak that she believed she might sink fainting to the ground if she attempted to go for the shortest walk.

Generally on days when Marsden was away from Mallingbridge she crept to bed at dusk. Yates used to aid her as of old, sit by the bed-side talking to her; and then leave her in the fire-glow, to watch the dancing shadows or listen to the whispering wind.

She did not wish to think; but in spite of all efforts to forget facts and to hold firmly to delusions, her old power of logical thought was remorselessly returning to her. In defiance of her enfeebled will, the past reconst.i.tuted itself, events grouped themselves in sequence; hitherto undetected connections linked up, and made the solid chain that dragged her from vague surmise to definite conclusions. Then with the full vigour of the old penetrative faculties she thought of her mistake.

He did not care for her. He had never cared for her. It was all acting.

All that she relied on was false; all that had been real was the steadfast sordid purpose sustaining him throughout his odious dissimulation.

His marriage was a brutal male prost.i.tution, in which he had sold his favours for her gold. And shame overwhelmed her as she thought of how easily she had been trapped. While he was coldly calculating, she was endowing him with every attribute of warm-blooded generosity; when her fine protective instincts made her yearn over him, longing to give him happiness, comfort, security, he was in truth playing with her as a cat plays with a wounded mouse--no hurry, no excitement, but steel-bright eyes watching, retracted claws waiting. And she remembered his studied phrases that rang so true to the ear, till too late she discovered their miserable falsity. With what art he had prepared the way for the final disclosure of his effrontery! He could not brook the sense of dependence, his manly spirit would not allow him to pose as the pensioner of a rich wife, and so on--and then, even at the last, how he waited until she had completely betrayed her secret, and he could be certain that her pride as a woman would infallibly prevent her from drawing back. Not till then, when she had taken the world into her confidence, when escape had become impossible, did he drive his bargain.

While the honeymoon was not yet over she imagined she could understand the pain that lay before her. But in these three months she had suffered more than she had conceived to be endurable by any living creature. If pain can kill, she should be dead.

Her punishment had been like the fabled torture of the Chinese--hundreds of small lacerations, a thousand slicing cuts of the executioner's sword, and the kind death-stroke craftily withheld. But the swordsman of the East does not laugh while he mutilates. And _he_ struck at her with a smiling face.

She thought of how in every hour of their companions.h.i.+p he had wounded her; with what unutterable baseness he had used his power over her--the power given to him by her love. The love stripped her of every weapon of defence; she was tied, naked, with not a guarding rag to shelter her against the blows--and the pitiless blows fell upon her from her gagged mouth to her pinioned feet.

Daily he attacked her pride, her self-respect, her bodily health and her mental equipoise; but most of all she suffered in her love--that terrible flower of pa.s.sion that refuses to die. Torn up by its bleeding roots, it replants itself--and will thrive on the barren rock as well as in life's richest garden. Robbed of light, air, sustenance, it will cling to the dungeon wall, and bud and burst again for the prisoner to touch its blossoms in his darkness. Its flame-petals can be seen by the glazing eyes that have lost sight of all else, and its burning poisonous fruit is still tasted in the earth of our graves.

She thought of what he had said to her when they first came back to the house that she had decorated and made luxurious for him. A laugh, a nudge of the elbow--"This is the beginning of Chapter Two, Janey. We can't be honeymooning forever, old girl;" and then some more unforgettable words, to formulate the request that they might occupy different rooms; and so, in the home-coming hour, he had struck a deadly blow at her pride by the brutally direct implication that what she most desired was that which every woman craves for least. As if the grosser manifestations could satisfy, when all the spiritual joys are denied!

But he judged her nature by his own. He was common as dirt. He was savage as a beast of the forest, a creature of fierce strong appet.i.tes that believes the appeas.e.m.e.nt of any physical craving--to drink deeply, to eat greedily, to sleep heavily--is the highest pleasure open to the animal kingdom; and that man the king is no higher than the dog, his servant.

He knew only worthless women, and he supposed that all women were alike.

Undoubtedly he remembered the innumerable conquests won simply by his handsome face, the ready and absolute surrender to a sensual thraldom that had made other women his abject slaves; and he dared to think that his wife was as impotent as they to resist the viler impulses of the ungoverned flesh.

He dared to think it.--But was he wrong? And she recalled the episodic renewal of their embraces during these last months. Once after high words; once after he had found her weeping; once for no reason at all that she knew of--except a carelessly systematic desire on his part to keep her in good temper--or perhaps merely because he had the prost.i.tute's point of honour. A bargain is a bargain. He had been paid his price without haggling, and he intended to fulfil the conditions of the contract--so far as certain limits fixed by himself.

Horrible scenes to look back at--when the cruelly bright light of reason flashes upon the decorously obscured past and shows the ignominious secrets of a life: blind instincts moving us, all that is high beaten down by all that is low, the soul held in fetters by the flesh.

Much of her slow agony had come from the stinging p.r.i.c.ks of jealousy. He was unfaithful--he was notoriously unfaithful. Already, after three months, everyone in the shop knew that he frequently broke the marriage vow. She would have known it anyhow--even if one of his vulgar friends, turning to a more vulgar enemy, had not troubled to tell her in an ill-spelt series of anonymous letters. She remembered how he once used to look at her, and she saw how in her presence he now looked at other women. Each look was an insult to her. Each word was an outrage.

"There's a pert little minx;" and he would smile as he watched some pa.s.ser-by. "Young hussy! Dressed up to the nines--wasn't she?" And he swelled out his chest, and swaggered more arrogantly by the side of his wife, unconscious of the swift completeness with which she could interpret the thoughts behind his bold eyes and his lazily lascivious smile.

And she thought of how he harped upon the over-tightened string of youth, making every fibre of her tired brain vibrate to the discord of the jarring note. It was melody to him. Youth was his own paramount merit, and he praised it as the only merit that he could admit of in others. He had forgotten half the lies of his courts.h.i.+p. Age was contemptible--the thing one should hide, or excuse, or ransom. "Only one life! Remember, I'm young--I am not old." But her friends, the people she trusted, were shamefully old, even a few years older than herself.

Old Prentice, Old Yates, Old Mears; and he never spoke of them without the scornful epithet.

But the jingling coin that she had put in his pockets would procure him the solace to be derived from youthful companions. With the money she had paid for all the love that he could give, he bought from loose women all the love that he cared for. Of course when he stayed in London he was carrying on his promiscuous amours.... Perhaps, too, here in Mallingbridge.

Yet when he came back to her, she had failed to resist him. She knew the reflective air with which he considered her face when he proposed to exercise his sway. She trembled when he lightly slapped her on the shoulder, or took her chin in his hand, and spoke with caressing tones.

He was beginning to act the lover. He had made up his mind to wipe out the past, to subjugate her afresh, to a.s.sure himself that his poor slave was not slipping away.

"Janey--dear old Janey.... I leave you alone, don't I?" And with an arm round her waist, he would pull her to him, and hold her closer and closer. "Have you missed me? Eh? Have you missed your d.i.c.kybird?"

And she could not resist him. There was the abominable basis of the tragedy--worse, infinitely worse than the imagined horrors that had troubled her before the marriage. Love dies so slowly.

But the night spent in the same room with him was like a fatal abandonment to some degrading habit--as if in despair she had taken a heavy dose of laudanum,--knowing that the drug is deadly, yet seeking once more to stupefy herself, impelled at all hazards to pa.s.s again through the gates of delirium into the vast blank halls of unconsciousness. Next day she felt sick, broken, shattered--like the drug-taker after his debauch. Each relapse seemed now an immeasurably lower fall. Each awakening brought with it a sharper pang of despair: as when a wrecked man on a raft, who in his madness of thirst has drunk at the salt spray, wakes from frenzied dreams to see the wide immensity of ocean mocking him with s.p.a.ce great enough to hold all things except one--hope.

Such thoughts as these came sweeping upon her like waves of light, illuminating the darkest recesses of her mind, showing the innermost meaning of every cruel mystery, forcing her to see and to know herself as she was, and not as she wished to be.

Then the light would suddenly fade. The stress of emotion had relaxed, and she could consider her circ.u.mstances calmly--could try to make the best of him.

A difficult task--a poor best.

She thought of his varied meannesses. In only one direction was he ever really generous. He grudged nothing to himself--he could be lavish when pandering to his own inclinations, reckless when gratifying the moment's whim, and retrospectively liberal when counting the cost of past amus.e.m.e.nts; but in his dealings with the rest of the world he was cautious, watchful, tenaciously close-fisted. She felt a vicarious humiliation in hearing him thank instead of tip; or seeing him, when he had failed to dodge the necessity of a gift, make the gift so small as to be ludicrous. Not since he carried her purse at the London restaurants had he ever exhibited a large-handed kindness to subordinates.

He never alluded to the household expenses--had accepted as quite natural the fact that the female partner should defray the expenses of the household. Without a Please or a Thank-you he took board and lodging free of charge; but he bought for himself cigars, liqueurs, and wine, and he always spoke of my brandy, my champagne, etc. It was _our_ house, but _my_ wine. Nevertheless, the habitual use in the singular of the personal p.r.o.noun did not render him egotistically anxious to pay his own bills.