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Studies in Wives





Studies in Wives
By
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
Author of
‘ ‘ Barbara Reboll,” “The Pulse of Life," “ The Uttermost Farthing,"
etc.


London
William Heinemann
I 909


Fir:tMntzd,/unz, 1909
Srcond impressian, [ul], 1909
Copyright, London, by William Heinemmm, and
Washinglon, U.S.A., lg; Paul R. Reynolds.


I
ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY



‘ lli


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY
“ His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it
shall bring him to the king of terrors.”—JOB xviii. 14.
THERE came the sound of a discreet, embarrassed
cough, and Althea Scrope turned quickly round
from the window by which she had been standing
still dressed in her outdoor things.
She had heard the door open, the unfolding of
the tea-table, the setting-down of the tea-tray,
but her thoughts had been far away from the old
house in Westminster which was now her home;
her thoughts had been in Newcastle, dwelling for
a moment among the friends of her girlhood, for
whom she had been buying Christmas gifts that
afternoon.
The footman’s cough recalled her to herself,
and to the present.
“ Am I to say that you are at home this after-
noon, ma’am ‘2”
Althea’s thoughtful, clear eyes rested full on the
youth’s anxious face. He had not been long in
the Scropes’ service, and this was the first time
he had been left in such a position of responsi-
bility, but Dockett, the butler, was out, a rare
event, for Dockett liked to be master in his
master’s house. Before the marriage of Perceval
1—2


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY '5
brown skirt, and so to the sable cape which had
been one of her husband’s wedding gifts, but which
now looked a little antiquated in cut and style.
It is a bad thing—a sign that all is not right
with her—when a beautiful young woman becomes
indifferent to how she looks. This was the case
with Althea, and yet she was only twenty-two, and
looked even younger; no one meeting her by chance
would have taken her to be a married woman, still
less the wife of a noted politician.
She took off her fur cape and put it on a chair.
She might have sent for her maid, but, before her
marriage, she had always waited on herself, and
she was not very tidy—one of her few points of
resemblance with her husband, and not one which
made for harmony. But Mrs. Scrope, if untidy,
was also conscientious, and as she looked at the
damp fur cloak her conscience began to trouble her.
She rang the bell. “ Take my cloak and hang
it up carefully in the ha ,” she said to the foot-
man. And now the room was once more neat
and tidy as she knew her friend, Mr. Bustard,
would like to see it.
It was a curious and delightful room, but it
resembled and reflected the woman who had to
spend so much of her life there as little as did her ,
quaint and fanciful name of Althea. Her husband, ‘
in a fit of petulance at some exceptional density
of vision, had once told her that her name should
have been J ane—J ane, Maud, Amy, any of those
old-fashioned, early Victorian names would have
suited Althea and Althea’s outlook on life when
she had married Perceval Scrope.
Althea’s drawing-room attained beauty not only


6 STUDIES IN WIVES
because of its proportions, and its delightful out-
look on St. J ames’s Park, but also because quite
a number of highly intelligent people had seen to
it that it should be beautlful.
Although Scrope, who thought he knew his young
wife so well, would have been surprised and perhaps
a little piqued if he had been told it, Althea preferred
the house as it had been before her marriage, in
the days when it was scarcely furnished, when
this room, for instance, had been the library-
smoking-room of its owner, an owner too poor to
offer himself any of the luxurious fitments which
had been added to make it suitable for his rich
bride.
As soon as Scrope’s engagement to the provincial
heiress Althea then was had been announced, his
friends—and he was a man of many friends—had
delighted to render him the service of making the
pleasant old house in Delahay Street look as it
perchance had looked eighty or a hundred years
ago. The illusion was almost perfect, so cleverly
had the flotsam of Perceval Scrope’s ancestral
possessions been wedded to the jetsam gathered
in curiosity shops and at country auctions—for
the devotion of Scrope’s friends had gone even
to that length.
This being so, it really seemed a pity that these
same kind folk had not been able to—oh ! no, not
buy, that is an ugly word, and besides it had been
Perceval who had been bought, not Althea—to
acquire for Scrope a wife who would have suited
the house as well as the house suited Scrope.
But that had not been possible.
Even as it was, the matter of marrying their


ALTHEA’S OPPQRTUNITY 7
friend had not been easy. Scrope was so wilful
—that was why they loved him ! He had
barred—absolutely barred—Americans, and that
although everybody knows how useful an American
heiress can be, not only with her money, but with
her brightness and her wits, to an English politician.
He had also stipulated for a country girl, and he
would have preferred one straight out of the
school-room: . . .
Almost all his conditions had been fulfilled.
Althea was nineteen at the time of her marriage,
and, if not exactly country bred—she was the
only child of a Newcastle magnate—she had seen
nothing of the world to which Scrope and Scrope’s
Egeria, the woman who had, actually picked out
Althea to be Scrope’s wife, had introduced her.
Scrope’s Egeria ? At the time my little story
opens, Althea had long given up being jealous—-
jealous, that is, in the intolerant, passionate sense
of the word; in fact she was ashamed that she had
ever been so, for she now felt sure that Perceval
would not have liked her, Althea, any better, even
if there had not been another woman to Whom he
turned for flattery and sympathy.
The old ambiguous term was, in this case, no
pseudonym for another and more natural, if uglier,
relatiOnship on the part of a married man, and of
a man whom the careless public believed to be
on exceptionally good terms with his young
wife.
Scrope’s Egeria was twenty-four years older than
Althea, and nine years older than Scrope himself.
Unfortunately she had a husband who, unlike
Althea, had the bad taste, the foolishness, to be


8 STUDIES IN WIVES
jealous of her close friendship with Perceval
Scrope. And yet while admitting to herself the
man’s folly, Althea had a curious liking for Egeria’s
husband. There was, in fact, more between them
than their common interest in the other couple;
for he, like Althea, provided what old-fashioned
people used to call the wherewithal ; he, like Althea,
had been married because of the gifts he had
. brought in his hands, the gifts not only of that
material comfort which counts for so much now-
adays, but those which, to Scrope’s Egeria, counted
far more than luxury, that is, beauty of surround-
ings and refinement of living.
Mr. and Mrs. Panfillen—to give Egeria and her
husband their proper names—lived quite close to
Althea and Perceval Scrope, for they dwelt in Old
Queen Street, within little more than a stone’s
throw of Delahay Street.
Joan Panfillen, unlike Althea Scrope, was ex-
quisitely suited to her curious, old-world dwelling.
She had about her small, graceful person, her
picturesque and dateless dress, even in her low
~melodious voice, that harmony which is, to the
man capable of appreciating it, the most desirable
and perhaps the rarest of feminine attributes.
There was one thing which Althea greatly
envied Mrs. Panfillen, and that was nothing per-
sonal to herself; it was simply the tiny formal
garden which divided the house in Old Queen
Street from Birdcage Walk. This garden looked
fresher and greener than its fellows because, by
Mrs. Panfillen’s care, the miniature parterres were
constantly tended and watered, while the shrubs
both summer and winter were washed and cleansed
.


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 9
as carefully as was everything else likely to be
brought in contact with their owner’s wife.
In spite of the fact that they lived so very near
to one another, the two women were not much
together, and as a rule they only met, but that
was, of course, very often, when out in the political
and social worlds to which they both belonged.
Althea had a curious shrinking from the
Panfillens’charming house. It was there, within
a very few weeks of her father’s death, that
she had first met Perceval Scrope—and there
that he had conducted his careless wooing. It
was in Mrs. Panfillen’s boudoir, an octagon-shaped
room on the park side of the house, that he had
actually made his proposal, and that Althea,
believing herself to be “ in love ”, and uplifted'
by the solemn and yet joyful thought of how
happy such a marriage—her marriage to a member
of the first Fair Food Cabinet—would have made
her father, had accepted him.
From Old Queen Street also had taken place her
wedding, which, if nominally quiet, because the
bride still chose to consider herself in deep mourning,
had filled St. Margaret’s with one of those gather-
ings only brought together on such an occasion——
a gathering in which the foemen of yesterday, and
the enemies of to-morrow, unite with the friends
of to-day in order to do honour to a fellow poli-
tician.
Althea had darker memories connected with
Mrs. Panfillen’s house. She had spent there, im-
mediately after her honeymoon, an unhappy fort-
night, waiting for the workpeople to leave her future
home in Delahay Street. It was during that fort-


10 STUDIES IN WIVES
might that for the first time her girlish com-
placency had forsaken her, and she had been
made to understand how inadequate her husband
found her to the position she was now called upon
to fill. It was then that there had first come to
her the humiliating suspicion that her bridegroom
could not forgive her his own sale of himself.
Scrope and Joan Panfillen were subtle people,
living in a world of subtleties, yet in this subtle,
unspoken matter of Scrope’s self-contempt con-
cerning his marriage, the simple Althea’s know-
ledge far preceded theirs.
In those days Joan Panfillen, kindest, most
loyal of hostesses, had always been taking the
bride’s part, but how unkind—yes, unkind was
the word—Perceval was, even then !
Althea had never forgotten one little incident
connected with that time, and this afternoon she
suddenly remembered it with singular vividness.
Scrope had been caricatured in Punch as Scrooge ;
and—well—Althea had not quite understood.
“ Good Lord !” he had exclaimed, turning to the
older woman, “ Althea doesn’t know who Scrooge
was!” and quickly he had proceeded to put his
young wife through a sharp, and to her a very
bewildering examination, concerning people and
places some of whom she had never heard of,
while others seemed vaguely, worryingly familiar.
He had ended up with the words, “ And I sup-
pose you consider yourself educated !” A chance
muttered word had then told her that none of
these places were real—that none of these people
Perceval had spoken of with such intimate know-
ledge, had ever lived !


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 11
Althea had felt bitterly angered as well as hurt.
Tears had welled up into her brown eyes; and
Mrs. Panfillen, intervening with far more eager
decision than she generally showed about even
important matters,e had cried, “ That’s not fair!
In fact you are being quite absurd, Perceval!
I’ve never cared for Dickens, and I’m sure most
people, at any rate most women, who say they
like him are pretending—pretending all the time !
I don’t believe there’s a girl in London who could
answer the questions you put to Althea just now,
and if there is such a girl then she’s a literary
monster, and I for one don’t want to know her !”
As only answer Scrope had turned and put a
thin brown finger under Althea’s chin. 153;“ Cry-
ing '3” he had said, “ Baby ! She shan’t be made
to learn her Dickens if she doesn’t want to, so
there!”
At the time Althea had tried to smile, but the
words her husband had used had hurt her, horribly,
for they had seemed to cast a reflection on her father
—the father who thought so much of education,
and who had been at such pains to obtain for his
motherless only child an ideal chaperon governess,
a lady who had always lived with the best families
in Newcastle. Miss Burt would certainly have
made her pupil read Dickens if Dickens were in
any real sense an educating influence, instead of
writing, as Althea had always understood he did,
only about queer and vulgar people.
Not educated? Why, her father had sent her
away from him for a whole year to Dresden, in
order that she might learn German and study
music to the best possible advantage ! True, she


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 13
distrusted and despised in England—of political
adventurers. Scrope required, more than most
men, the solid platform, nay, the pedestal, of
wealth, and accordingly his Egeria had sacrificed
herself and, incidentally, the heiress, Althea.
But, as so often happens to those who make
the great renouncement, Joan Panfillen found
that after all no such thing as true sacrifice was
to be required of her.
After his marriage, Scrope was more often with
her than he had ever been, and far more willing, not
only to ask but to take, his Egeria’s advice on all
that concerned his brilliant, meteoric career. He
seldom mentioned his wife, but Mrs. Panfillen
knew her friend far too well not to know how
it was with him ; Althea fretted his nerves,
ofiended his taste, jarred his conscience, at every
turn of their joint life.
There were, however, two meagre things to the
good—Althea’s fortune, the five thousand a year,
which now, after four years, did not seem so large
an income as it had seemed at first ; and the fact
that Scrope’s marriage had extinguished the odious,
and, what was much more unpleasant to such a
woman as was Joan Panfillen, the ridiculous,
jealousy of Joan’s husband.
Thomas Panfillen greatly admired Althea; he
thought her what she was—a very lovely young
woman, and the fact that he had known her father
made him complacently suppose that he had brought
about her marriage to the peculiar, he was told the
remarkably clever, if rather odd, Perceval Scrope.
Baulked of certain instinctive rights, the human
heart seeks compensation as surely as water seeks


14 STUDIES IN WIVES
its level. Althea, unknown to herself, had a com-
pensation. His name was John Bustard. He v
was in a public office—to be precise, the Privy
Council Office. He lived in rooms not far from
his work, that is, not far from Delahay Street,
and he had got into the way of dropping in to
tea two, three, sometimes even four times a week.
The fact that Bustard was an old schoolfellow
of Scrope’s had been his introduction to Althea in
the early days when she had been conscientiously
anxious to associate herself with her husband’s
interests past and present. But of the innumerable
people with whom Scrope had brought her into
temporary contact, Mr. Bustard—she always called
him Mr. Bustard, as did most other people—was
the one human being who, being the fittest as
regarded herself, survived.
And yet never had there been a man less suited
to play the part of hero, or even of consoler. Mr.
Bustard was short, and his figure was many years
older than his age, which was thirty-four. While
forcing himself to take two constitutionals a day,
he indulged in no other manlier form of exercise,
and his contempt for golf was the only thing that
tended to a lack of perfect understanding between
his colleagues and himself. He was interested in
his work, but he tried to forget it when he was not
at the office. Bustard was a simple soul, but
blessed with an unformulated, though none the
less real, philosophy of life.
Of the matter nearest his heart he scarcely ever
spoke, partly because he had always supposed it
to be uninteresting to anyone but himself, and
also on account of a certain thorny pride which


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 15
prevented his being willing to ask favours from
the indifferent.
This matter nearest Mr. Bustard’s heart con-
cerned his two younger brothers and an orphan
sister whom he supremely desired to do the best
for, and to set well forward in life.
It was of these three young people that he and
Althea almost always talked, and if Althea allowed
herself to have an ardent wish, it was that her
husband would permit her to invite Mr. Bustard’s
sister for a few weeks when the girl left the
German finishing school which she and Mr. Bustard
had chosen, after much anxious deliberation, a
year before.
It soothed Althea’s sore heart to know that
there was at least one person in her husband’s
circle who thought well of her judgment, who
trusted in her discretion, and who did her the
compliment of not only asking, but also of taking
her advice.
John Bustard had formed a very good opinion
of Althea, and, constitutionally incapable of
divining the causes which had determined the
choice of Scrope’s wife, he considered Mrs. Scrope
a further proof, if indeed proof were needed, of
his brilliant schoolfellow’s acute intelligence. He
had ventured to say as much to Scrope’s late
official chief, one of the few men to whom Mr.
Bustard, without a sufficient cause, would have
mentioned a lady’s name. But he had been taken
aback, rather disturbed, by the old statesman’s
dry comment: “ Ay, there’s always been method
in Scrope’s madness. I agree that he has made,
from his own point of view, a very good marriage.”
.w-srtpfl.__.‘..
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[I‘M-
Tl. "


16 STUDIES IN WIVES
/
v.3. ‘ L
His wife’s friendship with Mr. Bustard did not
escape Perceval Scrope’s ironic notice. He affected
to think his old schoolfellow a typical member of
the British public, and he had nicknamed him
“ the Bullometer ”, but, finding that his little joke
vexed Althea, he had, with unusual consideration,
dropped it.
Unfortunately the one offensive epithet was soon
exchanged for another; in allusion doubtless to some
historical personage of whom Althea had no know-
ledge, Scrope began to call Bustard her fat friend.
“ How’s your fat friend?” he would ask, and a
feeling of resentment filled Althea’s breast. It was
not John Bustard’s fault that he had a bad figure ;
it was caused by the sedentary nature of his work,
and because, instead of spending his salary in the
way most civil servants spend theirs, that is in
selfish amusements, he spent it on his younger
brothers, and on his little sister’s education.
* * * * *
Althea again went ' over to the window and
looked out. It had now left off snowing, and the
mists were gathering over the park. Soon a veil
of fog would shut out the still landscape. If Mr.
Bustard were coming this afternoon she hoped he
would come soon, and so be gone before Perceval
came in.
Perceval was going to make a great speech in
the House to-night, and Althea was rather ashamed
that she did not care more. He had been put up
to speak against those who had once been of his
own political household and who now regarded
him as a renegade, but the subject was one sure


18 STUDIES IN WIVES
She felt sure that he would tell her, as he had told
her so many times before when he had failed her,
to ofier herself to Mrs. Panfillen for dinner.
But no—the voice she heard calling her by name
was not that of Perceval Scrope. It was a woman’s
voice, and it seemed to float towards her from a
far distance. “ Althea,” called the strange voice,
“ Althea.”
“ Yes?” she said, “ who is it? I can hardly
hear you,” and then, with startling closeness and
clearness—the telephone plays one such tricks—
came the answer in a voice she knew well, “ It is
I—Joan Panfillen ! Are you alone, Althea ‘? Yes ‘2
Ah ! that’s good! I want you to do me a kind-
ness, dear. I want you to come round here now
-—at once. Don’t tell anyone you are coming to
me. I have a reason for this. Can you hear what
I say, Althea ?”
“ Yes,” said the listener hesitatingly, “ yes, I
hear you quite well now, Joan.”
“ Come in by the park side, I mean through the
garden—the gate is unlocked, and I will let you
in by the window. Be careful as you walk across
the' flags, it’s very slippery to-night. Can you
come now, at once ?”
Althea hesitated a moment. Then she an-
swered, in her low, even voice, “ Yes, I’ll come
now, at once.”
A kindness ‘3 What kindness could she, Althea
Scrope, do Joan Panfillen ? The fear of the other
woman, the hidden distrust with which she
regarded her, gathered sudden force. Not lately,
but in the early days of Scrope’s marriage, Mrs.
Panfillen had more than once tried to use her


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 19
friend’s wife, believing—strange that she should
have made such a mistake—that Althea might
succeed where she herself had failed in persuading
Scrope for his own good. Althea now told herself
that no doubt Joan wished to see her on some
matter connected with Perceval’s coming speech.
As this thought came to her Althea’s white
forehead wrinkled in vexed thought. It was
too bad that she should have to go out now,
when she was expecting Mr. Bustard, to whom
she had one or two rather important things to say
about his sister But stay, why should he be
told that she was out ? Why indeed should she
be still out when Mr. Bustard did come ‘2 It was
not yet five o’clock, and he seldom came before a
quarter past. With luck she might easily go over
to Joan Panfillen’s house and be back before he
came.
Althea walked quickly out of the drawing-room
and down into the hall. Her fur cloak had been
carefully hung up as she had directed. Perceval
always said Luke was a stupid servant, but she
liked Luke; he was careful, honest, conscientious, a
very different type of man from the butler, Dockett.
Althea passed out into the chilly, foggy air. De-
lahay Street, composed of a few high houses, looked
dark, forbidding, deserted. She had often secretly
wondered why her husband chose to live in such a
place. Of course she knew that their friends raved
about the park side of the house, but the wife of
Perceval Scrope scarcely ever went in or out of her
own door without remembering a dictum of her
father’s: “ Nothing makes up for a good front
entrance.”

2—2


20 STUDIES IN WIVES
Althea walked quickly towards Great George
Street; to the left she passed Boar’s Head Yard,
where lived an old cabman in whom she took an
interest, and whose cab generally stood at Storey’s
Gate.
How strange to think that here had once
stood Oliver Cromwell’s house ! Her husband had
told her this fact very soon after their marriage;
it had seemed to please him very much that they
lived so near the spot where Cromwell had once
lived. Althea even at the time had thought this
pleasure odd, in fact affected, on Perceval’s part.
If the great Protector’s house stood there now,
filled with interesting little relics of the man, she
could have understood, perhaps to a certain extent
sympathised with, Perceval’s feeling, for Crom-
well had been one of her father’s heroes. But to
care, or pretend to care for a vanished associa-
tion !
But Perceval was like that. No man living—-
or so Althea believed—was so full of strange
whimsies and fads as was Perceval Scrope ! And
so thinking of him she suddenly remembered,
with a tightening of the heart, how often her hus-
band’s feet had trodden the way she was now
treading, hastening from the house which she
had just left to the house to which she was now
going.
Jealous of Joan Panfillen ? Nay, Althea assured
herself that there was no room in her heart for
jealousy, but it was painful, even more, it was
hateful, to know that there were people who pitied
her because of this peculiar intimacy between
Perceval and Joan. Why, quite lately, there had


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 21
been a recrudescence of talk about their friend-
ship, so an ill-bred busybody had hinted to Althea
only the day before.
The wife was dimly aware that there had been
a time when Mrs. Panfillen had hoped to form
with her an unspoken compact ; each would have
helped the other, that is, to “ manage ” Perceval ;
but the moment when such an alliance would have
been possible had now gone for ever—even if it
had ever existed. Althea would have had to have
been a different woman,—older, cleverer, less
scrupulous, more indifferent than she was, even
now, to the man she had married, to make such
a compact possible.
When about to cross Great George Street she
stopped and hesitated. Why should she do this
thing, why leave her house at Joan Panfillen’s
bidding ‘2 But Althea, even as she hesitated,
knew that she would go on. She had said that
she was coming, and she was not one to break
lightly even a light word.
As she crossed Storey’s Gate, she noticed the
stationary cab of the old man who lived in Boar’s
Head Yard. It had been standing there when she
had come in from her walk, and she felt a thrill
of pity—the old man made a gallant fight against
misfortune. She and Joan Panfillen were both
very kind to him.
Althea told herself that this sad world is
full of real trouble, and the thought made her
ashamed of the feelings which she had just allowed
to possess and shake her with jealous pain. And
yet—yet, though many people envied her, how
far from happy Althea knew herself to be, and


22 STUDIES IN WIVES
how terribly grey her life now looked, stretching
out in front of her.
As she passed into Birdcage Walk, and came
close to the little iron gate which Mrs. Panfillen had
told her was unlocked, she saw that a woman stood
on the path of the tiny garden behind the railings.
Of course it was not Joan herself ; the
thought that Joan, delicate, fragile as she was,
would come out into the cold, foggy air was un-
thinkable ; scarcely less strange was it to see
standing there, cloakless and hatless, Joan’s maid,
a tall, gaunt, grey-haired woman named Bolt, who
in the long ago had been nurse to the Panfillens’
dead child. Scrope had told Althea the story of
the brief tragedy very early in his acquaintance
with her; he had spoken with strong feeling, and
that although the child had been born, had lived,
and had died before he himself had known Joan.
In the days when she had been Mrs. Panfillen’s
guest, that is before her marriage, Althea had
known the maid well, known and liked her grim
honesty of manner, but since Althea’s marriage
to Perceval Scrope there had come a change over
Bolt’s manner. She also had made Althea feel
that she was an interloper, and now the sight of
the woman standing waiting in the cold mist dis-
turbed her.
Bolt looked as if she had been there a very long
time, and yet Althea had hurried ; she was even a
little breathless. As she touched the gate, she saw
that it swung loosely. Everything had been done
to make her coming easy; how urgent must be
Joan’s need of her !
Althea became oppressed with a vague fear.


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 23
She looked at the maid questioningly. “ Is Mrs.
Panfillen ill ‘2” she asked. The other shook her
head. “ There’s nothing ailing Mrs. Panfillen,”
she said in a low voice.
Together, quite silently, they traversed the
flagged path, and then Bolt did a curious thing.
She preceded her mistress’s visitor up the iron
steps leading to the boudoir window, and leaving
her there, on the little balcony, went down again
into the garden, and once more took up her station
near the gate as if mounting guard.
The long French window giving access to the
boudoir was closed, and in the moment that
elapsed before it was opened from within Althea
Scrope took unconscious note of the room she
knew so well, and of everything in it, including
the figure of the woman she had come to see.
It was a panelled octagon, the panels painted a
pale Wedgwood blue, while just below the ceiling
concave medallions were embossed with flower
garlands and amorini.
A curious change had been made since Althea
had last seen the room. An old six-leaved screen,
of gold so faded as to have become almost silver
in tint, which had masked the door, now stood
exactly opposite the window behind which Althea
was standing. It concealed the straight Empire
sofa which, as Mr. Panfillen was fond of telling his
wife’s friends, on the very rare occasions when he
found himself in this room with one of them, had
formerly stood in the Empress J osephine’s boudoir
at Malmaison; and, owing to the way it was now
placed, the old screen formed a delicate and charm-
ing background to Mrs. Panfillen’s figure.


24 STUDIES IN WIVES
Scrope’s Egeria stood in the middle of the room,
waiting for Scrope’s wife. She was leaning forward
in a curious attitude, as if she were listening, and
the lemon-coloured shade of the lamp standing on
the table threw a strange gleam on her lavender
silk gown, fashioned, as were ever the clothes
worn by Joan Panfillen, with a certain austere
simplicity and disregard of passing fashion.
Althea tapped at the window, and the woman
who had sent for her turned round, and, stepping
forward, opened the window wide. -
“ Come in !” she cried. “ Come in, Althea—
How strange that you had to knock ! I’ve been
waiting for you so long.”
“ I came as quickly as I could—I don’t think I
can have been five minutes.”
Althea stepped through the window, bringing
with her a blast of cold, damp air. She looked
questioningly at Mrs. Panfillen. She felt, she
hardly knew why, trapped. The other’s look of
anxious, excited scrutiny disturbed her.
Mrs. Panfillen’s fair face, usually pale, was
flushed.
So had she reddened, suddenly, when Althea had
come to tell her of her engagement to Perceval
Scrope. So had she looked when standing on
the doorstep as Althea and Perceval started for
their honeymoon, just after there had taken place
a strange little scene—for Scrope, following the
examp e of Thomas Panfillen, who had insisted
on what he called saluting the bride, had taken
Panfillen’s wife into his arms and kissed her.
“ Althea ”—Joan took the younger woman’s
hand in hers and held it, closely, as she spoke,


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 25
“ don’t be frightened,—but Perceval is here, ill,—
and I’ve sent for you to take him home.”
“ Ill ‘2” A look of dismay came over Althea’s
face. “ I hope he’s not too ill to speak to-night
—that would be dreadful—he’d be terribly upset,
terribly disappointed!” Even as she spoke she
knew she was using words which to the other
would seem exaggerated, a little childish.
“ I’m sure he’d rather you took him home, I’m
sure he’d rather not be found—” Mrs. Pan-
fillen hesitated a moment, and again she said the
words “ ‘ill’, ‘ here ’, ” and for the first time Althea
saw that there was a look of great pain and strain
on Joan’s worn, sensitive face.
“ Of course not 1” said the young wife quickly.
“ Of course he mustn’t be ill here; he must come
home, at once.”
Althea’s pride was protesting hotly against her
husband’s stopping a moment in a house where he
was not wanted—pride and a certain resentment
warring together in her heart. How strange
London people were ! This woman whom folk—-
the old provincial word rose to her lips—whom
folk whispered was over-fond of Perceval—why,
no sooner was he ill than her one thought was
how to get rid of him quietly and quickly !
Mrs. Panfillen, looking at her, watching with
agonised intensity the slow workings of Althea’s
mind, saw quite clearly what Perceval’s wife was
feeling, saw it with a bitter sense of what a few
moments ago she would have thought inconceiv-
able she could ever feel again—amusement.
She went across to the window and opened it.
As if in answer to a signal, the little iron gate


26 STUDIES IN WIVES
below swung widely open: “ Bolt has gone to get
a cab,” she said, without turning round; “ we
thought that it would be simplest. The old cab-
man knows us all—it will be quicker.” She spoke
breathlessly, but there was a tone of decision in
her voice, a gentle restrained tone, but one which
Althea knew well to spell finality.
“ But where is Perceval ‘2”
Althea looked round her bewildered. She
noticed, for the first time, that flung carelessly
across two chairs lay his outdoor coat, his gloves,
his stick, his hat. -Then he also had come in by
the park side of the house ?
Mrs. Panfillen went towards her with slow,
hesitating steps.
“ He is here,” she said in a low tone, “ behind
the screen. He was sitting on the sofa reading
me the notes of his speech, and—and he fell back.”
She began moving the screen, and as she did so
she went on, “ I sent for Bolt—-she was a nurse
once, you know, and she got the brandy which
you see there—” '4
But Althea hardly heard the words; she was
gazing, with an oppressed sense of discomfort and '
fear, at her husband. Yes, Perceval looked ill—
very ill,—and he was lying in so peculiar a posi-
tion! “ I suppose when people‘ faint they have
to put them like that,” thought Althea to herself,
but she felt concerned, a little frightened. . .
Perceval Scrope lay stretched out stiffiy on the
sofa, his feet resting on a chair which had been
placed at the end of the short, frail-looking little
couch. His fair, almost lint white, hair was pushed
back from his forehead, showing its unusual


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 27
breadth. The grey eyes were half closed, and he
was still wearing, wound about his neck so loosely
that it hid his mouth and chin, a silk muffler.
Althea had the painful sensation that he did not
like her to be there, that it must be acutely dis-
agreeable to him to feel that she saw him in such
a condition of helplessness and unease. And yet
she went on looking at him, strangely impressed,
not so much by the rigidity, as by the intense
stillness of his body. Scrope as a rule was never
still ; when he was speaking, his whole body, each
of his limbs, spoke with him.
By the side of the sofa was a small table, on
which stood a decanter, unstoppered.
“ Has he been like that long ‘2” Althea whis-
pered at length. “ He—he looks so strange.”
Joan Panfillen came close up to the younger
woman; again she put her hand on her com-
panion’s arm.
“Althea,” she said, “don’t you understand?
Can’t you see the dreadful thing that has hap-
pened?”—and as the other looked down into the
quivering face turned up to hers, she added with
sudden passion, “ Should I want you to take him
away if he were still here ?——should I want him to
go if there were anything left that I could do for
him ‘2”
And then Althea at last understood, and so
understanding her mind for once moved quickly,
and she saw with mingled terror and revolt what
it was that the woman on whose face her eyes
were now riveted was requiring of her.
“ You sent for me to take him home—dead Y”
It was a statement rather than a question. Mrs.


26 STUDIES I ‘


below swung widely open :
a cab,” she said, withou
thought that it would be -
man knows us all—it will
breathlessly, but there w 'kzn-I~ _ 3.:
her voice, a gentle restra' .é‘mz f I “b
Althea knew well to spell _ s! 6‘ mi ‘
“ But where is Percev
Althea looked mun m z; 1.;- _,‘r_ m
noticed, for the first ti h M an ha- -1
across two chairs lay hi . - -" - -' 7 1’}
. . . Ilbacialgmzmh; m
h1s stlck, h1s hat. The p in" [What-: 2
the park side of the ho
Mrs. Panfillen went
hesitating steps.
“ He is here,” she s
the screen. He was -
me the notes of his spe .
She began moving th t {VM'BOh ml
she went on, “ I sent 'h Mill?“ spokenill
once, you know, and a me to allow 10 “km
y 011 see there—” to meet f0" 1“ {be d1“ L.—
But Althea hardly Alum. that would h": E m}:
gazing, with an oppr me lOFOU-T ’ I“ .
fear, at her husband. ‘ 1-! than in a very didamuifimfgshm
very ill,—and he wa d mud Ind gentle “mam:
tion ! “ I suppose w M, {orgire me. We“ 31in
to put them like tha ‘ ' I m “0118, few I? p,
but she felt concerns to Mb an ordeal lush” ed
Perceval Scropen‘nov‘ : -mwb8l0neasound of am
sofa, his feet re;v
placed at the Minionsom _
couch. His 3 ' b91100»
back from; _ “[11??wa
a you should allow Tom—T0111
. $11
I:
2"?
2
k



momma .


OPPORTUNITY 29


and so it was understood
g her so anxiously.
d nothing. She stood look-
kness, welcoming the feel of
She gave herself a few brief
ed very long moments to
ore she said the irrevocable
e did say them, they sounded
d from far away, for Althea as
turn round ; she feared to look
h might unnerve her, render her
was about to do.
aid, “I will do what you ask.
st now—right, I mean, in telling
1 would have wished.”
nervous, dry haste, and, to her
woman spared her thanks. . . .
ng silence, and then Mrs. Panfillen
o Althea and touched her, making
tly. “ Then I will call Bolt,” she
as if to pass through the window,
pped her with a quick movement
, no !” she cried, “ let me do that !”
down the iron steps; it was good
ight even for a moment of the still
he dead—the dead whose mocking
to be still terribly alive.
the long, diiiicult minutes that fol-
Joan Panfillen, not Althea Scrope,
and blenched. It was Althea who
young strength to help to lift the
and, under cover of the sheltering
e the leaden feet retrace their steps
on stairway, and along the narrow


28 STUDIES IN WIVES
Panfillen made a scarcely perceptible movement
of assent. “ It is what he would have wished,”
she whispered, “ I am sure it is what he would
have wished you to do.”
“ I—I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do that.”
Althea was speaking to herself rather than to the
other woman. She was grappling with a feeling
of mortal horror and fear. She had always been
afraid of Perceval Scrope, afraid and yet fascinated,
and now he, dead, seemed to be even more for-
midable, more beckoning, than he had been alive.
She turned away and covered her eyes with her
hand. “ Why did you tell me ‘2” she asked, a
little wildly. “ If you hadn’t told me that he was
dead I should never have known. I should even
have done the—the dreadful thing you want me
to do.”
“ Bolt thought that—Bolt said you would not
know,” Mrs. Panfillen spoke with sombre energy.
“ She wished me to allow her to take him down
into the garden to meet you in the darkness
But,—but Althea, that would have been an in-
famous thing from me to you—— ” She waited
a moment, and then in a very different voice, in
her own usual measured and gentle accents, she
added, “ My dear, forgive me. We will never
speak of this again. I was wrong, selfish, to think
of subjecting you to such an ordeal. All I ask ” r
—and there came into her tone a sound of shamed
p1eading—“ is that you should allow Tom—Tom
and other people—to think that you were here
when it happened.”
Althea remained silent. Then, uncertainly, she'
walked across to the window and opened it. The


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 29
action was symbolic—and so it was understood
by the woman watching her so anxiously.
But still Althea said nothing. She stood look-
ing out into the darkness, welcoming the feel of
the cold damp air. She gave herself a few brief
moments—they seemed very long moments to
Joan Panfillen—before she said the irrevocable
words, and when she did say them, they sounded
muffled, and uttered from far away, for Althea as
she spoke did not turn round; she feared to look
again on that which might unnerve her, render her
unfit for what she was about to do.
“Joan,” she said, “I will do what you ask.
You were right just now—right, I mean, in telling
me what Perceval would have wished.”
She spoke with nervous, dry haste, and, to her
relief, the other woman spared her thanks. . . .
There was a long silence, and then Mrs. Panfillen
crept up close to Althea and touched her, making
her start violently. “ Then I will call Bolt,” she
said, and made as if to pass through the window,
but Althea stopped her with a quick movement
of recoil—“ No, no l” she cried, “ let me do that l”
and she ran down the iron steps; it was good
to be out of sight even for a moment of the still
presence of the dead—the dead whose mocking
spirit seemed to be still terribly alive.
But during the long, difficult minutes that fol-
lowed, it was Joan Panfillen, not Althea Scrope,
who shrank and blenched. It was Althea who
put out her young strength to help to lift the
dead man, and, under cover of the sheltering
mist, to make the leaden feet retrace their steps
down the iron stairway, and along the narrow
5.;


30 STUDIES IN WIVES
path they had so often leapt up and along with
eager haste.
To two of the three women the progress seemed
intolerably slow, but to Althea it was all too swift ;
she dreaded with an awful dread the companioned
drive which lay before her.
Perhaps something of what she was feeling was
divined by Mrs. Panfillen, for at the very last
Scrope’s Egeria forgot self, and made, in all sin-
cerity, an offer which on her part was heroic.
“ Shall I come with you ‘2” she whispered, avert-
ing her eyes from that which lay huddled up by
Althea’s side, “ I will come, willingly; let me come
——Althea.”
But Althea only shook her head in cold, hurried
refusal. She felt that with speech would go a
measure of her courage.
Afterwards Althea remembered that there had
come a respite,—-what had seemed to her at the
time an inexplicable delay. A man and a girl had
gone slowly by, staring curiously at the two bare-
headed women standing out on the pavement, and
on whose pale faces there fell the quivering gleam
of the old-fashioned cab lamp. Then, when the
footfalls of these passers-by had become faint,
Bolt spoke to the driver, and handed him some
money. Althea heard the words as in a dream,
“ Get along as quick as you can to 24, .Delahay
Street, there’s a good man,” and then the clink of
silver in the stillness, followed by the full sounds
of the man’s wheezy gratitude. "
There came a sudden movement and the dread
drive began, the horse slipping, the cab swaying
and j olting over the frozen ground.


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 31
With a gesture which was wholly instinctive,
Althea put out her arm,—her firm, rounded, living
arm,—and slipped it round the inert, sagging thing
which had been till an hour ago Perceval Scrope.
And, as she did so, as she pressed him to her, and
kept from him the ignominy of physical helpless-
ness, there came a great lightening of her spirit.
Fear, the base fear bred of the imagination, fell
away from her. For the first time there came
the certainty that her husband was at last satis-
fied with her; for the first time she was able
to do Perceval Scrope dead what she had never
been able to do Perceval Scrope alive, a great ser-
vice—a service which she might have refused to do.
Once or twice, very early in their married life,
Perceval had praised her, and his praise had
given Althea exquisite pleasure because it was
so rare, so seldom lavished; and this long-lost
feeling of joy in her husband’s approval came
back, filling her eyes with tears. Now at last
Althea felt as if she and Perceval Scrope were
one, fused in that kindly sympathy and under-
standing which, being the manner of woman she
Was, Althea supposed to be the very essence of
conjugal love.
As they were clasped together, she, the quick,
he, the dead, Althea lost count of time; it might
have been a moment, it might have been an hour,
when at last the jolting ceased.
As the old man got off the box of his cab, and
rang the bell, Big Ben boomed out the quarter-past
five.
Since she had last gone through that door a
yawning gap had come in Althea’s life, a gap which
.-


32 STUDIES IN WIVES
she had herself bridged. Fear had dropped from
her ; she could never again be afraid as she had been
afraid when she, Joan and Perceval had formed for
the last time a trinity. The feeling which had so
upheld her, the feeling that for the first time she
and her husband were in unison, gave her not only
courage but serenity of spirit. Althea shrank from
acting a lie, but she saw, for the fisrt time, through
Perceval Scrope’s eyes, and she admitted the
necessity.
qu the door opened, she remembered, almost
with exultation, that Dockett, the butler, was
out, and that it was only with Luke, the slow young
footman, that she would have to deal. As she
saw his tall, thin figure emerge hesitatingly into the
street, Mrs. Scrope called out in a strong, confident
voice, “ Luke—come here! Help me to get Mr.
Scrope indoors. He is ill ; and as soon as we have
got him into the morning room, you must go off
for a doctor, at once—”
She waved aside the cabman almost impatiently,
and it was Althea, Althea helped by Luke, who
carried Perceval Scrope over the threshold of his
own house, and so into a small room on the ground
floor, a room opening out of the hall, and looking
out on to the street.
“ He looks very bad, don’t ’e, ma’am ‘2” Luke
was startled out of his acquired passivity. “ I’d
better go right off now.” She bent her head.
And then Althea, again alone with the dead man,
suddenly became oppressed once more with fear, not
the physical terror which had possessed her when
Joan Panfillen had told her the awful truth, but
none the less to her a very agonising form of fear.


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY
33
a
Althea was afraid that now, when approach-
ing the end of her ordeal, she would fail Scrope
and the woman he had loved. What was she to
say, what story could she invent to tell those
who would come and press her with quick eager
questions ‘3 She knew herself to be incapable,
not only of untruth but of invention, and yet now
both were about to be required of her.
Althea turned out the lights, and wandered out
into the hall. She felt horribly lonely; with the
exception of the kindly, stupid youth who had
now-gone to find a doctor, there was not a member
of her considerable household in sufficient human
sympathy with her to be called to her aid.
She remembered with a pang that this ques-
tion of their ser‘Vants had been one of the many
things concerning which there had been deep,
fundamental disagreement between her husband
and herself. She had been accustomed to a well-
ordered, decorous household, and would even have
enjoyed managing such a one; but Perceval—
Perceval influenced by Dockettflhad ordained
otherwise, and Althea had soon become uneasily
aware that the order and decorum reigning below
stairs were only apparent. Even now there came
up from the basement the sound of loud talking, of
unrestrained laughter.
Suddenly someone knocked at the door, a loud
double knock which stilled, as if by magic, the
murmur of the voices below.
Althea looked round her doubtfully, then she
retreated into the darkened room, but no one came
up, and she remembered that the other servants
of course supposed Luke to be on duty. It might
3


34 STUDIES IN WIVES
be—nay, it almost certainly was—the doctor. With
faltering steps she again came out into the hall and
opened the front door; and then, when she saw
who it was who stood there, his kind honest eyes
blinking in the sudden light, Althea began to cry.
The tears ran down her cheeks ; she sighed con-
vulsively, and John Bustard, looking at her with
deep concern and dismay, was quite unaware—he
does not know even to this day—that it was with
relief. ' '
“ What is it ‘2” he said. “ My dear Mrs. Scrope
—what is the matter ‘2 Would you like me to go
away—or—or can I be of any use ‘2”
“ Oh yes,” she said piteously. “ Indeed you
can be of use. Don’t go away—stay with me——
I’m—I’m so frightened, Mr. Bustard. Perceval—
poor Perceval is—is ill, and I’m afraid to stay in
there with him.”
And it was Mr. Bustard who at once took com-
mand—command of Althea, whom he ultimately
ordered to bed; command of the excited house-
hold, whose excitement he sternly suppressed; it
was Mr. Bustard who, believing he told truth, lied
for Althea, first to the doctor, and later to the
coroner. ‘
“ How fortunate it was for poor Althea that
Mr. Bustard, that nice little man in the Privy
Council Office, was actually in the house when
poor Perceval Scrope’s death took place!” bold
and cruel people would say to Mrs. Panfillen,
watching the while to see how she took their men-
tion of the dead man’s name.
“ Yes,” she would answer them quietly. “ Very
fortunate indeed. And it was: so kind of Mr.


ALTHEA’S OPPORTUNITY 35
Bustard to get his sister to go away with Althea.
Poor Althea is so alone in the world. I hope she
will come and stay with us when she comes back
to town; we were Perceval Scrope’s oldest, I
might say closest, friends. You know that their
marriage—his and Althea’s—took place from our
house ‘3”
The only human being who scented a mystery
was Dockett—Dockett, who was mindful, as he
had a right to be, of his lawful perquisites, and
who will never forgive himself for having been out
on that fateful afternoon.
“ I’d give something to know the whereabouts of
Mr. Scrope’s overcoat, to say nothing of his hat
and stick. That common ash stick’s a relic—it
may be worth money some day!” he observed
threatenineg to the footman. But Luke, as only
answer, stared at him with stolid dislike.
Luke had seen nothing of the hat and stick ; no
doubt they had been left in the cab in which Mr.
Scrope had come back, ill, from the House. As
for the overcoat, it had probably disappeared in
the confusion, the hurried coming and going, of
that evening when Luke had been almost run off
his legs answering the door, and his head made
quite giddy answering enquiries. But it was not
Luke’s business to say what he thought or did not
think. With such a man as Mr. Dockett, it only
led to unpleasantness.





MR. JARVICE’S WIFE
I.
“ ABOUT that letter of your uncle’s?
you have no one to suggest ‘3”
Thomas Garden glanced anxiously at the son in
whom he had so strong a confidence, and who was
the secret pride of his eyes, the only love of his
austere, hard-working life.
The two were a great contrast to one another.
The older man was short and slight, with the
:delicate, refined, spiritual face, so often seen
in the provincial man of business belonging to
that disappearing generation of Englishmen who
found time to cultivate the things of the mind
as well as the material interests of life. A
contrast, indeed, to the tall, singularly handsome,
alert-looking man whom he had just addressed,
and whose perfect physical condition made him
appear somewhat younger than his thirty-two
years. 1‘;
And yet, in spite or perhaps because of this con-
trast between them, the two were bound in the
closest, if not exactly in the most confidential,
ties of affection. And, as a matter of course, they
were partners in the great metal-broking business
of Josh. Garden, Thomas Garden and Son, which
I take it
39


40 ‘ STUDIES IN WIVES
had been built up by three generations of astute,
self-respecting citizens of Birmingham.
It was Easter Monday, and the two men were
lingering over breakfast, in a way they seldom
allowed themselves time to do on ordinary week-
days, in the finely proportioned, book-lined dining-
room of one of those spacious old houses which
remain to prove that the suburb of Edgbaston was
still country a hundred years ago.
Theodore Carden looked across the table medi-
tatively. He had almost forgotten his uncle’s
letter, for, since that letter had been read and
cursorily discussed, he and his father had been
talking of a matter infinitely more important to
them both. The matter in question was the son’s
recent engagement and coming marriage, a mar-
riage which was a source of true satisfaction to
the older man. His father’s unselfish joy in the
good thing which had befallen him touched Theo-
dore Carden keenly, for the niche occupied in most
men’s minds by their intimate feminine circle was ,
filled in that of the young man by the diminu-
tive figure of the senior partner of Carden and Son.
As is perhaps more often the case than those
who despise human nature believe, many have the
grace to reverence and admire the qualities in
which they know themselves to be deficient. Such
a man was the younger Carden.
To-day the depths had been stirred, and he let
his mind dwell with a certain sense of shame and
self-rebuke on his own and his father’s ideals of
human conduct. Even as a schoolboy, Theodore
had come to realise how much more he knew of
the ugly side of life than did his father. But then,


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 41
old Mr. Carden was quite exceptional; he knew
nothing—or so at least his son believed, and loved
him for it—of the temptations, conflicts, victories,
and falls of the average sensual man.
Theodore’s father had been engaged, at twenty,
to a girl of his own age whom he had not been able
to marry till twelve years later ; she had left him
a widower with this one child after five years of
married life, and Thomas Garden, as he had him-
self once told his son in a moment of unwonted
confidence, had been absolutely faithful to her
before the marriage and since her death.
The woman—many people would have said the
very fortunate young woman—who was so soon
to become Mrs. Theodore Garden would not pos-
sess such a husband as Thomas Carden had been
to his wife.
And yet, in his heart, Theodore was well aware
that the gentle girl he loved would probably be a
happier woman than his own mother had been,
for he, unlike his father, in his dealings with the
other sex could call up at will that facile and yet
rather rare gift of tenderness which women, so life
had taught him, value far more than the deeper,
inarticulate love. . . .
Carden came back to the prosaic question of his
uncle’s letter with a distinct effort.
“ Have I anyone to suggest ?” he echoed. “ I
have no one to suggest, father. I know, of course,
exactly the sort of man Uncle Barrett is looking
for; ~he’s asking us to find him the perfect clerk
every man of business has sought for at some time
or other. If I were you I should write and tell
him that the man he wants us to find never has


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 43
one of indifference to you! Now I submit that
in this indifference you are really a little—” he
hesitated for a word, but found that none so well
expressed his thought as that which had first
risen to his lips—“ peculiar, father.”
“ Am I ‘2” said Thomas Carden slowly ; “ am I
so, Theodore ‘2 Nay, nay, I deny that I am in-
different ! Lane ”-—Maj or Lane was at that time
Head Constable of Birmingham, and a lifelong
friend of the speaker—“ Lane was quite full of it
last night. He insisted on telling me all the details
of the affair, and what shocked me, my boy, was
not so much the question which, of course, occupied
Lane—that is, as to whether that unhappy young
woman poisoned her husband or not~but the
whole state of things which he disclosed about
them. Lane told me certain facts concerning
J arvice, whom, as you truly say, I have known, in
a sense, for years, which I should not have thought
possible of any man—vile things, which should
have prevented his thinking of marriage, especially
of marriage with a young wife.”
Theodore Carden remained silent; he never dis-
cussed unsavoury subjects with his father. More-
over, he had no liking for Major Lane, though he
regarded him with considerable respect, and even
with a feeling of gratitude. Some years before,
the Head Constable had helped the young man out
of a serious scrape, the one real scrape—so Carden
was complacently able to assure himself—engen-
dered by his systematic pursuit of women.
Even now he could not recall, without wincing,
the interview he had had on that occasion with
his father’s friend. During that interview Carden
“an-a ran-c


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 45
his engagement would be received with boisterous
congratulations, tempered in some cases with an
underlying touch of regret and astonishment, filled
him with repugnance.
The girl he had chosen to be his wife was abso-
lutely different from the women who had hitherto
attracted him ; he reverenced as well as loved her,
and hitherto Theodore Garden had never found
reverence to be in any sense a corollary of passion,
while he had judged women by those who were
attractive to, or, as was quite as often the case,
attracted by, himself.
The last few days had brought a great change
in his life, and one which he meant should be per-
manent; and yet, in spite or perhaps because of
this, as he stood staring with absent eyes into his
father’s charming garden, he found his mind
dwelling persistently on the only one of his many
amorous adventures which had left a deep, an
enduring, and, it must be admitted, a most
delightful mark on the tablets of his memory.
The whole thing was still so vivid to him that
half-involuntarily he turned round and looked
down the long room to where his old father was
sitting. How amazed, above all how shocked and
indignant, the man for whom he had so great an
affection and respect would feel if he knew the
pictures which were now floating before his son’s
retrospective vision !
Like most thinking human beings, Theodore
Garden had not lived to his present age without
being struck by the illogical way the world wags.
Accordingly, he was often surprised and made
humorously indignant by the curious moral stan-


46 STUDIES IN WIVES
dards—they had so many more than one—of the
conventional people among whom it was his fate
to dwell and have his social being.
Not one of the men he knew, with the exception
of his father, and of those others—a small number
truly—whom he believed to be sincerely, not con-
ventionally, religious, but would have envied him
the astonishing adventure which reconstituted
itself so clearly before him to-day—and yet not
one of them but would have been ready to con-
demn him for having done what he had done.
Theodore Carden, however, so often tempted to
kiss, never felt tempted to tell, and the story of
that episode remained closely hidden, and would
so remain, he told himself, to the end of his life.
What had happened had been briefly this.
One day in the previous October, Carden had
taken his seat in the afternoon express which
stops at Birmingham on its way from the north
to Euston, or rather, having taken a leisurely
survey of the train, which was, as he quickly
noted, agreeably empty, he had indicated to the
porter carrying his bag a carriage in which sat,
alone, a singularly pretty woman.
As he afterwards had the delight of telling her,
and, as he now reminded himself with a retro-
spective thrill of feeling, he had experienced, when
his eyes first met those of the fair traveller, that
incommunicable sensation, part physical, part
mental, which your genuine Lothario, if an in-
telligent man, always welcomes with quickening
pulse as a foretaste of the special zest to be
attached to a coming pursuit.


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 47
Garden’s instinct as to such delicate matters had
seldom played him false; never less so than on
this occasion, for, within an hour, he and the
lovely stranger had reached that delightful stage
of intimacy in which a man and woman each feels
that he and she, while still having much to learn
about the other, are on the verge of a complete
understanding.
During the three hours’ journey, Garden’s
travelling companion told him a great deal more
about herself than he had chosen to reveal con-
cerning his own life and affairs; he learnt, for
instance, that she was the young wife of an old
man, and that the old man was exceedingly jealous.
Further, that she found the life she was com-
pelled to lead “ horribly boring”, and that a
widowed cousin, who lived near London, and from
whom she had “ expectations”, formed a con-
venient excuse for occasional absences from home.
Concerning three matters of fact, however, she
completely withheld her confidence, both then,
in those first delicious hours of their acquaintance,
and even later, when their friendship—well, why
not say friendship, for Garden had felt a very
strong liking as well as an overmastering attrac-
tion for this Undine-like creature ?-—had become
much closer.
The first and second facts which she kept closely
hidden, for reasons which should perhaps have
been obvious, were her surname—she confided to
him that her Christian name was Pansy—and her
husband’s profession. The third fact which she con-
cealed was the name of the town where she lived, and
from which she appeared to be travelling that day.


48 STUDIES IN WIVES
The trifling incidents of that eventful October
journey had become to a great extent blurred
in Theodore Garden’s memory, but what had fol-
lowed was still extraordinarily vivid, and to-day,
on this holiday morning, standing idly looking out
of the window, he allowed his mind a. certain
retrospective licence.
From whom, so he now asked himself, had first
come the suggestion that there should be no part-
ing at Euston between himself and the strange,
elemental woman he found so full of unforced
fascination and disarming charm ‘2
The answer soon came echoing down the corri-
dors of remembrance: from himself, of course!
But even now the memory brought with it shame-
faced triumph as he remembered her quick acqui-
escence, as free, as unashamed, as joyous as that
of a spoilt child acclaiming an unlocked-for treat.
And, after all, what harm had there been in the
whole halcyon adventure—what injury had it
caused to any human being ?
Garden put the husband, the fatuous old man
who had had the incredible folly to marry a girl
thirty-five years younger than himself, out of
court. Pansy, light-hearted, conscienceless Pansy
—he always thought of her with a touch of easy
tenderness—had run no risk of detection, for, as
he had early discovered, she knew no one in London
with the solitary exception of the old cousin who
lived in Upper Norwood.
As for his own business acquaintances, he might,
of course, have been seen by any of them taking
about this singularly attractive woman, for the
two went constantly to the theatre, and daily to


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 49
one or other of the great restaurants. But what
then ‘2 Excepting that she was quieter in manner,
far better dressed, and incomparably prettier,
Pansy might have been the wife or sister of any
one of his own large circle of relations, that great
Carden clan who held their heads so high in the
business world of the Midlands.
Nay, nay, no risk had been run, and no one had
been a penny the worse! Indeed, looking back,
Theodore Carden told himself that it had been a
perfect, a flawless episode; he even admitted
that after all it was perhaps as well that there
had been no attempt at a repetition.
And yet ? And yet the young man, especially
during the first few weeks which had followed that
sequence of enchanting days, had often felt piqued,
even a little surprised, that the heroine of his
amazing adventure had not taken advantage of
his earnest entreaty that she would give him the
chance of meeting her again. He had left it to
her to be mysterious ; as for himself, he had seen
no reason why he should conceal from her either
his name or his business address.
Many men would not have been so frank, but
Theodore Carden, too wise in feminine lore to
claim an infallible knowledge of women, never
remembered having made a mistake as to the
moral social standing of a new feminine acquaint-
ance.
During the few days they had been together,
everything had gone to prove that Pansy was no
masquerader from that under-world whose deni-
zens always filled him with a sensation of mingled
aversion and pity. He could not doubt—he
4


50 STUDIES IN WIVES
never had doubted—that what she had chosen to
tell him about herself and her private affairs was
substantially true. No man, having heard her
speak of it, could fail to understand her instinctive
repulsion from the old husband to whom she had
sold herself into bondage; and as human, if not
perhaps quite as worthy of sympathy, was her
restless longing for freedom to lead the pleasant
life led by those of her more fortunate con-
temporaries whose doings were weekly chronicled
in the society papers which seemed to form her
only reading.
Once only had Garden felt for his entrancing
companion the slightest touch of repugnance. He
had taken her to a play in which a child played an
important part, and she had suddenly so spoken
as to make him realise with a shock of surprise
that she was the mother of children! Yet the
little remark made by her, “ I wonder how my
little girls are getting on,” had been very natural
and even womanly. Then, in answer to a mut-
tered word or two on his part, she had explained
that she preferred not to have news of her chil-
dren when she was absent from home, as it only
worried her; even when staying with the old
cousin at Upper Norwood, she made a point of
being completely free of all possible home troubles.
Hearing this gentle, placid explanation of her
lack of maternal anxiety, Garden had put up his
hand to his face to hide a smile ; he had not been
mistaken; Pansy was indeed the thorough-going
little hedonist he had taken her to be. Still, it
was difficult, even rather disturbing, to think of
her as a mother, and as the mother of daughters.


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 51
Yet how deep an impression this unmoral, ap-
parently soulless woman had made on his mind
and on his emotional memory ! Even now, when
he had no desire, and, above all, must not allow
himself to have any desire, ever to see her again,
Theodore Garden felt, almost as keenly as he had
done during the period of their brief intimacy, a
morbid curiosity to know where she lived and had
her being.
It was late in the afternoon of Easter Monday.
Theodore Garden had just come in from a long
walk, and, as he passed through the circular hall
round which Watermead was built, he heard the
low sound of voices, those of his father and some
other man, issuing from the square drawing-room
always occupied by the father and son on such idle
days as these. He stayed his steps, realised that
the visitor was Major Lane, and then made up
his mind to go up and change, instead of going
straight in to his father, as he would have done
had the latter been alone.
As he came down again, and crossed the now
lighted hall, he met the parlourmaid, an elderly
woman who had been in Thomas Garden’s service
' ever since his wife’s death. “ I wonder if I can
take in the lamps now, Mr. Theodore ? It’s
getting so dark, sir.”
There was a troubled sound in her voice, and
the young man stopped and looked at her with
some surprise.
“ Of course you can, Kate,” he said quickly,
“ why not? Why haven’t you taken them in
before ‘2”
4—2
u! ejnRY S S
can". .m‘! 9"


52 STUDIES IN WIVES
“ I did go in with them half an hour ago, sir,
but the master told me to take them out again.
There’s firelight, to be sure, and it’s only Major
Lane in there, but he’s been here since three
o’clock, and master’s not had his tea yet. I sup-
pose they thought they’d wait till you came in.”
“ Oh! well, if my father prefers to sit in the
dark, and to put off tea till he can have my com-
pany, you had better wait till I ring, and then
bring in the lamps and the tea together.”
He spoke with his usual light good-nature, and
passed on into the room which was the only
apartment in the large old house clearly associ-
ated in his mind with the graceful, visionary figure
of his dead mother.
Thomas Garden and the Head Constable were
sitting in the twilight, one on each side of the fire-
place, and when the young man came in, they
both stirred perceptibly, and abruptly stopped
speaking.
Theodore came forward and stood on the hearth-
rug. “ May Kate bring in the lamps, father ‘2”
“ Yes, yes, I suppose so.”
And the lamps were brought in. Then came
the tea-tray, placed by Kate on a large table many
paces from the fire; womanless Watermead was
lacking in the small elegancies of modern life, but
now that would soon be remedied, so the younger
Garden told himself with a slight, happy smile.
Very deliberately, and asking no questions as to
milk or sugar, for well he knew the tastes of his
father and of his father’s friend, he poured out
two cups of tea, and turning, advanced, a cup
balanced in each steady hand.


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 53
But halfway up the room he stopped for a
moment, arrested by the sound of his father’s
voice——
“ Theo, my boy, I want to ask you something.”
The mode of address had become of late years
a little unusual, and there was a note in Thomas
Garden’s accents which struck his son as significant
—-even as solemn.
“ Yes, father ‘2”
“ Did you not tell me this morning that you
had never met J arvice ‘2”
The one onlooker, hatchet-faced Major Lane,
suddenly leaned a little forward.
He was astonished at his old friend’s extra-
ordinary and uncalled-for courage, and it was with
an effort, with the feeling that he was bracing
himself to see something terrible take place, that
he looked straight at the tall, fine-looking man
who had now advanced into the circle of light
thrown by the massive Argand lamps.
But Theodore Carden appeared quite unmoved,
nay more, quite unconcerned, by his father’s
question.
“ Yes,” he said, “ I did tell you so. I suppose
I knew the old fellow by sight, but I certainly
was never introduced to him. Are there any new
developments ‘2”
He turned to Major Lane with a certain curi-
osity, and then quite composedly handed him the
cup of tea he held in his right hand.
“ Well, yes,” answered the other coldly, “ there
are several new developments. We arrested Mrs.
J arvice this morning.”
“ That seems rather a strong step to have taken,


5f STUDIES IN WIVES
unless new evidence has turned up since Satur-
day,” said Theodore thoughtfully.
“ Such new evidence has come to hand since
Saturday,” observed Major Lane drily.
There was a pause, and again Thomas Garden
addressed his son with that strange touch of
solemnity, and again Major Lane, with an inward
wincing, stared fixedly at the young man now
standing on the hearthrug, a stalwart, debonair
figure, between himself and his old friend.
“ Gan you assure me—can you assure us both—
that you never met Mrs. J arvice ?”
Garden looked down at his father with a puzzled
expression.
“ Of course I can’t assure you of anything of the
kind,” he said, still speaking quite placidly. “ I
may have met her somewhere or other, but I can’t
remember having done so; and I think I should
have remembered it, both because the name is an
uncommon one, and because ”—-he turned to
Major Lane—“ isn’t she said to be an extra-
ordinarily pretty woman ‘2”
As the last words were being uttered an odd
thing happened. Thomas Garden suddenly dropped
the cup he was holding in his hand; it rang against
the brass fender and broke in several pieces, while
the spoon went clattering into the fireplace.
“ Father ! ” exclaimed Theodore, and then
quickly he added, “ Don’t trouble to do that,”
for the old man was stooping over the rug, and
fumbling with the broken pieces. But Thomas
Garden shook his head ; it was evident that he was,
for the moment, physically incapable of speech.
A great fear came into the son’s mind ; he turned


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 55
to Major Lane, and muttered in an urgent,
agonised whisper, “ Is it—can it be a seizure?
Hadn’t I better go and try to find Dr. Gurle ?”
But the other, with a dubious expression on his
face, shook his head. “ No, no,” he said; “it’s
nothing of the kind. Your father’s getting older,
Garden, as we all are, and I’ve had to speak to
him to-day about a very disagreeable matter.”
He looked fixedly, probingly, at the young man.
“ I think it’s thoroughly upset him.” The
speaker hesitated, and then added: “ I daresay
he’ll tell you about it; in any case, I’d better go
now and come back later. If you can spare me
half an hour this evening, I should like to have a
talk with you—about the same matter.”
During the last few moments Major Lane had
made up his mind to take a certain course, even
to run a certain risk, and that not for the first
time that day, for he had already set his own
intimate knowledge of Thomas Garden, the life-
long friend whose condition now wrung him with
pity, against what was, perhaps, his official duty.
Some two hours before, the Head Constable had
entered the house where he had been so constantly
and so hospitably entertained, with the firm con-
viction that Theodore Garden had been the cats-
paw of a clever, unscrupulous woman ; in fact that
there had come a repetition, but a hundred times
more serious, of that now half-forgotten entangle-
ment which had so nearly brought Garden to grief
some seven or eight years before. Once more he
had come prepared to do his best to save his
friend’s son, so far as might be possible, from the
consequences of his folly.


56 STUDIES IN WIVES
But now ‘2 Ah, now, the experienced, alert
official had to admit to himself that the incidents
of the last ten minutes had completely altered his
view of the matter. He realised that in any case
Theodore Carden was no fool; for the first time
that day the terrible suspicion came into Major
Lane’s mind that the man before him might, after
all, be more closely connected with the J arvice
mystery than had seemed possible.
Never, during his long connection with crime,
had the Head Constable come across as good an
actor, as cool a liar, as he now believed this man
of business to be.
Well, he would give Theodore Carden one more
chance to tell the truth; Theodore was devoted
to his father, so much was certainly true, and per-
haps his father would be able to make him under-
stand the gravity of the case. Major Lane felt
bitterly sorry that he had come first to the old
man—but then, he had so completely believed in
the “ scrape ” theory; and now he hardly knew
what to believe !
For the moment, at any rate, so the Head Con-
stable told himself, the mask had fallen; Theodore
Carden could not conceal his relief at the other’s
approaching departure.
“ Certainly,” he said hastily, “ come in this
evening by all means ; I won’t ask you to stay to
dinner, for I mean to try and make father go to
bed, but later I shall be quite free. If, however,
you want to ask me anything about the J arvice
affair, I’m afraid I can’t help you much ; I’ve not
even read the case with any care.”
The old man, still sitting by the fire, had caught


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 57
a few of the muttered words, and before Major
Lane could leave the room Thomas Garden had
risen from his chair, his face paler, perhaps, than
usual, but once more his collected, dignified self.
“ Stay,” he said firmly; “ having gone so far, I
think we should now thresh the matter out.”
He walked over to where his son and his friend
were standing, and he put his hand on the older
man’s arm.
“ Perhaps I cannot expect you, Lane, to be
convinced, as I, of course, have been convinced,
by my son’s denials. It is, as I told you this
afternoon, either a plot on the part of someone who
bears a grudge against us, or else—what I think
more likely—there are two men in this great town
each bearing the name of Theodore Garden. But
I appreciate, I deeply appreciate, the generous
kindness which made you come and warn us of
this impending calamity; but you need not fear
that we shall fail to meet it with a complete
answer.”
“ Father ! Major Lane ! What does this mean?”
For the first time a feeling of misgiving, of
sudden fear, swept over Theodore Garden’s mind.
Without waiting for an answer, he led the way
back to the fireplace, and, deliberately drawing
forward a chair, motioned to Major Lane to sit
down likewise.
“ Now then,” he said, speaking with consider-
able authority and decision, “ I think I have a
right to ask what this is all about! In what way
are we, my father and myself, concerned in the
J arvice affair ? For my part, Major Lane, I can
assure you, and that, if you wish it, on oath, that


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 59
I wonder if you remember ”—~he paused, and
then went on firmly, “ an interview you and I
had many years ago?”
For the first time the younger man’s whole
manner changed ; a look of fear, of guilt, came over
his strong, intelligent face.
“ Father,” he said imploringly, “ I beg you not
to listen to Major Lane. He is alluding to a
matter which he gave me his word—his word of
honour—should never be mentioned to anyone,
least of all to you ;” then, turning with an angry
gesture to the Head Constable, “ Was that not
so ‘2” he asked imperiously.
“ Yes, I admit that by asking you this question
I have broken my word, but good God ! man, this
is no passing scrape that we have to consider now ;
to-morrow morning all Birmingham will be ring-
ing with your name—with your father’s name,
Theodore—for by some horrible mischance the
papers have got hold of the letters in question. I
did my best, but I found I was powerless.”
He turned and deliberately looked away, as
he added in a low, hesitating voice: “And now,
once more I ask you whether we had not better
delay this painful discussion until you and I are
alone 7”
“ No !” cried Carden, now thoroughly roused,
“ certainly not! You have chosen to come and
tell my father something about me, and I insist
that you tell me here, and at once, what it is of
which I am accused.”
He instinctively looked at his father for sup-
port, and received it in full measure, for at once
the old man spoke.


60 STUDIES IN WIVES
“ Yes, Lane, I think my son is right ; there’s no
use in making any more mystery about the matter.
I’m sure that the letters you have brought to show
Theodore will puzzle him as much as they have
me, and that he will be able to assure you that
he has no clue either to their contents or to their
writer.”
Very slowly, with a feeling of genuine grief and
shame for the man who seemed incapable of either
sorrow or shame, Major Lane held out the folded
paper; and then in very pity he looked away as
his old friend’s son eagerly unrolled the piece of
foolscap, placing it close under the lamp-shade
in order that he might thoroughly master its
contents.
As Theodore Garden completed the trifling
action, that of unrolling the piece of paper which
was to solve the mystery, he noted, with a curious
feeling of relief, that the documents (or were they
letters?) regarded by the Head Constable as so
damnatory, were but two, the first of some length,
the second consisting of a very few lines, and both
copied in the fair round hand of Major Lane’s
confidential clerk.
And then, with no premonitory warning, Garden
became the victim of a curious physical illusion.
Staring down at the long piece of blue paper, he
found that he was only able to master the signa-
ture, in both cases the same, with which each
letter terminated. Sometimes only one word, one
name—that of Pansy—stood out clearly, and then
again he seemed only to see the other word, the
other name—that of Jarvice. The two names
appeared to play hide-and-seek withjone another,


MR. J ARVICE’S WIFE 61
to leap out alternately and smite his eyes, pressing
and printing themselves upon his brain.
At last, while he was still staring silently, obsti-
nately, at the black lines dancing before him, he
heard the words, and they seemed to be coming
from a long way off, “ Theodore! Oh, my boy,
what is the matter 2” and then Major Lane’s
voice, full of rather angry concern, “Rouse your-
self, Garden, you are frightening your father.”
“Am I ‘2” he said dully; “ I mustn’t do that ;”
then, handing back the sheet of foolscap to the
Head Constable, he said hoarsely, “ I can’t make
them out. Will you read them to me ‘2”
And Major Lane, in passionless accents, read
aloud the two letters which he already almost
knew by heart.
6, LIGHTWOOD PLACE,
January 282k.
You told me to write to you if ever I was in real
trouble and thought you could help me. Oh!
Theo, darling, I am in great trouble, and life,
especially since that happy time—you know when
I mean—is more wretched than ever. You used
to say I was extraordinarily pretty, I wonder if
you would say so now, for I am simply ill—worn
out with worry. He—you know who—has found
out something; such a little insignificant thing;
and since then he makes my life unbearable with
his stupid jealousy. It isn’t as if he knew about
you and me, that would be something real to
grumble at, wouldn’t it, darling! Sometimes I
feel tempted to tell him all about it. How he
would stare! He is incapable of understanding
anything romantic. However, I’m in no mood
for laughing now. He’s got a woman in to watch
me, a governess, but luckily I’ve quite get her


62
STUDIES IN WIVES
to be on my side, though of course I haven’t told
her anything about my private affairs.
Will you meet me one day this week, to-mor—
row if you can, at No. 15, Calthorpe Street ? Four
o’clock is the safest time for me. Between the
two small shops you will see a swing door with
“Madame Paula, Milliner,” on it; push it open
and go straight upstairs. On the first landing
you will see a door with “Gone out, enquire up-
stairs,” on it. Push up the door knob (don’t try
to turn it) and walk in. The room will be empty,
but you will see a door leading to a back room :
push up the knob and there—there you will find
your poor little Pansy, fainting with joy at seeing
her big strong Theo again.
Send me a postcard, saying, “ Mrs. Jarvice can
be fitted on (day you select).” If posted before
eleven, it will reach me in time. Of course, I’m
running a risk in meeting you here, so near my
home, but I must see you, for I have a great favour
to ask you, Theo, and I dare not propose going
away even for one day.
PANSY JARVICE.
Major Lane paused a moment, then went on :—
Theo, I wrote to you ten days ago, but I have
had no answer. I am dreadftu worried ; I know
you are in Birmingham, for I saw your name in a
paper before I wrote to you. I have gone through
such terrible days waiting for the postcard I asked
you to send me. Write, if only to say you don’t
want to hear again of poor miserable
PANSY JARVICE.
“ I suppose you will now admit that you know
who wrote these letters ‘2” asked Major Lane
sternly.


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 63
“ Yes—at least I suppose they were written
by Mrs. Jarvice.”
Theodore Garden spoke with a touch of im-
patience. The question seemed to him to be, on
the part of his father’s old friend, a piece of useless
cruelty.
“ And can you suggest to whom they were
written, if not to yourself ‘2”
“ No, of course not; I do not doubt that they
were written to me,” and this time his face was
ravaged with a horror and despair to which the
other two men had, so far, no clue. “ And yet,”
he added, a touch of surprise in his voice, “ I
never saw these letters—they never reached
me.”
“ But of course you received others ‘2”
Major Lane spoke with a certain eagerness; then,
as the young man seemed to hesitate, he added
hastily: “ Nay, nay—say nothing that might in-
criminate yourself.”
“ But indeed—indeed I have never received a
letter from her—that perhaps is why I did not
know the handwriting.”
“ Theodore!” cried his father sharply, “ think
what you are saying! What you’ve been shown
are only copies—surely you understood that ‘2
What Lane has just shown you are copies of letters
which purport to have been addressed to you, but
which were intercepted on their way to the post
—is that not so ‘2” and he turned to the Head
Constable.
“ Yes,” said Major Lane; then he added, very
deliberately,
“ The originals of these two letters, which were


64 STUDIES IN \VIVES
bought for a large sum from Mrs. J arvice’s
governess, evidently the woman referred to in
the first letter, are now in the hands of the news
editor of the Birmingham Dispatch. I was shown
them as a great favour”—a grim smile distorted,
for a moment, the Head Gonstable’s narrow
jaw.
“ I did my best—for your father’s sake, Theo-
dore—to frighten these people into giving them
up; I even tried to persuade them to hold them
over, but it was no good. I was told that no Bir-
mingham paper had ever had such a—‘ scoop’, I
believe, was the word used. You and your father
are so well known in this city.” And again
Theodore Garden marvelled at the cruelty of the
man.
Thomas Garden broke in with a touch of im-
patience,
“ But nothing else has been found, my boy!
Lane should tell you that the whole theory of your
having k’nown Mrs. J arvice rests on these two
letters—which never reached you.”
_ Father and son seemed suddenly to have
changed places. The old man spoke in a strong,
self-confident tone, but the other, his grey face
supported on his hands, was staring fixedly into
the fire.
“ Yes,” said Major Lane, more kindly, “ I
ought perhaps to tell you that within an hour of
my being shown these letters I had Mrs. J arvice’s
house once more searched, and nothing was found
connecting you with the woman, excepting, I am
sorry to say, this ;”—and he held out an envelope
on which was written in Theodore Garden’s clear


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 65
handwriting the young man’s name and business
address. ~
“ Now, I should like you to tell me, if you don’t
mind doing so, where, when, and how this name
and address came to be written ‘2”
“ Yes, I will certainly tell you.”
The young man spoke collectedly; he was
beginning to realise the practical outcome of the
conversation.
“ I wrote that address about the middle of last
October, in London, at Mansell’s Hotel in Pall
Mall East.”
“ The poor fellow’s going to make a clean breast
of it at last,” so thought Major Lane with a
strange feeling of relief, for on the flap of the
envelope, which he had kept carefully turned down,
was stamped “ Mansell’s Hotel.”
It was in a considerate, almost kindly tone, that
the Head Constable next spoke.
“ And now, I beg you, for your own sake, to
tell me the truth. Perhaps I ought to inform you,
before you say anything, that, according to our
' theory, Mrs. J arvice was certainly assisted in
procuring the drug with which there is no doubt
she slowly poisoned her husband. As yet we
have no clue as to the person who helped her, but
we have ascertained that for the last two months,
in fact, from about the date of the first letter
addressed to you, a man did purchase minute
quantities of this drug at Birmingham, at Wolver-
hampton, and at Walsall. Now, mind you, I do
not suspect, I never have suspected, you of having
any hand in that, but I fear you’ll have to face
the ordeal of being confronted with the various
5


(so STUDIES IN WIVES
chemists, of whom two declare most positively
that they can identify the man who brought them
the prescription which obtained him the drug in
question.”
While Major Lane was speaking, Theodore
Garden had to a certain extent regained his self-
possession ; here, at least, he stood on firm ground.
“ Of course, I am prepared to face anything of
the kind that may be necessary.” He added
almost inaudibly : “ I have brought it on myself.”
Then he turned, his whole voice altering and
softening : “ Father, perhaps you would not mind
my asking Major Lane to go into the library with
me ‘2 I should prefer to see him alone.”
II.
And then the days dragged on, a week of days,
each containing full measure of bitter and public
humiliation; full measure also of feverish sus-
pense, for Theodore Garden did not find it quite
so easy as he had thought it would be to clear
himself of this serious and yet preposterous accu-
sation of complicity in murder.
But Major Lane was surprised at the courage
and composure with which the young man faced
the ordeal of confrontation with the various men,
any one of whom, through a simple mistake or
nervous lapse of memory, might compel his pre-
sence, if not in the dock, then as a witness at the
coming murder trial.
At last the awful ordeal was over, for, as a
matter of fact, none of those brought face to face


MR. JARVICE’S WIFE 67
with him in the sordid promiscuity of such scenes,
singled out Theodore Garden as resembling the
mysterious individual who had almost certainly
provided Mrs. J arvice with the means wherewith
to poison her husband.
But it was after the need for active defence had
passed away that Theodore Garden’s true suffer-
ings began. . . . The moment twilight fell he was
haunted, physically and mentally possessed, by
the presence of the woman he had known at once
so little and so well—that is, of her he now knew
to be Pansy J arvice.
Especially terrible were the solitary evenings of
those days when his father was away, performing
the task of breaking so much of the truth as could
be told to the girl to whom his son had been
engaged.
As each afternoon drew in Theodore found him-
self compelled to remain more or less concealed in
the rooms which overlooked the garden of Water-
mead. For, with the approach of night, the sub-
urban road in front of the fine old house was filled
by an ever coming and going crowd of bat-like
men and women, eager to gaze with morbid
curiosity at the dwelling of the man who had un-
doubtedly been, if not Mrs. J arvice’s accomplice—
that, to the annoyance of the sensation-mongers,
seemed decidedly open to question—then, her
favoured lover.
But to these shameful and grotesque happenings
Theodore Garden gave scarce a thought, for it was
when he found himself alone in the drawing-room
or library that his solitude would become stealthily
invaded by an invisible and impalpable wraith.
5—2


68 STUDIES IN WIVES
So disorganised had become his nerves, so pitiable
the state of his body and mind, that constantly he
seemed conscious of a faint, sweet odour, that of
wood violets, a scent closely associated in his
thoughts with Pansy Jarvice, with the woman
whom he now knew to be a murderess.
He came at last to long for a tangible delusion,
for the sight of a bodily shape which he could tell
himself was certainly not there. But no such
relief was vouchsafed him; and yet once, when
sitting in the drawing-room, trying to read a book,
he had felt a rounded cheek laid suddenly to his ;
a curl of silken, scented hair had touched his
neck. . . .
Terrifying as was the peopled solitude of his
evenings, Carden dreaded their close, for at night,
during the whole of each long night, the woman
from whom he now felt so awful a repulsion held
him prisoner.
From the fleeting doze of utter exhaustion he
would be awakened by feeling the pressure of
Pansy’s soft, slender arms about his neck; they
would wind themselves round his shuddering
body, enclosing him slowly, inexorably, till he
felt as if he must surely die under their gyves-like
pressure.
Again—and this, perhaps, was what he learnt
to dread in an especial degree—he would be sud-
denly roused by Pansy’s liquid, laughing voice,
whispering things of horror in his ear ; it was then,
and then only, that he found courage to speak,
courage to assure her, and so assure himself, that.
he was in no sense her accomplice, that he had had
naught to do with old J arvice’s death. But then


M R. JARVICE’S WIFE 69
there would come answer, in the eager tones he
remembered so well, and the awful words found
unwilling echo in his heart: “ Yes, yes, indeed
you helped !”
And now the last day, or rather the last night,
had come, for the next morning Theodore Garden
was to leave Birmingham, he hoped for ever, for
New Zealand.
The few people he had been compelled to see
had been strangely kind ; quiet and gentle, as folk,
no doubt, feel bound to be when in the presence
of one condemned. As for Major Lane, he was
stretching—no one knew it better than Garden
himself—a great point in allowing the young man
to leave England before the Jarvice trial.
During those last days, even during those last
hours, Theodore deliberately prevented himself
from allowing his mind to dwell on his father. He
dil not know how much the old man had been told,
and he had no wish to know. A wall of silence
had arisen between the two who had always been
so much, nay, in a sense, everything, to one
another. Each feared to give way to any emo-
tion, and yet the son knew only too well, and was
ashamed of the knowledge, with what relief he
would part from his father.
There had been a moment when Major Lane had
intimated his belief that the two would go away
and make a new life together, but Theodore Garden
had put aside the idea with rough decision. Per-
haps when he was far away, on the other side of
the world, the former relations of close love and
sympathy, if not of confidence, might be re-


70 STUDIES IN WIVES
established between his father and himself, but
this, he felt sure, would never be while they
remained face to face.
And now he was lying wide awake in the dark-
ness, in the pretty peaceful room which had once
been his nursery, and where he had spent his
happy holidays as a schoolboy.
His brain remained abnormally active, but
physically he was oppressed by a great weariness ;
to-night, for the first time, Garden felt the loath-
some wraith that haunted him, if not less near,
then less malicious, less watchful than usual, above
all less eager to assert her power. . . . Yet, even
so, he lay very still, fearing to move lest he should
once more feel about his body the clinging, en-
veloping touch he dreaded with so great a dread.
And then, quite suddenly, there came a strange
lightening of his heart. A space of time seemed
to have sped by, and Garden, by some mysterious
mental process, knew that he was still near home,
and not, as would have been natural, in New Zea-
land. Nay, more, he realised that the unfamiliar
place in which he now found himself was Winson
Green Gaol, a place which, as a child, he had been
taught to think of with fear, fear mingled with a
certain sense of mystery and excitement.
Theodore had not thought of the old local prison
for years, but now he knew that he and his father
were together there, in a small cell lighted by one
candle. The wall of silence, raised on both sides
by shame and pain, had broken down, but, alas !
too late; for, again in some curious inexplicable
way, the young man was aware that he lay under
4. . A..-» L. l





A VERY MODERN INSTANCE
OLIVER GERMAINE walked with long, even strides
from the Marble Arch to Grosvenor Gate. It was
Sunday morning, early in July, and the compara-
tively deserted portion of the Park which he had
chosen was, even so, full of walkers. A good
many people, men as well as women, looked at
him pleasantly as he went by, for the young man
was an attractive, even an arresting, personality
to the type of person who takes part in Church
Parade. -
Germaine was tall, slim, dark, so blessed by
fate in the mere matter of eyes, nose and mouth,
that his looks were often commented on when his
wife’s beauty was mentioned.
So it was that, as he walked quickly by, a rather
vexed expression on his handsome face, almost
every man who saw him envied him—if not his
looks then his clothes, if not his clothes then his
air of being young, healthy, and, to use an ugly
modern phrase, in perfect condition.
A nursemaid who watched him pass to and fro
several times told herself, rather wistfully, that
he was waiting for a loved one, and that the lady,
as is the way with loved ones, was late.
The nursemaid was right in one sense, wrong in
75


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 77
herself; she always behaved with extraordinary
prudence and sense,—in fact Oliver was now far
less jealous of Bella than he had been in the old
days, before she had blossomed into a famous
beauty. She was then rather fond of flirting—but
her husband had proved the truth of the comfort-
able old adage concerning safety in numbers.
Bella now simply had no time for flirtation !
There was no necessity for her to exert herself, she
had only to sit still and be admired and adored,—
adored, that is, in platonic fashion, admired as you
admire a work of art.
Another man who would certainly be lunching
with them to-day was Peter J oliffe.
J olifle was a clever, quaint fellow, whose mission
in .life was to make people laugh by saying funny
things in a serious tone. J olifle was always
fluttering round Bella. He had established himself
as a tame cat about the house, and he had, as a
matter of fact, been very useful to the young
couple, piloting Bella when she was only “ the
new beauty ” amid social quicksands and shallows
of which she naturally knew nothing.
Nay, more, Peter J oliffe had introduced the Ger-
maines to some of the very nicest people they knew,
——old-fashioned, well-established people, delightful
old ladies who called Bella “ My pretty dear ”,
courtly old gentlemen who paid her charmingly-
turned compliments. Yes, it was nice to think
Jolifie would be there to-day; he always helped
to make a party go off well.
As for Oliver’s sister, Fanny, she would have
to sit next Henry Buck. For a brief moment
Germaine considered Henry Buck,—~Buck who


78 STUDIES IN WIVES
was always called “ Rabbit ” behind his back, and
sometimes to his face.
Germaine hardly knew how it was that they had
come to know poor old Rabbit so well. They had
met him soon after they were married, and ever
since he had stuck to them both with almost
pathetic insistence. Oddly enough, he, Oliver,
did not reciprocate Henry Buck’s feelings of ad-
miring friendship. It was not that he disliked
the man, but he had a sort of physical antipathy
to him.
The only interesting thing about Henry Buck
was his wealth. But then to manypeople that made
him very interesting, for he was really immensely
rich, and one of those rather uncommon people
who don’t know how to spend their money! Poor
Rabbit had been educated at home by a foolish
widowed mother, who had been afraid of letting
him play rough games. This was perhaps why he
was so dull and awkward—~not quite like other
people.
Germaine felt rather sorry that Henry Buck
would certainly be there to-day. Considering
how very little he did for them—no, that was a
beastly thing to say, even to oneself !——but con-
sidering how very unornamental and uninteresting
poor old Rabbit was, it was really very nice of
Bella to be so kind to him. She never seemed to
mind his being there, and she had even managed
to force his company on certain people whose one
object in life was to avoid a bore, and who didn’t
care a button whether a man was a pauper or a
millionaire.
Of course Germaine guessed what had hap-


80 STUDIES IN WIVES
world in which Oliver and Bella now moved ; she
was quite convinced that she belonged to the very
best, exclusive set, and so she did—in Shrop-
shire. But here in town? Why, she was even
ignorant of the new social shibboleths; all her
notions as to what it was the right thing to do, or
to avoid doing, belonged to the year before last !
Take to-day. Fanny would certainly feel cross
and disappointed that Bella was not there, in the
Park, too; and, as a matter of fact, Germaine had
tried to make his wife please his sister in this
little matter of Church Parade—but Bella had
shaken her head smilingly.
“ You know I would do anything for Fanny,”
she had said, “ but really, darling, you mustn’t
ask me to do that—to go into that big, horrid,
staring crowd. Why should I? It makes one
look so cheap! It would only bore me, and I
don’t think Fanny would really enjoy having me
there,” and Bella had smiled a little smile.
Germaine had smiled too,—he really couldn’t
help it! It was quite true that Fanny would not
enjoy seeing Bella looked at, followed,—in a word,
triumphing, in the way she did triumph every time
she appeared in a place where she was likely to
be recognised.
Of course it was odd, when one came to think
of it, that Bella, who had been just as pretty two
years ago as she was now, should, for some mys-
terious reason, have been suddenly discovered, by
those whose word is law in such matters, to be
astonishingly, marvelloust beautiful !
An involuntary smile again quivered across
Oliver Germaine’s good-looking face. He had but


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 81
little sense of humour, and yet even he saw some-
thing almost comic about it—the way that Bella,
his darling, pretty little Bella, had suddenly been
exalted—hoisted up, as it were, on to a pin-
nacle. She was now what the Londoners of a
hundred years ago would have called “ the reign-
ing toast ”—so an amusing old fellow, who was a
great authority on history, had told him a few
days ago.
Still, he ought to make allowances for his sister
Fanny. It was not in human nature—or so
Oliver believed—for any woman, even for such a
good sort as Fanny undoubtedly was, to be really
pleased at another woman’s triumph.
Small wonder that, to use his sister’s favourite
expression, Fanny could not make it out ! It was
unfortunate that Bella’s fame—that fame of
which the young husband was half ashamed and
half proud—had actually penetrated to the dull
village where his only sister held high state as
wife of the lord of the manor.
Since Fanny had been in town she had said little
things to him about Bella’s position as reigning
beauty — not altogether kindly or nice little
things. Even yesterday she had observed, with
a touch of sharp criticism in her voice, “ I wonder,
dear old boy, why you allow Bella’s photograph to
appear in all those low papers!” and Oliver had
shrugged his shoulders, not knowing what to
answer, but comfortably sure, in a brotherly way,
that Fanny would have been quite willing to see
her own fair features reproduced in similar fashion,
had it occurred to any of the editors of these
same papers to ask forgthe loan of her photograph.
6


82 STUDIES IN WIVES
As a matter of fact, he had remembered, even
while she was speaking, a monstrously ugly photo-
graph of Fanny,——Fanny surrounded by her dogs
and children,—which had appeared in a well-known
lady’s paper. Why, she had actually sent the paper
to him, marked! But Oliver magnanimously re-
frained from reminding her of this,—the more so
that Fanny had hurried on from the trifling ques-
tion of Bella’s portrait to the more serious and
unpleasant one of her brother’s income.
But, as Germaine now told himself complacently,
he had been very short with her. In fact he had
administered a good brotherly snub to inquisitive
Fanny. She had no business to ask him a lot of
questions concerning the way he and Bella chose
to spend their income ; it was no business of hers
how the money was spent. Unfortunately Fanny
did consider it her business, simply owing to the
fact that she was Oliver’s only sister, and very
fond of him,—that went without saying—and that
unluckin her husband was Oliver’s trustee. So it
was that she had shown extraordinary curiosity
as to how her brother and his wife managed to
live in the way they did, on the income she knew
they had.
“ Do you know,” she had said gravely, “ exactly
what your income is ‘2” Oliver had nodded im-
patiently. Of course he knew, roughly speaking,
that he and Bella had a little over two thousand a
year
“ Two thousand and sixty-one pounds, eighteen
shillings,” she had gone on impressively. “ At
least that was what it was last year, for I asked
Dick.” Now Dick was Fanny’s husband, and a


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 83
most excellent fellow, but hopelessly under Fanny’s
thumb.
Oliver Germaine had not always been so well
off. In fact, when he first met Bella—something
like six years ago—he had been a subaltern, with
a very small private income, in a Line regiment.
And it was on that small income that the loveliest
girl in Southsea—now the most beautiful woman
in London—had married him. Then had come an
immense, unlooked-for piece of good fortune!
A distant Scotch cousin, a crusty old chap, of
whom all the Germaines were afraid, and who
had constantly declared it to be his intention to
leave his money outside his own family, had chosen
to make Oliver his heir, and had appointed
Fanny’s husband, the steady-going, rather dull
Shropshire squire, as trustee.
Of course Oliver, and even more Bella, knew
now that the fortune which had seemed then to
make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, was
not so very much after all. But still, at first, it
had been plenty—plenty for everything they could
reasonably require.
But when Bella had become a famous beauty,
they had of course to spend rather more, and about
a year ago they had gone through rather a disagree-
able moment. The little house in West Chapel
Street which had seemed so cheap had proved
more expensive than they had expected. How-
ever, Dick, as trustee, had stretched a point in his
brother-in-law’s favour, and the slight shrinkage
which had resulted in the Germaines’ income
mattered not at all from the practical point of
view, for the simple reason that they went on
6—2


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 85
They differed from some people they knew—that
is, they did not (more than they could help) live on
their rich friends. Their only real extravagance
last year had been sharing a house during Good-
wood week. That had let them in for a great
deal more than they had expected—in fact, not
to put too fine a point on it, they had been rooked,
regularly rooked, and by people whom they had
thought their intimate friends !
Germaine sighed impatiently. This little un-
easiness about money was the one spot on avery
bright sun. But he had no wish to confide this fact
to Fanny ! Fanny would be certain to blame Bella.
He remembered very well, though she had ap-
parently forgotten it, the way Fanny had behaved
at the time of his marriage.
The fact that the girl he wished so ardently to
make his wife was lovely (no one could have de-
nied that even then), and quite sufficiently well
connected, had not counterbalanced, from the
prudent sister’s point of view, Bella Arabin’s
lack of fortune and her having been brought up
in such a “ mixed ” place (whatever that might
mean) as Southsea.
But Bella had never borne malice; and far
from being spoilt or rendered “ uppish ” by her
sudden intoxicating success, Bella was, if any-
thing, nicer than before. She and Oliver were
still devoted, still happier together than apart;
their quarrels, so far, had been only lovers’
quarrels. . . .
Germaine grew restless—restless and tired. He
had not had such a thinking bout for a long time.
J ust_as he reached Grosvenor Gate _for the fifth or


88 STUDIES IN WIVES
the knob of his stick, and he caught himself listen-
ing—listening with a queer mixture of morbid
interest and growing disgust.
It was the elder woman who spoke the most, and
she was a good speaker, with that trick,—self-
taught, instinctive,——of making the people of whom
she was speaking leap up before the listener. Now
and again she was interrupted by little shrieks
of astonishment and horror—her companion’s
way of paying tribute to the interesting nature of
the conversation.
How on earth—so Oliver Germaine asked him-
self with heating cheek—had the woman obtained
her peculiarly intimate knowledge of those of whom
she was speaking? The people, these men and
women, especially women, whose lives, the inner
cores of whose existences, were being probed and
ruthlessly exposed, almost all belonged to the
Germaines’ own particular set,—if indeed such a
prosperous and popular couple as were Oliver and
Bella, could be said to have a particular set in
that delightful world into which they had only
comparatively lately effected an entrance, and of
which the strands all intermingle the one with the
other.
Germaine was too young, he had been too happy,
he was too instinctively kindly, to concern himself
with other people’s private affairs, save in a wholly
impersonal fashion. He had always avoided the
hidden, unspoken side of life ; when certain secrets
were confided to him they dropped quickly out of
his mind; ugly gossip passed him by.
Yet now he found himself listening to very
ugly gossip; some feeling outside himself, some


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 89
instinct which for the moment mastered him,
made him stay on there, eavesdropping.
For the moment the stream of venom was
directed against Mrs. Slade, the pretty, harmless
little woman whom he would see within the next
hour sitting at his own table. She was one of
Bella’s special friends, and Oliver had got quite
fond of her, the more so that he was well aware
that she was in a difficult position, owing to the
fact, not of her seeking, or so the Germaines
believed, that her husband spent most of his life
away from her, abroad.
In this special case, Germaine knew something
of the hidden wounds ; it was horribl to hear this
——this old devil engaged in plucking the scabs from
these same wounds, and exposing to her vulgar
companion the shifts to which the unfortunate
little woman was put. Nay, more, she said certain
things concerning Mrs. Slade which, if they were
true, or even only half true, made the poor little
soul under discussion no fit friend or companion
for Germaine’s own spotless wife, Bella. . . .
The burden of the old woman’s talk was money,
how people got money, how they spent money,
how they did without money. That was the idea
running through all her conversation, although it
was, of course, concerned with many uglier things
than money.
Had they been men speaking Germaine would
have been sufficiently filled with righteous indig-
nation to have found words with which to rebuke,
even to threaten them, but they were women,
common women, and he felt tongue-tied, helpless.
And then, suddenly, there leapt into the con-


92 STUDIES IN WIVES
unmistakable, and Germaine made a restless
movement ; then he became almost rigidly still—
a man cannot turn and strike a woman on the
mouth.
“N-o-o, I don’t think so.” Mrs. Bliss spoke
guardedly. “ She’s a lot of gentlemen buzzing round
her, but that’s only to be expected ; and as far as
I can hear there’s not one that buzzes closer than
another. To tell you the truth, Sophy, I’m
puzzled about those Germaines. It’s no business
of mine, of course, but she spends three times as
much as she did when I first began dressing her,
and she don’t mind now what she does pay,—very
different to what she used to do! It’s only the
best that’s good enough for my lady now.”
“ Germaine’s an army chap, isn’t he ‘2”
“ He was—and a handsome fellow he is, too.
He came into a good bit of money just after they
got married, but that must be melting pretty
quick. Why, she goes everywhere ! Last season
she really wore her clothes out. They ”—-she
waved her hand comprehensively round a vague
area comprising Marylebone and Mayfair—
“ scratched and fought with each other in order
to get her.”
“ Then I suppose you don’t bother about your
money.”
“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Bliss shortly. “I’m
not that kind; I don’t work for the King of
Prussia, as my French tailor used to say.”
There was a pause, and then in a rather different
voice Mrs. Bliss went on, “ I do get my money
from Mrs. Germaine, but lately,—we11, I won’t
say lately, but for the last eighteen months or so,


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 93
she’s always paid me in notes, two, three, some-
times four hundred pounds at a time, always in
five-pound notes.”
She spoke in a low voice, and yet, to Oliver
Germaine, it seemed as if she shouted the words
aloud.
The young man got up, and, careless of the
lateness of the hour, walked away without looking
round towards the Marble Arch; so alone could
he be sure that Mrs. Bliss would not see him, and
perchance leap to the recollection of who he was.
The words the woman had said so quietly
seemed to be reverberating with loud insistence
in his ear: “She’s always paid me in notes.” “ Two,
three, sometimes four hundred pounds.”
What exactly had Mrs. Bliss meant by this
statement ‘2 What significance had she intended
it to carry? There had been a touch of regret in
the hard voice, a hesitation in the way she had
conveyed the pregnant confidence, which made
Oliver heartsick to remember.
But after a time, as Oliver Germaine walked
quickly along, uncaring as to which way he was
going, almost running in his desire to outstrip his
own thoughts, there came a little lightening of his
bewildered misery. It was possible, just possible,
that.Mrs. Bliss was really thinking of some other
customer.
Notes ‘2 The idea was really absurd to anyone
who knew Bella, as he Oliver, thank God, knew
his wife ! Why, there was never any loose money
in the house, both he and Bella were always
running short of petty cash.
Then the young man remembered, with a


94 STUDIES IN WIVES
sudden tightening of the heart, that this had not
been the case lately. During the last few months,
since they had moved into their new house,
Bella had always had money—plenty of sixpences
and shillings, half-crowns and half-sovereigns—
at his disposal. Nay more, looking back, he
realised that his wife no longer teased him, as she
had once perpetually teased him, for supplements,
large or small, to her allowance; he had to face
the fact that of late Bella’s allowance had borne
a surprising resemblance to the widow’s cruse ; it
had actually sufficed for all her wants. '
But he had been unsuspecting, utterly unsus-
pecting, and even now he hardly knew what he
did suspect.
The horrible things he had heard Mrs. Bliss say
about other people acted and reacted on Ger-
maine’s imagination. If these things were true,
then the world in which he and Bella lived was
corrupt and rotten ; and, as even Oliver Germaine
knew by personal experience, pitch defiles. If
Daphne Slade did the things Mrs. Bliss implied
she did, Bella must know it,—know it and con-
done it. Bella was far too clever to be taken in,
as he, Oliver, had been taken in, by Mrs. Slade’s
pretty pathetic manner, and appealing eyes. If
Mrs. Slade took money from men, what an ex-
ample, what a model Germaine’s mind re-
fused to complete the thought.
Certain of Oliver’s and Bella’s old acquaint-
ances—people whom they were too kind to drop,
but of whom they couldn’t see as much now as they
had once done, in the days before Bella became a
famous beauty—would sometimes hint darkly as


A NERY MODERN INSTANCE 95
to the wickedness of some of the people they knew.
Even Fanny had told him bluntly that Bella had
got into a very fast set. “ Fast ” was the word
his sister had used, and it had diverted him.
But was it possible that these people, whom he
had thought envious and silly—and that Fanny,
his rather narrow-minded and old-fashioned sister,
—had been right after all ‘2 Was it possible that
like so many husbands of whom he had heard,
for whom he had felt contempt and pity, he had
—as regarded his own cherished wife—lived in a
fool’s paradise ‘2
Germaine now remembered several things that
he had known—known and thought forgotten—
for they had been completely apart from his own
life. He recalled the case of a man in his own
regiment who had shot himself three days after
his wife’s death. It had been publicly given out
that the poor fellow had been mad—distraught
with grief; but there had been many to mutter
that the truth was far other, and that the man had
made a shameful discovery among his dead wife’s
papers. . . .
Concerning any other woman than Bella, Ger-
maine would have admitted, perhaps reluctantly,
—-but still, if asked the plain question, he would
have admitted, that women are damned tricky
creatures, and that—well, that you never can tell !
Again, out of the past, there came back to him,
with horrid vividness, the memory of a brief
episode which at the time had filled him with a
kind of pity, even sympathy.
It was at a ball; he was quite a youngster, in
fact it was the year after he had joined, and a


96 ‘ STUDIES IN WIVES .
woman sitting out with him in a conservatory had
fallen into intimate talk, as people so often do
amid unfamiliar surroundings. There came a
moment when she said to him, with burning, un-
happy eyes, “ People think I’m a good woman,
but I’m not.” And she had hurried on to make
the nature of her sinning quite clear ; she had not
passion for her excuse—only lack of means and
love of luxury. He had been startled, staggered
by the unasked-for confidence—and yet he had
not thought much the worse of her; now, retro-
spectively, he judged her with terrible severity.
But Bella ? The thought of Bella in such com-
pany was inconceivable; and yet, deep in Oliver
Germaine’s heart, there grew from the seed sown
by Mrs. Bliss a upas tree which for the moment
overshadowed everything. He was torn with
anguished jealousy, which made him forget, ex-
cepting as affording a proof of what he feared,
the sordid, horrible question of the money.
Germaine had already been jealous of Bella,
jealous before their marriage, and jealous since,
but that feeling had been nothing, nothing to that
which now held him in its grip.
As a girl, Bella had been a flirt, and, as she had
since confessed more than once, she had loved to
make Oliver miserable. Then, for some time after
their marriage he had been angered at the way
she had welcomed and courted admiration. But
he had never doubted her, never for a moment
thought that her love was leaving him, still less
that her flirtations held any really sinister intent.
He now remembered how a man, a fool of a fellow,
had once brought her a beautiful jewel by way of


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 97
a Christmas gift; but it had annoyed her, and,
without saying anything about it to Oliver at the
time, she had actually made the man take back
his present !
Was it conceivable that in three or four short
years Bella could have entirely altered—have
become to all intents and purposes, not only
another woman, but a woman of a type,—as even
he was well aware, a very common type, —he
would not have cared to hear mentioned in her
presence ‘2
Germaine was now at the Marble Arch. After a
moment’s bewildered hesitation, he went up Oxford
Street, and then took a turning which would ulti-
mately lead him home; home where Bella must be
impatiently awaiting him—home where their inti-
mates had already doubtless gathered together for
lunch.
And then, during his walk through the now de-
serted and sun-baked streets and byways of May-
fair, Oliver Germaine passed in slow review the
men and the women who composed his own and
Bella’s intimate circle. They rose in blurred out-
line against the background of his memory,and
gradually the women fell out, and only the men
remained,—two men, for Henry Buck did not
count.
Which of these two men who came about his
house in the guise of close friends, had planned to
steal, to buy, the wife on whose absolute purity and
honour he would an hour ago have staked his life ‘2
Germaine’s fevered mind leapt on Bob Uvedale.
What were Uvedale’s relations, his real relations,
7


98 STUDIES IN WIVES
with Bella ‘2 Oliver, so he now told himself
sorely, was not quite a fool; he had known men
who hid the deepest, tenderest—he would now
say the most dishonourable—feelings, towards a
married woman, under the skilful pretence of a
frank laughing flirtation.
Uvedale, when all was said and done, was an
adventurer, living on his wits. He talked of his ;
poverty, talked of it over-much, but he often made
considerable sums of money; in fact twice, in
moments of unwonted expansiveness, Uvedale had
offered to put Germaine on to a “good thing,” to
share with him a tip which had been given him by
one of his financial friends. Germaine now remem-
bered, with a sick feeling of anger, how seriously
annoyed Bella had been to find that her husband
had refused to have anything to do with it ; nay
more, how she had taunted him afterwards when
the “good thing ” had turned out good after all.
But that was long ago, when they had first known
Uvedale.
They now knew Uvedale too well—at least
Bella did. Oliver was an outdoor man; he hated
crowds. He remembered how often Uvedale took
his place as Bella’s companion at those semi-public
gatherings, charity fetes, and so on, which ap-
parently amused her, and where the presence of
the beautiful Mrs. Germaine was always eagerly
desired.
Germaine’s mind next glanced with jealous,
anguished suspicion at another man who was
constantly with Bella—Peter J oliffe.
There was a great, almost a ludicrous, contrast
between Uvedale and J oliffe. Uvedale, so Germaine
h - 7 ,_i .MJ._- u . b, - ‘r‘


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 99
dimly realised even now, was a man with a
wider, more generous, outlook on life than the
other, capable of deeper depths, of higher heights.
Jolifle was well off; and, as the Germaines had
been told very early in their acquaintance with
him, he had the reputation of being “ near.” But
Bella and Oliver had both agreed that this was not
true. Only the other day Bella had spoken very
warmly of J olifie ; when they had moved into their
new house he had given them a Sheraton bureau,
a very charming and certainly by no means a cheap
piece of old furniture. Oliver had supposed it to
be a delicate way of paying back some of their -
constant hospitality, for Jolifie was perpetually
with Bella.
Time after time Germaine had come in and found
J olifie sitting with her; walking through the hall he
had heard her peals of laughter at J olifle’s witti-
cisms, the funny things he said with his serious face.
But after all jesters are men of like passions to
their more melancholy brethren; they can, and do,
throw off the grinning mask. Bella had said, only
yesterday, “ There’s more in Peter than you
think, Oliver. Believe me there is !” Bella always
called J olifie Peter,——she was more formal with
Bob Uvedale.
Germaine now reminded himself that J olifie did
not like Uvedale, and that Uvedale did not like
J olifie. There seemed a deep, unspoken antagonism
between the two men, who were yet so constantly
meeting. J olifle had gone so far as to say some-
thing—not exactly disagreeable, but condemna-
tory—of Uvedale’s city connections, to Germaine.
Jolifie was annoyed, distinctly annoyed at the
7—2


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 103
if the fancy seized her. Sometimes when Bella did
something that he, Oliver, did not like or approve,
she explained that her mother had done the same
thing, and the excuse always irritated him, left
him without an answer.
Supposing that Bella were now to tell him that
the late Mrs. Arabin, whose reputation for a certain
daring liveliness and exceeding beauty still lin-
gered in the ever-shifting naval and military
society where he had first met his wife, always
paid her bills in notes and cash rather than by
cheque——what then ‘2
He walked up the staircase ; Henry Buck passed
him coming down. Germaine’s eyes rested on
the awkward figure, the plain, good-natured face.
Rabbit was certainly lacking in tact; he always
outstayed all their other guests, and he never knew
when Bella was tired,but still he was the one human
being present at the little lunch party at whom
Oliver had been able to look without a feeling
of unease.
Slowly he turned the painted china knob of the
drawing-room door. ..
Bella was standing before the Sheraton bureau
which had been the gift of Peter J oliffe. She had
apparentlybeen putting somethingaway; Germaine
heard the click of the lock. She turned round
quickly, and her husband thought there was a
look of constraint on her face.
“ Why, Oliver,” she said, “ I thought you were
going out with Fanny this afternoon l”
“ With Fanny ‘2” he stammered, “ I never
thought of doing such a thing.”
“ But you’re not going to stay in, are you ‘2”


104 STUDIES IN WIVES
He looked at her attentively, and again there
surged up in his heart wild jealousy and suspicion.
Why did she ask whether he was going to stay
in ‘2 Which of the two men who had just left the
house was she expecting to come back as soon as
he, poor deluded fool, was safely out of the way ‘2
But Bella went on speaking rather quickly: “ I
shan’t go out. I’m tired. Besides, I’m expecting
‘some people to tea. So perhaps I’d better go and
take my hat off. I shall only be a few minutes ;
do wait till I come back.” Bella spoke rather
breathlessly, moving across the room towards the
door.
Then she didn’t want him to go out ‘2 He had
wronged her in this, at any rate. Germaine stared
at the door through which his wife had just gone
with a feeling of miserable uncertainty. '-
Then his eye travelled round to the place where
she had been standing just now, in front of J olifie’s
bureau. A glance at Bella’s bank-book would set
his mind at rest one way or the other. It would
go far to prove or disprove the story Mrs. Bliss
had told, for it would show if Bella were indeed
in the habit of drawing considerable cheques to
“ se .” Why hadn’t he thought of this simple test
before,—before shaming himself and shaming his
wife by base suspicions ‘2
And yet Oliver, for some few moments, stood
in the middle of the room irresolute. Yesterday
it would never have occurred to him that Bella
would mind his looking at her bank-book, although
as a matter of fact he never had looked at it. She
was a tidy little woman ; he knew that everything
under the flap which he had seen her close down


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 105
so quickly just now would be exquisitely neat;
he knew the exact spot where her bank-book was
to be found.
With a curious feeling that he was doing some-
thing dishonourable,—-and it was a feeling which
sat very uneasily on Oliver Germaine,——he took
hold of the little brass knob and slid up the flap
of the sloping desk.
The bank-book closed the ranks of the red
household books over which in old days, when
they were first married, before he had come into
his fortune, he had actually seen Bella shed tears.
With fingers that felt numb he took up the
little vellum-bound book and opened it at the
page containing the latest items. I
There, on the credit side, was the sum of money
which had been paid in, to his bankers’ order, on
the last quarter day. On the debit side were a
few cheques made out to tradespeople. There
was not a single cheque made out to “self” on
the page at which he was looking; but—but of
course it was possible that Bella, like so many
women, added a few pounds for change every
time she settled a tradesman’s account.
He turned several leaves of the little book back-
wards Here was a page which bore the date of
three years ago; and here, as he had feared to find,
there were constant, small, entries to “ self.” . . .
By the empty place on the shelf where the
bank-book had stood was a gilt file for bills, a
pretty little toy which had been given her, so the
husband now remembered, by Uvedale. The
letters composing the word “ paid ” were twisted
round the handle—horrible symbolic word !


106 STUDIES IN WIVES
He took up the file and ran his fingers through
the receipted bills.
Ah ! here, at last, was one which bore the name
of Mrs. Bliss.
The amount of the bill amazed him,~eight
hundred and seventy-one pounds, sixteen shillings,
—and Bella had paid four hundred pounds on
account about a fortnight before. It was the only
bill on the file on which there still remained a
balance owing. Germaine did not need to look
again at his wife’s bank-book to see that the
majority of the receipted bills had not been paid
by cheque.
These bills, so he now became aware with a
frightful contraction of the heart, were for all sorts ‘
of things—expensive trifles, costlyhothouse flowers,
extravagantly expensive fruit—which he had en-
joyed, and of which he had partaken, believing,
if he thought of the matter at all—fool that he
had been—that they were being paid for out of
his modest income, the income which had once
seemed so limitless.
“ What are you doing, Oliver ‘2 You’ve no
business to look at my things. I never look at
yours.” He had not heard the door open, and Bella
had crept up swiftly behind him ; there was some
anger, but there was far more fear, in her soft voice.
Germaine turned round and looked at his wife.
Bella had changed her dress, and she was now
wearing a painted muslin gown, her slender waist
girdled with a blue ribbon. She looked exquisitely
lovely, and so young,——a girl, a young and innocent
girl.


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 107
There fell a heavy hand on her rounded shoulder.
“ Oliver !” she cried, “ you’re hurting me !”
He withdrew his hand—quickly.
“ Bella,” he said, “ I only want to ask you one
question—I know everything,”—and in answer to
a strange look that came over her face he added
hurriedly, “ Never mind how I found out. I have
found out, and now I only want to ask you one
thing—I—I have a right to know who it is.”
“ Who it is ‘2” she repeated. “ I don’t under-
stand what you mean, Oliver? Who—what ?”
but as Bella Germaine asked the useless question
she shrank back; for the first time in their joint
lives she felt afraid of Oliver,—afraid, and intensely
sorry for him.
A sob rose to her throat. What a shame it
was ! How on earth could he have found out ?
She had thought he would go on not knowing—
for ever. 'That this should happen now, when she
was so happy too,—when everything was so—so
comfortable.
“ Tell me—tell me at once, Bella,” he said again,
shaken almost out of his self-control by her pre-
tended lack of understanding.
But Bella made no answer ; she was retreating
warily towards the open window; Oliver, poor
angry Oliver, could not say much, he could not do
anything, out on the balcony.
But he grasped her arm. “ Come back,” he
said, “ right into the room,” and forced her,
trembling, down into a low chair. “ Now tell
me,” he repeated. “Don’t keep me waiting—I
can’t stand it. I won’t hurt you.” He leant over
her, grasping her soft arm.


108 STUDIES IN WIVES
But still Bella said nothing. Her free hand was
toying with the fringe of her blue sash. She had
become very pale, a sickly yellow colour which
made her violet eyes seem blue,—for one terrible
moment Oliver thought she was going to faint. .
“ Why should I tell you ‘2” she muttered at last,
“ you can’t force me to tell you. It’s a matter
personal to myself. It’s no business of yours.
I’ve never spent any of the money on you,”—
she unfortunately added, “ at least hardly any.”
Germaine took his hand from her arm. “ My
God !” he said, “ my God 1”
Did a dim gleam of what he was feeling pene-
trate Bella’s brain ‘2
“ I don’t know why you should trouble to ask
me,” she said, defiantly. “ Surely you must know
well enough.”
“ I daresay I’m stupid, but I find it very diffi-
cult to guess which of the two, J oliffe or—or Uve-
dale, is your lover.”
“ My lover ‘2 J oliffe—Uvedale ‘2” Bella started
to her feet, the colour rushed back into her face.
She was shaking with anger and indignation.
“ How dare you insult me so ‘2” she gasped.
“ You wouldn’t have dared to say such a thing if
my father had been alive! How dare you say,
how dare you think, I have a lover ‘2” and then
with quivering pain she gave a little cry, “ Oh,
Oliver !”
Germaine looked at her grimly enough. What
a fool—what an abject fool he had been ! It fed
his anger to see that Bella had so poor an opinion
of his intelligence as to suppose that he would
believe her denial.


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 1.09
“I know you are lying,” he said, briefly. “I
know it is either Joliffe or Uvedale.”
“ But, Oliver—indeed it isn’t !”
She was looking at him with a very curious ex-
pression ; the fear, the real terror, there had been
in her face, had left it. She was staring at her
husband as if she were seeking to find on his face
some indication of a distraught, unhinged mind.
But he looked cool, collected, stern,—and anger
again surged up in Bella’s heart. If he were sane
she would never—never forgive him his vile sus-
picion of her. Was it for this that she, Bella, had
always gone so straight—never even been tempted
to go otherwise, in spite of all the admiration
lavished on her ‘2
There had been a time in Bella Germaine’s life,
some two years before, when she had often re-
hearsed this scene,when she had been so haunted by
the fear of it that it had been a constant nightmare.
But never had she imagined the conversation
between Oliver and herself taking the turn it
now had. Never, in her most anguished dreams,
had Oliver accused her of having—a lover. But
she had known, only too well, with what anger
and amazement he would learn the lesser truth.
“ Peter Jolif'fe 2” she said, with a certain scorn.
“ How little you know Peter, Oliver, if you think
he would be any married woman’s lover, let alone
mine ! Why, Peter’s a regular old maid!” She
laughed a little hysterically at her simile, and, to
her husband, the merriment, which he felt to be
genuine, lowered the discussion to a level which
was hateful—sordid.
“ Then it’s Uvedale,” he said, heavily ; and this


110 STUDIES IN WIVES
time, so he was quick to notice, Bella did not take
the trouble to utter a direct denial.
“ Bob, Uvedale ? Are you quite mad ? Bob
Uvedale is really fond of you, Oliver,—do you
honestly think he would make love to me ?”
She was actually arguing with him ; he shrugged
his shoulders with a hopeless gesture.
Then Bella Germaine came quite close up to her
husband. She looked at him straight in the eyes.
“ I’ll tell you,” she said. “ I see you really
don’t know. It’s—it’s—” she hesitated, again a
look of shame,—more, of fear,—came into her face.
“ The person who has been giving me money,
Oliver, is Rabbit.”
“ Rabbit ? I don’t believe you !”
“ You don’t believe me ?”
Bella drew a long breath. The worst, from her
_ point of view, was now over. She had told the
truth,-—and Oliver had brushed the truth aside,
so possessed by insane jealousy of Peter J oliffe and
Bob Uvedale, that he had apparently no room in
his heart for anything else.
Bella gave a little sigh of relief. Perhaps, after
all, she had made a mistake in being so frightened;
men are so queer—perhaps Oliver would feel, as
she had now felt for so long, that poor old Rabbit
could not find a better use for his money than in
making her happy.
She walked over to her pretty desk, and frowned
a little as she saw its condition of disarray; the
receipted bills which she had found her husband
looking over were scattered, even the tradesmen’s
books had not been put back in their place on the
little shelf.


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 111
She touched the spring of a rather obvious
secret drawer. There had been a time when Bella
Germaine had hidden very carefully what she was
now about to show Oliver as the certain, trium-
phant proof that his revolting suspicions were
false. But of late she had grown careless.
“ If you don’t believe me,” she said coldly,
“look at this, Oliver. I think it will convince
you that I told the truth just now.”
Bella knew she had a right to be bitterly indig-
nant at her husband’s preposterous accusation.
But she told herself that now was not the time to
show it ; she would punish Oliver later on.
She waited a moment and then cried, “ Catch !”
Oliver instinctively held out his hands. A
bulky envelope fell into them. It was addressed
in a handwriting he knew well,—the unformed, and
yet meticulous handwriting of Henry Buck. On
it was written :
Mrs. Oliver Germaine,
19, West Cha 01 Street,
Mayfliir.
In the corner were added the words :
Anyone finding this, and taking it to the above
address, will be handsomely rewarded.
“ Open it!” she said imperiously. “ Open it,"
and see what is inside,——he only brought it to-
day.”
Oliver opened the envelope. Folded in two
pieces of paper was a packet of bank-notes held
together with an elastic band. .
Germaine looked up questioningly at his wife.
Bella hung her head. She had the grace to feel


112 STUDIES IN WIVES
embarrassed, ashamed in this moment that she
believed to be the moment of her exculpation.
Her pretty little hands, laden with rings, each one
of which had been given her by her husband, were
again toying with the fringe of her blue sash:
The silence grew intolerable.
“ I know I’ve been a beast,”—her voice faltered,
broke into tears. “ I knew you wouldn’t like it,
but—but you know, Oliver, Rabbit isn’t like an
ordinary man.”
“ When did he begin to give you money ‘2”
asked Oliver, in a low voice.
“ A long time ago,” she answered, vaguely.
“ He came in one day when I was awftu upset
about a bill—a bill of that old devil, Bliss,—and he
was so kind, Oliver. He explained how awftu fond
he was of us both. He said we were his only friends
—I always have been nice to him, you know.
He said he couldn’t spend the money he’d got——”
“ How much have you had from him ‘2”
“ I can tell you, exactly,” she said eagerly, and
again she moved towards her bureau.
Bella felt utterly dejected; somehow she had
not expected Oliver to take the news quite in this
way; he looked dreadful—not relieved, as she had
thought he would do.
It was with slow lagging steps that she walked
back to where her husband was still standing with
the envelope and its contents crushed in his right
hand. '
Bella’s love of tidiness and method had stood
her in fatally good stead. She had put down all
the sums she had received from Henry Buck, but
in such a fashion that anyone else looking at the
4 {1:41


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 113
figures would not have known money was in
question.
Oliver stared down at the piece of paper. In-
sensibly he straightened his shoulders as if to meet
calmly a physical blow. “ Are these pounds ‘2” he
asked.
She nodded.
“ But, Bella, it’s an enormous sum,—over four
thousand.”
“ I suppose it is,” she said listlessly.
Her husband put the paper in his breast pocket ;
then he hesitated a moment, and Bella thought he
was perhaps going to hand her back the envelope
and its contents. But that also, to her chagrin,
disappeared into his pocket.
“ I suppose the money Buck brought you to-day
is included in this amount ‘2”
Bella shook her head sadly. "' I hadn’t time to
put it down,” she said.
“ Well, I’ll see what can be done.”
“ I suppose you mean to pay it all back? I
suppose ”——her voice was trembling with self-
pity—“ that we shall have to go and live in the
country now '2”
He said nothing,—only looked at her with that
same cold look of surprise and alienation.
He was leaving the room when a cry from her
brought him back. She clutched his hand.
“ You’ve never said you’re sorry for the horrible
thing you said to me—” and, as he looked at
her, still silent, “ Oliver! you surely don’t think
that Rabbit— Why, he’s never even squeezed
my hand !”
“ Stop !” he cried roughly. “ Don’t be silly,
8


114 STUDIES IN WIVES
Bella. Of course I don’t think anything of the
kind. I accept absolutely what you tell me of
your relations with Henry Buck.”
“ Why, there have been no relations between
Henry Buck and me,” she cried, protesting.
“ What a hateful word to use, Oliver !”
But he was already out of the door, making his
way to the only human being in whom he still
felt complete confidence, who, he knew, loved
him, in the good old homely sense of the word.
* * * * *
“ My dear boy, what is the matter ‘2”
Fanny sat up. She had been lying down on
the sofa in the sitting-room of her lodgings.
Oliver had explained to the servant that he was
Mrs. Burdon’s brother, and he had been allowed
to make his own way up to the drawing-room floor.
7 “ There’s a good deal the matter,” he said.
“ The fact is I’ve made a fool of myself, Fanny,—
and I’ve come to you for help.” '
Fanny looked up at him, and what she saw
checked the words on her lips. She was wide
awake now, but rather painfully conscious that
she looked untidy. Her smart voile gown—voile
was the “ smart ” material that season—was
crumpled. And Oliver’s wife, Bella, was always so
dreadfully, so unnaturally, tidy and neat,—it was
one of the things that perhaps made people think
her so much prettier than she really was.
“ Of course I will help you,” she answered,
briskly. “ Tell me all about it.”
“ Have you still that five thousand pounds
Cousin Andrew left you ‘2”
“ Why of course I have,—and it’s rather more


A VERY MODERN INSTANCE 115
now, for luckily we didn’t put it into Consols ; we
put it into a Canadian security.”
“ Is it invested in Dick’s name ‘2”
Dick’s wife laughed. “ No, of course it isn’t,”
she said. “ Why should it be ‘2”
“ Could you get at it without Dick’s knowing ‘2”
“ Yes, I suppose I could.” There was a touch
of wonder in her voice.
“ Fanny, I want you to lend me four thousand
pounds.” Oliver spoke huskily. He was staring
out of the window.
His sister looked at him rather queerly for a
moment: “ Yes, of course I will,” she said. And,
as he turned to her, his face working,——“ You
needn’t make a fuss about it, dear old boy. You’ll
pay me back all right, I know that.”
“ I’ll insure against it, and I’ll pay you proper
interest for it—whatever you’re getting now,” he
said. “ And we’ll get a lawyer to see that it’s
all made safe.”
“ That’ll be all right,” said Fanny, and then
again she gave him that curious, considering look.
Germaine pulled himself together. “ You’ll
think I’ve been a fool,” he exclaimed abruptly,—
he had to say something in answer to that look,—
“ and so I have. But you know—at least you don’t
know, luckily for you—what it’s like to be mixed
up with a lot of fellows who are all richer than one
is oneself ;” and then in a very different tone, one
in which his sister felt the ring of truth, “ Are you
sure Dick won’t know, Fanny ‘2 I don’t want
Dick to know.”
“ Of course he won’t know, Fanny smiled.
“ You don’t suppose I tell Dick everything ‘2”
Oliver stared at his sister. He was rather
8—2
7,


116 STUDIES IN WIVES
shocked by her admission; till to-day he had
thought that all husbands and wives who loved
one another told each other everything; and yet
here was Fanny, who hadn’t a thought in the
world beyond Dick, the children, the dogs—and,
and, yes, her brother
“ It’s none of Dick’s business what I choose to
do with my own money—not that he’d mind.”
“ I think of spreading the re-payment over five
years.”
“ That would be rather too soon,” she said;
and added, looking away as she spoke, “ I don’t
think it would be fair to Bella.”
Oliver reddened,—a man’s dusky unbecoming
blush.
“ Bella’s been good about it,” he said briefly.
“ She said herself that we should have to go and
live in the country. Still, let’s make it seven
years. I say, Fanny, you are a brick,” and sitting
down by the table, Oliver Germaine broke into
hard, painful sobs.
Fanny got up off the sofa. She felt rather shy.
“ Don’t be so worried,” she said. “ Bella’s a
very good sort, and awftu fond of you, old boy.
She’ll like the country better than you think.
Her looks will last twice as long there, and, and-—
if I were you, Oliver—you and Bella I mean,”
Fanny got rather mixed, and very red—“ well,
I’d try and have a baby! Bella would look awftu
sweet with a baby. And a baby’s no trouble in
the country—less trouble than a puppy !”
“ Yes, that’s true,” he said, raising his head,
and feeling vaguely comforted. His sister Fanny
had a lot of sense. Oliver had always known that.


IV
ACCORDING TO MEREDITH


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH
“Certainly, however, one day these present conditions of
marriage will be changed. Marriage will be allowed for a certain
period, say ten years.”—Mr. GEORGE MEREDITH in the Daily
Mail of September 24th, 1904.
“ GIVE you some heads ? My dear fellow, there
need be no question of heads! This is to be a
model will. You need simply put down, in as
few words as are legally permissible—I know
nothing of such things—that I leave all of which I
die possessed to my wife.”
Philip Dering threw his head back, and gave
the man to whom he was speaking, and opposite
to whom he was standing, a confident smiling
glance. Then he turned and walked quickly
over to the narrow, old-fashioned, balconied
window which, commanding the wide wind-
blown expanse of Abingdon Street, exactly faced
the great cavity formed by the arch of the Vic-
toria Tower.
To the right lay the riverside garden, a bright
patch of delicate spring colouring and green ver-
dure, bounded by the slow-moving grey waters of
the Thames; and Dering’s eager eyes travelled
on till he saw, detaching itself against an April
afternoon horizon, the irregular mass of building
119


122 STUDIES IN WIVES
good firm of old-established attorneys. Again,
later, they had come together once more, sharing
a modest lodging, while Dering earned a small
uncertain income by contributing to-the literary
weeklies, by “ ghosting ” writers more fortunate
than himself, by tutoring whenever he got the
chance,—in a word, by resorting to the few ex-
pedients open to the honest educated Londoner
lacking a definite profession.
The two men had not parted company till
Dering, enabled to do so with the help of a small
legacy, had chosen to marry a Danish girl, as
good-looking, as high-minded, as unpractical as
himself.
But stay, had Louise Dering proved herself so
unpractical during the early years of her married
life 2
Wingfield, standing there, his mind steeped in
memories, compared her, with an unconscious
critical sigh, with his own stolid, unimaginative
wife, Kate. As he did so he wondered whether,
after all, Dering had not known how to make the
best of both worlds; and yet he and his Louise
had gone through some bad times together.
Wingfield had been the one intimate of the
young couple when they began their married life
in a three-roomed flat in Gray’s Inn; and he had
been aware, painfully so, of the incessant watchful
struggle with money difficulties, never mentioned
while the struggle was in being, for only the rich
can afford to complain of poverty. He had
admired, it might almost be said he had reverenced
with all his heart, the high courage then shown
by his friend’s wife.


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 128
During those first difficult years, when he,
Wingfield, could do nothing for them, Louise had
gone without the help of even the least adequate
servant. The women of her nation are taught
housewifery as an indispensable feminine accom-
plishment, and so she had scrubbed and sung,
cooked and read, made and mended, for Philip and
herself.
Wingfield was glad to remember that it was he
who had at last found Dering regular employ-
ment; he who had so far thrown prudence aside
as to persuade one of his first and most valuable
clients to appoint his clever if eccentric friend
secretary to a company formed to exploit a new
invention. The work had proved congenial ;
Dering had done admirably well, and now, when
his salary had just been raised to four hundred
a year, a distant, almost unknown, cousin of his
dead mother’s had left him fifteen thousand
pounds !
At last James Wingfield sat down. He began
making notes of the instructions he had just re-
ceived, though as he did so he knew well enough
that he could not bring himself to draw up a will
by which his own children might so greatly
benefit.
Then, as he sat, pen in hand, wondering with a
certain discomfort as to what ought to be the
practical effect of the conversation, there suddenly
came a sound of hurrying feet up the shallow oak
staircase, and through the door, flung open quickly
and unceremoniously, strode once more Philip
Dering.


124- STUDIES IN WIVES
“ I say, I’ve forgotten something !” he ex-
claimed, and then, as Wingfield instinctively
looked round the bare spacious room—“ No, I
didn’t leave anything behind me. I simply forgot
to ask you one very important question—”
He took off his hat, put it down with a certain
deliberation, then drew up a chair, and placed
himself astride on it, an action which to the other
suddenly seemed to blot out the years which had
gone by since they had been housemates together.
“ As I went down your jolly old staircase,
Wingfield, it suddenly occurred to me that making
a will may not be quite so simple a matter as I once
thought it—”
He hesitated a moment, then went on :—“ So
I’ve come back to ask you the meaning of the
term ‘ proving a will.’ What I really want to get
at, old man, is whether my wife, if she became a
widow, would have to give any actual legal proof
of our marriage ‘2 Would she be compelled, I
mean, to show her ‘ marriage lines ’ ‘2”
Wingfield hesitated. The question took him by
surprise.
“ I fancy that would depend,” he said, “ on the
actual wording of the will, but all that sort of thing
is a mere formality, and of course any solicitor
employed by her would see to it. By the way, I
suppose you were married in Denmark ‘2” He
frowned, annoyed with himself for having forgotten
a fact with which he must have been once well
acquainted. “ If you had asked me to be your
best man,” he added with a vexed laugh, “ I
shouldn’t have forgotten the circumstances.”
Dering tipped the chair which he was bestriding


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 125
a little nearer to the edge of the table which stood
between himself and Wingfield ; a curious look, a
look half humorous, half deprecating, but in no
sense ashamed, came over his sensitive, mobile face.
“ No,” he said, at length, “ we were not married
in Denmark. Neither were we married in Eng-
land. In fact, there was no ceremony at all.”
The eyes of the two men, of the speaker and of
his listener, met for a moment ; but Wingfield, to
the other’s sudden uneasy surprise, made no com-
ment on what he had just heard.
Dering sprang up, and during the rest of their
talk he walked, with short, quick strides, from the
door to the window, from the window to the door.
“ I wanted to tell you at the time, but Louise
would not have it; though I told her that in
principle—not, of course, in practice—you thor-
oughly agreed with me-—I mean with us. Nay,
more, that you, with your clear, legal mind, had
always realised, even more than I could do, the
utter absurdity of making such a contract as that
of marriage—which of all contracts is the most
intimately personal, and which least affects the
interests of those outside the contracting parties——
the only legal contract which can’t be rescinded
or dissolved by mutual agreement ! Then again,
you must admit that there was one really good
reason why we should not tell you the truth ; you
already liked Kate, and Louise, don’t you re-
member, used to play chaperon. Now, Kate’s
people, you know !”
All the humour had gone out of Dering’s face,
but the deprecating look had deepened.


126 STUDIES IN WIVES
The lawyer made a strong effort over himself.
He had felt for a moment keenly hurt, and not a
little angry.
“ I don’t think,” he said quietly, “ that there is
any need of explanations or apologies between us.
Of course, I can’t help feeling very much sur-
prised, and that in spite of our old theoretical
talks and discussions, concerning—well, this sub-
ject. But I don’t doubt that in the circumstances
you did quite right. Mind you, I don’t mean
about the marriage,” he quickly corrected himself,
“ but only as to the concealment from me.”
He waited a moment, and then went on, hesitat-
ingly: “ But even now I don’t really understand
what happened—I should like to know a little
more—”
Dering stayed his walk across the room, and
stood opposite his friend. He felt a great wish to
justify himself, and to win Wingfield’s retrospec-
tive sympathy.
“ I will tell you everything there is to tell !” he
cried eagerly; “ indeed, it can all be told in a
moment. My wife and I entered into a personal
contract together, which we arranged, provision-
ally, of course, should last ten years. Louise was
quite willing, absolutely willing. . . .” For the
first time there came a defensive note in the eager
voice. “ Y6u see the idea—that of leasehold
marriage ? We used to talk about it, you and I,
of course only as a Utopian possibility. All I can
say is that I had the good fortune to meet with a
woman with whom I was able to try the experi-
ment; and all I can tell you is—well, I need not
tell you, Wingfield, that there has never been a


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 127
happier marriage than ours.” Again Dering
started pacing up and down the room. “ Louise
has been everything—everything—everything—
that such a man as myself could have looked for in
a wife !”
“ And has no one ever guessed—has no one ever
known ‘2” asked the other, rather sternly.
“ Absolutely no one! Yes, wait a moment——
there has been one exception. Louise told Gerda
Hinton. You know they became very intimate
after we went to Bedford Park, and Louise thought
Gerda ought to know. But it made no difference
——no difference at all !” he added, emphatically;
“ in fact poor Gerda practically left her baby to
Louise’s care.”
“ And that worthless creature, Jack Hinton——
does he know too ‘2”
“ No, I don’t think so ; in fact I may say most
decidedly not—but of course Gerda may have told
him, though for my part I don’t believe that
husbands and wives share their friends’ secrets.
Still, you are quite at liberty to tell Kate.”
“ No,” said Wingfield, “ I don’t intend to tell
Kate, and there will be no reason for doing so if
you will take my advice—which is, I need hardly
tell you, to go and get married at once. Now that
you have come into this money, your marrying
becomes a positive duty. Are you aware that if
you were run over and killed on your way home
to-day Louise would have no standing ‘2 that she
would not have a right to a penny of this money,
or even to any of the furniture which is in your
house ‘2 Let me see, how long is it that you have
been ”——he hesitated awkwardly—“ together ‘2”


128 STUDIES IN WIVES
Dering looked round at him rather fiercely.
“ We have been married nine years and a half,” he
said. “ Our wedding day was the first of Sep-
tember. We spent our honeymoon in Denmark.
You remember my little legacy ‘2”
Wingfield nodded his head. His heart suddenly
went out to his friend—the prosperous lawyer had
reason to remember that hundred pounds legacy,
for ten pounds of it had gone to help him out of
some foolish scrape. But Dering had forgotten all
that ; he went on speaking, but more slowly :—
“ And then, as you know, we came back and
settled down in Gray’s Inn, and though we were
horribly poor, perhaps poorer than even you ever
guessed, we were divinely happy.” He turned his
back to the room and stared out once more at the
greyness opposite. “ But you’re quite right, old
man, it’s time we did like our betters ! We’ll be
married at once, and I’ll take her off for another
and a longer honeymoon, and we’ll come back and
be even happier than we were before.”
Then again, as abruptly as before, he was gone,
shutting the door behind him, and leaving Wing-
field staring thoughtfully after him.
That his friend, that the Philip Dering of ten
years ago, should have done such a thing, was in
no way remarkable, but that Louise—the thought-
ful, well-balanced, intelligent woman, who, coming
as a mere girl from Denmark, had known how to
work her way up to a position of great trust and
responsibility in a City house, so winning the
esteem and confidence of her employers that they
had again and again asked her to return to them
after her marriage—that she should have consented


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 129
to such—to such . . . Wingfield even in his own
mind hesitated for the right word . . . to such an
arrangement—seemed to the lawyer an astounding
thing, savouring indeed of the fifth dimension.
No, no, he would certainly not tell Kate any-
thing about it. Why should he ? He knew very
well how his wife would regard the matter, and
how her condemnation would fall, not on Louise—
Kate had become exceedingly fond of Louise—no
indeed, but on Dering. Kate had never cordially
“ taken ” (a favourite word of hers, that) to Wing-
field’s friend; she thought him affected and un-
practical, and she laughed at his turned-down
collars and Liberty ties. No, no, there was no
reason why Kate should be told a word of this
extraordinary, this amazing story.
On leaving Abingdon Street, Philip Dering
swung across the broad roadway, and made his
way, almost instinctively, to the garden which lay
so nearly opposite his friend’s office windows. He
wanted to calm down, to think things over, and to
recover full possession of himself before going
home.
It had cost him a considerable effort to tell
Wingfield this thing. Not that he was in the least
ashamed of what he and Louise had done—on the
contrary, he was very proud of it—but he had often
felt, during all those years, that he was being
treacherous to the man who was, after all, his best
friend; and there was in Dering enough of the
feminine element—that element which Kate Wing-
field so thoroughly despised in him—to make him
feel sorry and ashamed.
9


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 131
and to discuss Ibsen! Well, Louise had more
than fulfilled this early and rather absurd ideal.
From the day when they had first met and
made unconventional acquaintance, with no inter-
vening friend to form a gossip-link of introduc-
tion, Dering had found her full of ever-recurrent
and enchanting surprises. Her foreign birth
and upbringing gave her both original and unsus-
pected points of view about everything English,
and he had often thought, with good-humoured
pity, of all those unfortunate friends of his,
Wingfield included, whose lot it had perforce been
to choose their wives among their own country-
women.
Dering had not seen much of Denmark, but
everything he had seen had won his enthusiastic
approval. Where else were modern women to be
found at once so practical and so cultivated, so
pure-minded and so large-hearted ‘2 Perhaps he
was half aware that his heaven was of his own
creation, but that, in his present exalted mood,
was only an added triumph; how few human
beings can evolve, and preserve at will, their own
stretch of blue sky !
Of course it was not always as easy as it seemed
to be to-day; lately Louise had been listless and
tired, utterly unlike herself—even, he had once or
twice thought with dismay, slightly hysterical!
But all that would disappear, utterly, during the
first few days of their coming travels; and even
he, so he now reminded himself, had felt quite
unlike his usual sensible self—Dering was very
proud of his good sense—since had come the news
of this wonderful, this fairy-gift-like legacy.
9—2


132 STUDIES IN WIVES
The young man passed out of the garden, his
feet stepping from the soft shell-strewn gravel on
to the wide pavement which borders the Houses
of Parliament. He made his way round swiftly,
each buoyant step a challenge to fate, to the
Members’ Entrance, and so across the road to the
gate which leads into what was once the old parish
churchyard of Westminster. It was still too cold
to sit out of doors, and after a momentary hesita-
tion he turned into Westminster Abbey by the
great north door.
Dering had not been in the Abbey since he was
a child, and the spirit of quietude which fills the
broad nave and narrow aisles on early spring days
soothed his restlessness. But that, alas ! only for
a moment; as soon as his busy brain began to
realise all that lay about him, he was filled with
a sincere if half voluntarily comic indignation.
It annoyed him to feel that this national heritage
was still a church; why could not Westminster
Abbey be treated as are the Colosseum in Rome
and the Panthéon in Paris? And so, as he sat
down in one of the pews which roused his resent-
ment, he began to think over all the improvements
which he would effect, were he given, if only for a
few days, a free hand in Westminster Abbey !
Suddenly he saw, at right angles with himself,
and moving across the choir, a group of four
people, consisting of a man, a woman, and two
children.
The man was Jack Hinton, the idle, ill-condi-
tioned artist neighbour of his in Bedford Park, to
whom there had been more than one reference in
his talk with Wingfield ; the children were Agatha


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 133
and Mary Hinton, the motherless girls of the
Danish woman to whom Louise had been so much
devoted ; and the fourth figure was that of Louise
herself. His wife’s back was turned to Dering,
but even without the other three he would have
known the tall, graceful figure, if only by the
masses of fair, almost lint-white hair, arranged in
low coils below her neat hat.
Dering felt no wish to join the little party. He
was still too excited, too interested in his own
affairs, to care for making and hearing small talk.
Still, a look of satisfaction came over his face as
he watched the four familiar figures finally dis-
appear round a pillar. How pleased Louise would
be when he told her of his latest scheme, that of
commissioning the unfortunate Hinton to paint
her portrait ! If only the man could be induced
to work, he might really make something of his
life after all. Dering meant to give the artist one
hundred pounds, and his heart glowed at the
thought of what such a sum would mean in the
untidy, womanless little house in which his wife
took so tender and kindly an interest.
Dering and Jack Hinton had never exactly hit
it ofi together, though they had known each other
for many years, and though they had both married
Danish wives. The one felt for the other the
worker’s wordless contempt for the incorrigible
idler. Yet, Dering had been very sorry for Hinton
at the time of poor Mrs. Hinton’s death, and he
liked to think that now he would be able to do
the artist a good turn. He had even thought very
seriously of offering to adopt the youngest Hinton
child, a baby now nearly a year old ; but a certain


134- STUDIES IN \VIVES
belated feeling of prudence, of that common sense
which often tempers the wind to the reckless
enthusiast, had given him pause.
After all, he and Louise might have children of
their own, and then the position of this little inter-
loper might be an awkward one. Louise had
always intensely wished to have a child—nay,
children—and now, if it only depended onhim,
and if Nature would only be kind, she should have
her wish. Perhaps that would be the most tangible
good this legacy would bring them.
Dering left the Abbey by the door which gives
access to the Cloisters. There he spent half an
hour in pleasant meditation before he started home
for the place which he knew to be so much dearer
to his wife than to himself. Dering was a Lon-
doner, the son of a doctor who had practised for
many years in one of the City parishes, and in his
heart he had much preferred the rooms in Gray’s
Inn which had been their first married home to
the trim little villa, of which the interior had
acquired an absurd and touching resemblance to
that of a Danish homestead.
Those who declare that the borderlands of
London lack physiognomy are strangely mistaken.
Each suburban district has an individual character
of its own, and of none is this more true than of
Bedford Park. Encompassed by poor and popu-
lous streets, within a stone’s-throw of what is still
one of the great highways out of the town, this
oasis, composed of villas set in gardens, has the
tranquil, rather mysterious, charm of a river back-
water.


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 135
The amazing contrast between the stir and un-
ceasing sound of the broad High Road and the
stillness of Lady Rich Road—surely the man who
laid out Bedford Park must have been a Cromwell
enthusiast—struck Dering with a sense of un-
wonted pleasure. As he put his latchkey in the
front door he remembered that his wife had told
him that their young Danish servant was to have
that day her evening out. Well, so much the
better; they would have their talk, their discus-
sion concerning their future plans, without fear
of eavesdropping or interruption.
Various little signs showed that Louise was
already back from town. Dering went straight
upstairs, and, as he began taking off his boots,
he called out to her, though the door between his
room and hers was shut : “ Do come in here, for I
have so much to tell you !” But this brought no
answering word, and after a moment he heard his
wife’s soft footsteps going down the house.
Dering dressed himself with some care; it had
always been one of his theories that a man should
make himself quite as formally agreeable at home
as he does elsewhere, and he and Louise had ever
practised, the one to the other, the minor cour-
tesies of life. Before going downstairs he also
tidied his room, as far as was possible for him to
do so, and, delicately picking up his dusty boots,
he took them down into the kitchen so as to save
their young servant the trouble.
Then, at last, he went through into the dining-
room, where he found Louise standing by the
table on which lay spread their simple supper.
She gave him a quick, questioning glance, then :


136 STUDIES IN WIVES
“I saw you in the Abbey,” she said in a con-
strained, hesitating voice; “why did you not
come up and speak to us? Mr. Hinton was on
his way to some office, and I brought the children
back alone.”
“ If I had known that was going to be the case,”
said Dering frankly, “ I should have joined you,
but I had just been spending an hour with Wing-
field, and—well, I didn’t feel in the mood to make
small talk for Hinton !”
He waited a moment, but she made no comment.
Louise had always been a silent, listening woman,
and this had made her seem to eager, ardent Philip
a singularly restful companion.
He went on, happily at first, rather nervously
towards the close of his sentence, “ Well, every-
thing is settled—even to my will. But I found
Wingfield had to know—I mean about our old
arrangement.”
“Then you told him? I do not think you
should have done that.” Louise spoke very
slowly, and in a low voice. “ I asked you if I
might do so before telling Gerda Hinton.”
Dering looked at her deprecatingly. He felt
both surprised and sorry. It was almost the first
time in their joint lives that she had uttered to
him anything savouring of a rebuke.
“ Please forgive my having told Wingfield with-
out first consulting with you,” he said at once;
“ but you see the absurd, the abominable state
of the English law is such that in case of my
sudden death you would have no right to any of
this money. Besides, apart from that fact, if I
trusted to my own small legal knowledge and


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 137
made a will in which you were mentioned, you
would probably have trouble with those odious
relations of mine. So I simply had to tell him.”
Dering saw that the discussion was beginning
to be very painful and disagreeable; he felt a
pang of impatient regret that he had spoken to
his wife now, instead of waiting until she had
had a thorough change and holiday.
Louise was still standing opposite to him, look-
ing straight before her and avoiding his anxious
glances. Suddenly he became aware that her
lip was trembling, and that her eyes were full of
tears ; quickly he walked round to where she was
standing, and put his hand on her shoulder.
“ I am sorry, very sorry, that I had to tell Win g-
field,” he said; “ but, darling, why should you
mind so much ‘2 He was quite sympathetic; he
thoroughly understood ; I think I might even say
that he thoroughly agrees with our point of view ;
but I fancy he felt rather hurt about it, and I
couldn’t help wishing that we had told him at the
time.”
Dering’s hand travelled from his wife’s shoulder
to her waist, and he held her to him, unresisting
but strangely passive, as he added :—
“ You can guess, my dearest, what Wingfield,
in his character of solicitor, advises us to do ‘2 Of
course, in a sense it will be a fall from grace—but,
after all, we shan’t love one another the less be-
cause we have been to a registry office, or spent
a quarter of an hour in a church ! I do think that
we should follow his advice. He will let me know
to-morrow what formalities have to be fulfilled
to carry the thing through, and then, dear heart,


138 STUDIES IN WIVES
we will go off for a second honeymoon. Some-
times I wonder if you realise what this money
means to us both—I mean in the way of freedom
and of added joy.”
But Louise still turned from him, and, as she
disengaged herself from the strong encircling arm,
he could see the slow, reluctant tears rolling down
her cheek.
Dering felt keenly distressed. The long strain,
the gallantly endured poverty, the constant
anxiety, had evidently told on his wife more than
he had known.
“ Don’t let’s talk about it any more !” he ex-
claimed. “ There’s no hurry about it now, after
all.”
“ I would rather talk about it now, Philip. I
don’t—I don’t at all understand what you mean.
It is surely too late for us now to talk of marriage 2
The time remaining to us is too short to make it
worth while.”
Dering looked at her bewildered. Well as she
spoke the language, she had remained very igno-
rant of England and of English law. -
“ I will try and explain to you,” he said gently,
“ why Wingfield has made it quite clear to me
that we shall have to go through some kind of
legal ceremony ”
“ But there are so few months, she repeated,
and he felt her trembling ; “ it is not as if you were
likely to die before September; besides, if you
were to do so, I should not care about the
money.”
For the first time a glimmer of what she meant,
of what she was thinking, came into Dering’s

,,


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 139
mind. He felt strongly moved and deeply
touched. This, then, was why she had seemed so
preoccupied, so unlike herself, of late.
“ My darling, surely you do not imagine—that
I am thinking . . . of leaving you ‘2”
“ No,” and for the first time Louise, as she
uttered the word, looked up straight into Dering’s
face. “ No, it was not of you that I was thinking
—but of myself. . . .”
“ Let us sit down.” Dering’s voice was so
changed, so uneager, so cold, that Louise, for the
first time during their long partnership, felt as
if she was with a stranger. “ I want to thoroughly
understand your point of view. Do you mean to
say that when we first arranged matters you in-
tended our—our marriage to be, in any case, only
a temporary union ‘2”
He waited for her answer, looking at her with a
still grimness, an unfamiliar antagonism, that
raised, in her a feeling of resentment, and renewed
her courage. “ Please tell me,” he said again,
“ I think you owe me the truth, and I really Wish
to know.”
Then she spoke. And though her hands still
trembled, her voice was quite steady.
“ Yes, Philip, I will tell you the truth, though
I fear you will not like to hear it. When I first
accepted the proposal you made to me, I felt con-
vinced that, as regarded myself, the feeling which
brought us together would be eternal, but I as
fully believed that with you that same feeling
would be only temporary. I was ready to remain
with you as long as you would have me do so;


14-0 STUDIES IN WIVES
but I felt sure that you would grow tired of me
some day, and I told myself—secretly, of course,
for I could not have insulted you or myself by
saying such a thing to you then—~I told myself, I
say, that when that day came, the day of your
weariness of me, I would go away, and make no
further demand upon you.”
“ You really believed that I should grow tired
of you,—that I should wish to leave you ‘2”
Dering looked at her as a man might look at a
stranger who has suddenly revealed some sinister
and grotesque peculiarity of appearance or manner.
“ Certame I did so. How could I divine that
you alone would be different from all the men of
whom I had ever heard? Still, I loved you so
well—ah, Philip, I did love you so—that I would
have come to you on any terms, as indeed I did
come on terms very injurious to myself. But
what matters now what I then thought ? I see
that I was wrong—you have been faithful to me
in word, thought, and deed——”
“ Yes,” said Dering fiercely, “ by God, that is
so ! Go on !”
“ I also have been faithful to you ” she
hesitated. “ Yes, I think I may truly say it, in
thought, word, and deed, ”
Dering drew a long breath, and she went slowly
on : “ But I have realised, and that for some time
past, that the day would come when I should no
longer wish to be so—when I should wish to be
free. I have gradually regained possession of my-
self, and, though I know I must fulfil all my
obligations to you for the time I promised, I long
for the moment of release, for the moment when


142 STUDIES IN WIVES
“ Do you contemplate leaving me for another
man ‘2” he asked quietly.
Again Louise hesitated a moment.
“ Yes,” she said at length, “ that is what I am
going to do. I did not mean to tell you now—
though I admit that later, before the end, you
would have had a right to know. The man to
whom I am going, and who is not only willing, but
anxious, to make me his wife, I mean his legal
wife,”—she gave Dering a quick, strange look—
“ has great need of me, far more so than you ever
had. My feeling for him is not in any way akin
to what was once my feeling for you; that does
not come twice, at any rate to such a woman as
I feel myself to be; but my affection, my—my
regard, will be, in this case, I believe, more en-
during; and, as you know, I dearly love his chil-
dren, and promised their mother to take care of
them.”
While she spoke, Dering, looking fixedly at her,
seemed to see a shadowy group of shabby forlorn
human beings form itself and take up its stand by
her side—Jack Hinton, with his weak, handsome
face, and shifty, pleading eyes; his two plain,
neglected-looking girls; and then, cradled as he
had so often seen it in Louise’s arms, the ugly
and to him repulsive-looking baby.
What chance had he, what memories had their
common barren past, to fight this intangible
appealing vision ‘2
He raised his hand and held it for a moment
over his eyes, in a vain attempt to shut out both
that which he had evoked, and the sight of the
woman whose repudiation of himself only seemed
_. IA


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 143
to make more plainly visible the bonds which
linked them the one to the other. Then he turned
away, with a certain deliberation, and, having
closed the door, walked quickly through the little
hall, flinging himself bareheaded into the open air.
For the second time that day Philip Dering felt
an urgent need of solitude in which to hold com-
munion with himself. And yet, when striding
along the dimly-lighted, solitary thoroughfares,
the stillness about him seemed oppressive, and
the knowledge that he was encompassed by
commonplace, contented folk intolerable.
And so, scarcely knowing where his feet were
leading him, he made his way at last into the
broad, brilliantly lighted High Road, now full of
glare, of sound, and of movement, for throngs of
workers, passing to and fro, were seeking the
amusement and excitement of the street after
their long, dull day.
Very soon Dering’s brain became abnormally
active ; his busy thoughts took the shape of com-
pleted half-uttered sentences, and he argued with
himself, not so loudly that those about him could
hear, but still with moving lips, as to the outcome
of what Louise had told him that evening.
He was annoyed to find that his thoughts re-
fused to marshal themselves in due sequence.
Thus, when trying to concentrate his mind on
the question of the immediate future, memories
of Gerda Hinton, of the dead woman with whom
he had never felt in sympathy, perhaps because
Louise had been so fond of her, persistently inter-
vened, and refused to be thrust away. His own


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 145
After a while he looked at his watch, and found,
with some surprise, that he had been walking up
and down for over an hour ; he also became aware,
for the first time, that his bare, hatless head pro-
voked now and again good-natured comment
from those among whom he was walking.
He turned into a side-street, and taking from
his pocket a small notebook, wrote the few lines
which later played an important part in determin-
ing, to the satisfaction of his friends, the fact that
he was, when writing them, most probably of
unsound mind.
\Vhat Dering wrote down in his pocket-book
ran as follows :—
1. I buy a hat at Dunn’s, if Dunn be still open
(which is probable).
2. I call on the doctor who was so kind to the
Hintons last year and settle his account. It is
doubtful if Hinton ever paid him—in fact there
can be no doubt that Hinton did not pay him. I
there make my will and inform the doctor that
he will certainly he wanted shortly at Number 8,
Lady Rich Road.
3. I buy that revolver (if guaranteed in perfect
working order) which I have so frequently noticed
in the pawnbroker’s window, and I give him five
shillings for showing me how to manage it. Mem.
Remember to make him load it, so that there may
be no mistake.
4. I wire to Wingfield. This is important. It
may save Louise a shock.
5. I go to Hinton’s place, and if the children
are already in bed I lock the door, and quietly kill
him and then kill myself. If the children are still
up, I must, of course, wait awhile. In any case
the business will be well over before the doctor
can arrive.
10


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 147
waiting in the surgery had refused to state his
business.
“ My name is Dering. I think you must have
often met my wife when you were attending the
late Mrs. Hinton. In fact I’ve come to-night to
settle the Hintons’ account. I fancy it is still
owing ‘2”
Dering spoke with abrupt energy, looking
straight, and almost with a frown, as he spoke,
into the other’s kindly florid face. It seemed
strange, at that moment intolerably hard, that
this man, who looked so much less alive, so much
less intellectually keen than himself, should be
destined to find him within a few hours lying dead,
obliterated into nothingness.
“ Oh, yes, the account is still owing,” Dr.
Johnstone spoke with a certain eagerness. “ Then
do I understand that you are acting for Mr.Hinton
in the matter ? The amount is exactly ten
pounds—”
He paused awkwardly, and not till the two bank-
notes were actually lying on his surgery table
before him did he believe in his good fortune.
The Hintons’ account had long since passed into
that class of doctor’s bill which is only kept on the
books with a view to the ultimate sale of the prac-
tice, and this last quarter the young man had
not even troubled to send it in again.
J ohnstone remembered poor Mrs. Hinton’s friend
very well; Mrs. Dering had been splendid, per-
fectly splendid, as nurse and comforter to the
distracted household. And then such a pretty
woman, too, the very type—quiet, sensible, self-
contained, and yet feminine—whom Dr. John-
10—2


148 STUDIES IN WIVES
stone admired; he was always pleased when he
met her walking about the neighbourhood.
This, then, was her husband ‘2 The doctor
stared across at Dering with some curiosity.
\Vell, he also, though, of course, in quite another
way, was uncommon and attractive-looking. What
was it he had heard about these people quite
lately, in fact that very day ‘2 Why, of course!
One of his old lady patients in Bedford Park had
told him that her opposite neighbours, this Mr.
and Mrs. Dering, had come into a large fortune—
something like fifty thousand pounds !
Dr. Johnstone looked at his visitor with a
sudden accession of respect. If he could have
foreseen this interview, he might have made his
account with Mr. Hinton bear rather more rela-
tion to the actual number of visits he had been
compelled to pay to that unfortunate household.
Still, he reminded himself that even ten pounds
were very welcome just now, and his heart warmed
to Mr. Hinton’s generous friend.
Suddenly Dering began speaking: “ I forget if
I told you that I am starting this very night for
a long journey, and before doing so I Want to ask
you to do me a favour—-——”
His host became all pleased attention.
“ Would you kindly witness my will ‘2 I have
just come into a sum of money, and—~and, though
my will is actually being drawn up by a friend,
who is also a lawyer, I have felt uneasy—”
“ I quite understand. You have thought it
wise to make a provisional will ‘2 Well, that’s a
very sensible thing to do ! We medical men see
much trouble caused by foolish postponement in
l


150 STUDIES IN WIVES
paper bearing the doctor’s address, and the two
witnesses, Johnstone himself, and a friend whom
he fetched out of his smoking-room for the purpose,
could not help seeing what generous provision
the testator had made for the younger generation.
As the doctor opened the front door for his, as
he hoped, new friend, Dering suddenly pulled a
notebook out of his breast pocket.
“ I have forgotten a most important thing—’
there was real dismay in his fresh, still youthful
voice—“ and that is to ask you kindly to look
round at No. 8, Lady Rich Road after your friends
have left you to-night. I should think about
twelve o’clock would do very well. In fact,
Hinton won’t be ready for you before. And, Dr.
Johnstone—in view of the trouble to which you
may be put——-” Dering thrust another bank-
note into the other man’s hand. “ I know you
ought to have charged a lot more than that ten
pounds—” and then, before words of thanks
could be uttered, he had turned and gone down
the steps, along the little path, through the iron
gate which swung under the red lamp, into the
darkness beyond.
7
i * * * *
Down the broad and now solitary High Road,
filled with the strange brooding stillness of a spring
dawn, clattered discordantly a hansom cab. There
was promise of a bright warm day, such a day as
yesterday had been, but Wingfield, leaning for-
ward, unconsciously willing the horse to go faster,
felt very cold.
At last, not for the first time during this inter-


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 151
minable journey, he took from his breast pocket
the unsigned telegram which was the cause of his
being here, driving, oh! how slowly, along this
fantastically empty thoroughfare, through the chill
morning air, instead of lying sound asleep by
Kate’s side in his comfortable bed at home :—
“ Philip Dering is dead please come at once at
once at once to eight Lady Rich Road.”
\Vingfield, steadying the slip of paper as it
fluttered in his hand, looked down with frowning
puzzled eyes at the pencilled words.
The message had been sent off just before mid-
night, and had reached his house, he supposed, an
hour and a half later, for the persistent knocking at
his front door had gone on for some time before he
or his wife realised that the loud hammering sound
concerned themselves. Even then it had been
Kate who had at last roused herself and gone down-
stairs ; Kate who had rushed up breathless, whis-
pering as she thrust the orange envelope into his
hand :—“Oh, James, what can it be? Thank
God, all the children are safe at home !”
No time had been lost. While he was dressing,
his Wife had made him a cup of tea, kind and
solicitous for his comfort, but driving him nearly
distracted by her eager, excited talk and aimless
conjectures. It had seemed long before he found
a derelict cab willing to drive him from Regent’s
Terrace to Bedford Park, but now—well, thank
God, he was at last nearing the place where he
would learn what had befallen the man who had
been, next to his own elder boy, the creature he
had loved best in his calm, phlegmatic life.


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 153
capable of showing such emotion and horror in the
face of death.
“ Why, doctor, you mustn’t take on so ! How
could you possibly have told what was in the man’s
mind ‘2 You weren’t upset like this last year over
that business in Angle Alley, and that was a sight
worse than this, eh ‘2”
But J ohnstone had turned away, and was staring
out of the bow window. “ It isn’t that poor
wretch Hinton that’s upset me,” he muttered,
“ I don’t mind death. It’s—it’s—Dering—Dering
and Mrs. Dering.” Reluctant tears filled his tired,
red-rimmed eyes.
“ I’m sorry, too. Very sorry for the lady, that
is; as for the other—well, I’m pretty sure he’ll
cheat Broadmoor, and that without much delay,
eh, doctor ‘2 Hullo ! who’s this coming now ?”
The tone suddenly changed, became at once
official and alert in quality, as the sound of wheels
stopped opposite the little gate. When the front
door bell pealed through the house he added,
“ You go to the door, doctor; whoever it is had
better not see me at first.” And J ohnstone found
himself suddenly pushed out of the room and into
the little hall.
There he hesitated for a moment, looking fur-
tively round at the half-open door which led into
the back room fitted up as a studio, where still lay,
in dreadful juxtaposition, the dead and the dying,
Hinton and his murderer, alone, save for the
indifferent yet watchful presence of a trained
nurse.
From the kitchen beyond came the sound of
eager, lowered voices, those of the two young


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 155
himself to be responsible. He wished to avoid,
at any rate for the present, the repetition to this
stranger of what had happened the night before.
And so, “ Please come this way,” he muttered
hoarsely. “ I ought perhaps to warn you—to
prepare you for something of a shock.” And,
turning round, beckoning to the other to follow
him, he opened the door of the studio, stepping
aside to allow Wingfield to pass in before
him.
But once through the doorway the lawyer
suddenly recoiled and stopped short, so dreadful
and so unexpected was the sight which met his eyes.
What Wingfield saw remained with him for
weeks, and even for months, an ever-present,
torturing vision, full of mingled horror and
mystery, a mystery to which he was destined never
to find the solution.
Focussed against a blurred background made
up of distempered light green walls, a curtainless,
open window, and various plain deal studio
properties pushed back against the wall, lay,
stretched out on some kind of low couch brought
forward into the middle of the room, a rigid,
motionless figure.
The lower half of the figure, including the feet,
which rested on a chair placed at the bottom of the
couch, was entirely covered by a blanket; but
the chest and head, slightly raised by pillows,
seemed swathed and bound up in broad strips of
white linen, which concealed chin and forehead,
hair and ears, while the head was oddly supported
by a broad band or sling fastened with safety-pins
—Wingfield’s eyes took note of every detail—to


156 STUDIES IN WIVES
the side of the couch. Under the blanket, which
was stretched tightly across the man’s breast,
could be seen the feeble twitching of fingers, but
even so, the only sense of life and feeling seemed
to the onlooker centred in the eyes, whose glance
Wingfield found himself fearing yet longing to
meet.
To the right of the couch a large Japanese screen
had been so placed as to hide some object spread
out on the floor. To the left, watching every
movement of the still, recumbent figure, stood a
powerful-looking woman in nursing dress. Wing-
field’s gaze, after wandering round the large, bare
room, returned and again clung to the sinister,
immobile form which he longed to be told was that
of Hinton, and as he gazed he forced himself to
feel a fierce gladness and relief in the knowledge
that Dering was dead,—that in his pocket lay the
telegram which proved it.
At last, to gain courage and to stifle a horrible
doubt, he compelled himself to meet those at once
indifferent and appealing eyes, which seemed to
stare fixedly beyond the group of men by the
door ; and suddenly the lawyer became aware that
just behind him hurried whispered words were
being uttered.
“ This gentleman is Mr. Dering’s solicitor; per-
haps he will be able to throw some light on the
whole affair,” and he felt himself being plucked
by the sleeve and gently pulled back into the
hall.
“ It is—isn’t it ?—poor Hinton ?” and he looked
imploringly from one man to the other.
“ Hinton ?” said the doctor sharply. “ He’s


ACCORDING TO MEREDITH 157
there, sure enough—but you didn’t see him, for we
put him under a sheet, behind that screen. Your
friend shot him dead first, and then cut his own
throat, but he didn’t set about that in quite the
right way, so he’s alive still, as you can see.”
Wingfield drew a long breath of something like
relief. The torturing suspense of the last few
moments was at an end.
“ And where is Mrs. Dering ‘2” he spoke in a
quiet, mechanical voice ; and J ohnstone felt
angered by his callousness.
“ We’ve just sent her back into the next house,”
he answered curtly, “ and made her take the
Hinton children with her. For—well, it often is so
in such cases, you know—the presence of his wife
seems positively to distress Mr. Dering; besides,
the nurse and I can do, and have done, all that is
possible.”
“ And have you no clue to what has happened ‘2
Has Dering been able to give no explanation of
this—this-—horrible business ‘2”
J ohnstone shook his head. “ Of course he can’t
speak. He will never speak again. He wrote a
few words to his wife, but they amounted to nothing
save regret that he had bungled the last half of the
affair.”
“ And what do you yourself think ‘2” _
Wingfield spoke calmly and authoritatively.
He had suddenly become aware, during the last
few moments, that he was talking to a medical
man.
“ I haven’t had time to think much about it ;”
the tone was rough and sore. “ Mr. Dering
seems to have come into a large sum of money, and


158 STUDIES IN WIVES
such things have been known to upset men’s
brains before now.”
“ Still, he might write something of consequence
now that this gentleman has come,” interposed the
inspector.
But when Wingfield, standing by that which he
now knew was indeed his friend, watched the pain-
ful, laboured moving of the pencil across the slate
which had been hurriedly fetched some two hours
before from the young Hintons’ nursery, all he
saw, traced again and again, were the words :
“ Look after Louise. Look after Louise . . .
and then at last: “ I mean to die. I mean to die.
I mean to die.”
9,


V
SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2





162 STUDIES IN WIVES
other wedding guest, her whole face would soften
—so might a mother look at a daughter whom
instinct prompted her to love, and reason to con-
demn as foolish.
And yet the sitting figure was that of a con-
temporary of Mrs. Rigby, being, as a matter of
fact, a certain Matilda Wellow, who had been her
bridesmaid twenty-five years ago to-day, and who
was now, in more than one sense of the term, the
most substantial spinster of Market Dalling.
The sound of the door behind her quietly opening
and shutting made Mrs. Rigby turn round, and a
moment later she was looking up at a tall, straight,
still young-looking man, who, clad in evening
dress, stood smiling down at her. He was David
Banfield, her half-brother.
“ Why, you’ve put on all your war-paint !” she
exclaimed in half-pretended dismay. “ Didn’t
you know that there was only Matilda Wellow
coming ?”
“ I don’t know that I thought anything about
it,” he answered, more gaily than his sister was
now in the habit of hearing him speak. “ I
dressed out of compliment to you, Kate, and
because—well, I’ve got into the way of it lately.
But pray don’t let Matt think that he must needs
follow my example !”
Then he sat down by Mrs. Rigby, and gazed out
with quick, sensitive appreciation at the old walled
garden.
“ You’re a wonderful gardener, Kate,” he said
suddenly.
“ There’s a lot of nonsense talked now about
gardening,” she said drily. “ With the grand


164 STUDIES IN WIVES
a short holiday, there had come from her a letter
telling him shortly, bluntly, cruelly, that she had
been unfaithful to her marriage vow, and that she
hoped he would forget her. ‘
Had he forgotten her ‘? No. It had only been
owing to his sister’s urgency, and to Matthew
Rigby’s more measured advice, that Banfield had
at last consented to take the step of divorcing his“
wife.
This step Mrs. Rigby had not only never re-
gretted, but—and in this she was more fortunate
than her husband—no doubt had ever crossed her
mind of its having been the wisest thing for her
brother’s happiness and peace. ' But Matthew
Rigby, cautious member of a cautious profession,
had learned very early in his married life the
futility of disagreeing with the wife with whom
Providence had blessed him.
Now Banfield lived in solitary state with his
little girl, his household managed by the child’s
nurse, an old Irishwoman, who, if devoted to the
child, was incapable of managing such a decorous
household as should have been that of the Brew
House.
Any day, any hour, Mrs. Rigby would have
bartered her personal happiness for that of her
half-brother, and yet the two seldom met—and
they met almost daily—without the saying on her
part of something likely either to wound or to
annoy him.
“ I suppose Rosy is well ? I thought you meant
sending the child in to see me to-day ‘2”
“ Didn’t she come ?” A look of-,worry and
anger crossed Banfield’s dark, mobile face. “ I


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 165
can’t think what prevented it, unless—well, there’s
been rather an upset at the Brew House, and
perhaps Mary Scanlan didn’t like to go out.”
“ I heard there had been an upset,” observed
his slster drily, “for baker told cook. He said
your housekeeper turned the younger maid, old
'Hornby’s daughter, out of the house last night, and
_ that the girl could be heard crying all down the
street.”
Mrs. Rigby let her work fall unheeded on the
floor ; quite unconscious of her action she clasped
her hands tightly together.
“ David ! How long is this sort of thing to go
on ?” she asked, in a low, tense voice. “ It’s the
talk of the whole town, and it can’t be good for
your child.”
“ But what would you have me do ‘2” He had
hoped that to-day—his sister’s silver wedding day
——his domestic trials would be forgotten, or, at
any rate, not mentioned. “I can’t dismiss Mary
Scanlan now—she must stay on till Rosy goes to
school. That won’t be for very long, for, as you
know, I promised ”—he averted his face as he
spoke—“ to send the child to a convent school as
soon as she was twelve years old.”
The idea that her brother, the wealthy, highly-
thought-of brewer of Market Dalling, should confess
himself worsted by the old and ill-tempered Irish-
woman, who, together with little Rosy, had been
his wife’s—his unfaithful wife’s—only legacy to
him, was horrible to his sister.
Even now, when bitter, disconnected thoughts
crowded one on another, Mrs. Rigby, half-uncon-
sciously, evoked in her mind the strong personality


166 STUDIES IN WIVES
of the one human being who ever really “ stood
up ” to her. She had had the notion, so curiously
common in England, that your Irishwoman is in-
variably slatternly, untruthful, and good-natured;
but in Mary Scanlan she had found a human being
as scrupulously neat, truthful, and high-minded as
herself, while at the same time far more ill-tem-
pered, and equally determined to have her own
way.
While Mrs. Rigby was allowing a flood of very
bitter thoughts to surge up round her, David
Banfield was watching her face, and awaiting her
next words with some anxiety.
But when Kate Rigby at last spoke, she seemed
to have forgotten the immediate question under
discussion.
“ I suppose,” she said slowly, “ that you have
never thought, Dave, that there might be a simple
way out of your difficulties ‘2”
“ You mean that I might marry again ‘2 Well,
Kate, yes—I have thought of it. I suppose there’s
' no man, situated as I have been these last four
years, but thinks of a second marriage as a way
out; but—but, apart from other considerations, I
don’t feel as if I could bring myself to do it.”
“ And why not, pray ‘2” asked Mrs. Rigby in a
low voice.
“ Well, it’s difficult to explain the way I look at
it. Of course, no one can answer for another, and
yet, Kate, if anything happened to Matt, I don’t
see you marrying again—-— ‘2”
David Banfield was aware that he had not chosen
a very happy simile with which to point his mean-
ing, and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he hoped


168 STUDIES IN WIVES
as disastrous a matrimonial experiment as before,
and in a class which was as little his own as that
of his Irish wife had been.
But time had gone on, and David Banfield had
shown no disposition to make a second marriage,
either in the county set, or in the little town world
of Market Dalling, where the Rigbys themselves
lived and had their important being.
“ Kate—you don’t understand,” he said at last,
and, even as he uttered the words, they seemed to
him painfully inadequate. “ In fact, you never
did understand ”—there came a sudden touch of
passion into his voice, and he got up and walked up
and down the room—“ how I felt—how for the
matter of that I still feel—about Rosaleen. But
for the war—but for the getting clear away—I
don’t know what I should have done ! Once,
when I was out there, in a little out-of-the-way
station, I saw an old bill with her name on it, put
up, of course, before I met her, when she was
touring in South Africa. Well, I can tell you one
thing—if we had been back in the days when a
soldier could get killed so much more easily than he
can now, you would never have seen me again.
For days and days I couldn’t get her out of my
mind—she’s never out of my mind now—~——”
Mrs. Rigby was frightened, almost awed, not so
much by the violence of his feeling, as by the out-
spoken expression of that feeling.
She got up and walked quickly to him.
“ Perhaps I understand more than you think,”
she said in a moved voice, “ but now, David, you
must turn your back on all that. For good or
evil, it’s over and done with, and your duty is to


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 169
your child. I won’t. say a word against Mary
Scanlan,—I know she’s been a faithful servant to
you,—but wouldn’t it be better for Rosy if you had
someone who could look after the house, as well
as after her ‘2 Even you admit that you cannot
go on at the Brew House as you’ve been doing
lately. I know you can’t feel to anyone else as you
felt to—to Rosaleen, but surely it would be best for
the child, to say nothing of yourself, to have some
kind, nice woman about the place, instead of one
who’s only a servant after all.”
“ Of course, it would be better,” he said som-
brely. “ Don’t you think I know that ‘2 But
where am I to find the ‘ nice, kind woman ’ ‘2 As
for the girls I meet, it’s out of the question.”
PiAs he spoke, he unconsciously glanced round
the room in which he and his sister were standing.
Mrs. Rigby had not inherited the good taste
which had distinguished her Banfield forefathers.
The Brew House was full of fine old furniture,
furniture which some of the young brewer’s
“ grand ” friends envied him ; but that which the
Rigbys had gradually accumulated had the mean
and yet rather pretentious commonness which
belonged to the period in which they had married.
“ There’s one whom you’ve never thought of,
but who often thinks of you,” said Mrs. Rigby, her
voice sinking to a whisper.
Banfield looked at his sister attentively. His
fastidious mind passed in review the various young
women who composed the little society of Market
Dalling. He regarded them all with indifference,
rising in some cases to positive dislike, and since
his matrimonial misfortunes he had, as far as was


170 STUDIES IN WIVES
possible, avoided every kind of social gathering
held in his native place.
“ I don’t know whom you mean,” he said at
last with some discomfiture. “ In the old days
you were always apt to fancy that the girls were
after me, and I can’t say that you ever gave them
much encouragement,”—he added with a rather
clumsy attempt at playfulness.
“ The person I have in my mind,” persisted Mrs.
Rigby, “isn’t exactly a girl; she’s just what we
were talking about—a nice, kind woman—and you
never seem to mind meeting her.”
“ Do you mean—can you possibly mean ‘2”
“ -——Matilda Wellow ? Yes, of course I do !
It’s astonishing to me, it’s even surprising to
Matthew, that you’ve never noticed how much she
likes you. Why, she’s the only person in Market
Dalling who ever takes any trouble about little
Rosy, or who ever gives the child anything ; Rosy
always calls her Auntie Tiddy.”
“ Matilda Wellow ‘2” he repeated, honestly be-
wildered. “ Why, of course I like her, and think
well of her, but I’ve never thought of her—and I
don’t believe she’s ever thought of me, Kate—in
that way 1”
“ Don’t you ‘2” she said drily. “ There’s none
so blind as those who won’t see.”
Then, prompted by a shrewd instinct, she re-
mained quite silent, and withdrew her anxious
gaze from her brother’s face.
Only to-day Banfield had received a letter from
South Africa which had sorely tempted him to-
throw up everything and make a home in the
country which, perhaps unfortunately for himself,


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 171
held none of the glamour of the unknown. As a
matter of fact, the letter was now in his pocket,
and he felt guiltily aware of the angry pain with
which his sister would regard the offer, especially
if she guessed how tempting was its eflect on his
imagination.
But during their strange conversation he had
realised, as he had never done before, that there
were only two ways open to him—either to go away
and make a new life, or to attempt some such
solution of his troubles as that which his sister had
just proposed to him.
So it was that during those moments of tense
silence Matilda Wellow assumed in David Ban-
field’s mind the importance of an only alternative.
Perhaps the very fact that the young man was so
familiar with her personality, while always regard-
ing her as a contemporary of his sister, made it
easier for him to come to a sudden decision.
To another important fact—never forgotten for
a moment by Mrs. Rigby—namely, that Miss
Wellow was the wealthiest spinster in Market
Dalling, Banfield gave no thought, and it certainly
played no part in his hurried, anxious self-
communing.
“ I confess,” he said at last, “ that this is a new
idea to me—but that’s no reason why it should be
a bad idea. And if you really believe that it would
be better for Rosy, and that Miss Wellow would
not—” he hesitated awkwardly, “ think it strange
of me, I will do as you advise, Kate. But you
' must let me take my own time. Perhaps when
she’s heard what I’ve got to say, she won’t feel
about it as you believe she’s likely to do. I


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR ? 173
But this was too much for David Banfield.
“ I don’t think that’s fair !” he exclaimed.
“ What you ought to say is—‘ Think of what that
poor fellow might have become if he had married
me 1’ I don’t believe any man could have helped
going straight with you, Kate. If I’d been more
like you ”
Then, to the young man’s relief, his brother-in-
law, Matthew Rigby, came into the room, with a
smile on his thin lips, a joke on his tongue.
Mrs. Rigby went out into the garden. “ Ma-
tilda !” she cried. “ Tiddy dear, come in ! Matt
is here. Dinner will be ready in a minute.”
But as the two women met, and together walked
down the path, the hostess gave her guest no hint
of the good fortune which lay in wait for her——
indeed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, her
moment of softening, she was sharply, almost
cruelly, intolerant of Miss Wellow’s sentimental
references to that ceremony of which they were
about to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary.

And now the Silver Wedding festivity was
drawing to a close.
The dinner, in its old-fashioned way, had been
really excellent, for Kate Rigby was a notable
housewife ; but not even that fact, nor the equally
excellent champagne—for Matthew Rigby was too
shrewd a man to drink bad wine—had had the
effect of brightening the little party, and a certain
constraint now sat on the four people who were
linked so closely together.
The host, a man of equable temperament, felt
faintly uncomfortable; as he looked from one to


174 STUDIES IN WIVES
the other, he told himself that something was
wrong.
His brother-in-law was certainly oddly unlike
himself, yet surely David Banfield was too sensible,
and by this time too well accustomed to his sister’s
ways, to have taken offence at anything she might
have said concerning the well-worn subject of
Brew House domestic difficulties. Mrs. Rigby
was also unnaturally silent, and during the long
course of the meal she uttered none of the sharp,
pungent sayings with which she generally en-
livened each one of her husband’s repasts and
which, it must be admitted, never to him lost their
savour. Last, but not least, Miss Wellow, whose
flowered muslin gown was as much too youthful
as that of her hostess was too old, seemed more
sentimental and more foolish than usual.
Mr. Rigby told himself with much satisfaction
that his Kate had certainly worn better than Tiddy
Wellow. And yet——? Yet, twenty-five years
ago, Tiddy had been such a pretty girl ! Soft and
round, with dewy brown eyes and pink dimpled
cheeks. She still had the appealing, inconsequent
manner which, so charming in a girl, is apt to be
absurd in a woman—and then she had grown
stout ! Mr. Rigby liked a woman to have a neat,
trim figure—his Kate had kept hers—but Tiddy ‘2
Alas ! Tiddy had not been so fortunate.
So it was that Mr. Rigby paid poor Miss Wellow
but little attention, regarding her with a curious
mixture of affectionate contempt and respect, the
former due to his knowledge of her character, and
the latter to’his knowledge of her very considerable
fortune.


176 STUDIES IN WIVES
There are certain human beings, men perhaps
more than women, who use those they love as
princes of old used their whipping boys, and among
these human beings Mrs. Rigby could certainly
have claimed a high place. Matthew Rigby was,
therefore, the, more surprised, even, perhaps, a
little relieved, when he noted the unwonted tender-
ness with which she slipped her arm through his ;
it couldn’t be anything so very bad after all !”
“ I don’t suppose I need tell you, Matt, what
has happened—or what is just going to happen—
to our David and Tiddy Wellow ‘2” and she nodded
her head significantly towards the two figures which
were now disappearing into the rustic arbour
which, erected by Mrs. Rigby’s father-in-law
some thirty years ago, had always vexed her thrifty
soul as an extravagant and useless addition to her
garden; just now, however, she would have ad-
mitted that even arbours have their uses.
“ Phew !————” exclaimed Matthew Rigby, and
had it not been for the presence of his wife, he
would certainly have sworn some decorous form
of oath to express his extreme surprise. His pause
prolonged itself, and then, with a certain effort, he
exclaimed : “ You’re an even cleverer woman than
I took you for, Kate, and that’s saying a good
deal !”
Mrs. Rigby turned and looked at him steadily.
Their heads were almost on a level, but even she
could guess nothing from his expression. It was
his tone, rather, that jarred on her very true con-
tentment. ,
“ Surely you think it’s the best thing that could
happen to him ‘2” she asked, a note of wistful


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR? 177
anxiety in her voice. “ Why, you and I have
talked it over dozens of times !”
“ I’ve heard you say that you thought Matilda
Wellow was the ver; woman for him, time and
again, but—but I don’t think, Kate, you ever
heard me say so. Still, I daresay it’s all right; you
generally know best,”—and the husband spoke
with less irony than might have been expected.
Twenty-five years of married life had taught him
that, on the whole, his wife generally did know
best.
“ And surely you think so, too ‘2” and she pressed
more closely to him, “ surely, Matt, you don’t
doubt that Matilda Wellow will make him a good
wife, and be kind to the child ‘2”
“ Of course, I’ve no doubt about that,” he an-
swered reassuringly. “ But still, she’s not exactly
the woman I’d have chosen for myself, and, after
all, David was very fond of that queer, cold little
hussy.”
Mrs. Rigby was given no time for a reply, for her
brother and Miss Wellow were coming slowly to-
wards the house. She turned up the gas with a
quick movement, and when they approached the
window a glance at her future sister-in-law’s face
was enough. She saw that David had spoken,
but she also saw that he had had the power—and
unconsciously her respect for her brother grew—
to stifle in his companion the mingled emotions his
offer of marriage had called forth.
Not till the long dull evening was over, not till
Banfield and Miss Wellow were actually bidding
the Rigbys good-night, did the young man say
the word which let loose Matilda’s incoherent words
12


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR ? 179
sulkily for her mistress’s return. Banfield was
awkwardly debating with himself whether Matilda
expected him to kiss her ; on the whole he thought
—he hoped—not.
But he was spared the onus of decision concern-
ing this delicate point ; for suddenly he felt himself
drawn on one side, and there, in the deep shadow
of the wall, his companion threw her arms about
him, murmuring, with a catch in her voice, “ I
know you don’t love me yet, but—but—David,
I’ll make you love me,” and the face turned
up to his in the half darkness was full of eager
yearning. .
Feeling a traitor—to himself, to Rosaleen, above
all, to the poor soul now leaning on his breast—-
Banfield bent and kissed her; then he turned on
his heel, leaving her to make her way as best she
could up the trim path leading to her front
door.
Hardly aware of what he was doing, he walked
away quickly, taking the opposite direction to
that of the quiet lane of houses which would have
led him straight home. Instead he struck out,
instinctively, towards the flat open country, for he
had a fierce, unreasoning desire to be alone—far
away from all humankind. As he strode along, his
eyes having become so fully accustomed to the
dim light that he could see every detail of the
white-rutted road gleaming between low hedges,
Banfield’s feeling of bewilderment, even of horror,
grew and grew, making him feel physically cold in
the warm, scented night.
For the first time there swept over him that
awful sense of unavailing repentance for the word
12—2


180 STUDIES IN WIVES
said which might so well have been left unsaid,
which most human beings are fated to feel at some
time of their lives.
Not even over his divorce had he felt so desperate
a passion of revolt, for that act, or so he had be-
lieved, was forced on him by Rosaleen herself.
But to-night he realised that before doing what
he had just done he had been free—free to remain
free—and he now saw with a sense of impotent
anger how deliberately he had given himself into
slavery.
As he strode along, eager to escape from the
material surroundings of his surrender, Banfield
remembered each word of his talk with his sister,
and so remembering, he was amazed at his own
weak folly.
What were the trifling troubles connected with
his Irish servant, Mary Scanlan, compared to
those which lay before him ‘2—to the awful know-
ledge that he was now the prisoner—henceforth
the body and soul prisoner—of Matilda Wellow ‘2
How sluggish had been his imagination when he
had thought of the woman, whose tears had but
just now scalded his lips, as of a kind, unobtrusive
lady housekeeper ! He was now aware that there
was another Matilda Wellow, of whom till to-night
he had been ignorant, and it was this stranger who
was demanding as a right, and indeed had the right
to demand, that tenderness and devotion which
he knew himself incapable of bestowing on any
woman except on the elusive, cold-natured woman
who had been his wife.
And then a strange thing happened to David
Banfield.


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR ? 181
The near image of Matilda Wellow faded, giving
place to the distant, and yet in a spiritual and
even physical sense poignantly present, personality
of Rosaleen.
As far as was possible, Banfield till to-night had
banished his wife’s image from his emotional
memory. But what he had just done—that is, his
own lack of constancy—had the odd effect of
making him feel lowered to the level to which
those about him regarded Rosaleen as fallen. He
told himself that now he and Rosaleen were quits
—-and deliberately he yielded to the cruel luxury
of recollection.
His mind travelled back to the early days of
their acquaintance, to the pretence at a “ friend-
ship ” which on his side had so soon become over-
whelming passion. Then had come his formal
offer of marriage, and for a long time she had
played with him, saying neither yes nor no. Then
for a while he had flung everything to the winds
in order to be with her—on any terms. He re-
membered with a pang of pain the trifling reasons
which at last made her quite suddenly consent to
become his wife. A quarrel with the manager of
the concert company to which she then belonged,
followed by a bad notice in the local paper of the
town to which he, David Banfield, undeterred by
more than one half-laughing refusal, had come to
make what he intended should be a final offer—
these, it seemed, had brought Rosaleen to the point
of decision.
Even now, Banfield never heard the name of that
little Sussex town without a leap of the heart, for
it was there that had taken place their marriage,
‘ i


182 STUDIES IN WIVES
the quietest and least adorned of weddings,
celebrated in a small, bare Roman Catholic chapel,
the incumbent of which, a wise old man, had
spoken to Banfield very seriously, asking him to
give the young Irishwoman more time for thought,
and impressing upon him the gravity of the
promises which he, a Protestant, had consented to
make concerning their future married life.
With regard to the latter, Banfield had been
scrupulously honourable, going, indeed, out of his
way to remind Rosaleen of her religious obliga-
tions, and at the time of the divorce acting, in
the matter of their child’s future education, accord-
ing to the spirit rather than the letter of his
promise. . . .
With bent head and eyes fixed on the white
road, David Banfield insensiny slackened his
steps while his mind concerned itself with the five
years he and Rosaleen had spent together at
Market Dalling. They had been years of secret
drama, on his part of almost wordless struggle for
some kind of response to the passion which her
mysterious aloofness—to so many men the greater
part of a woman’s attraction—evoked and kept
alive in him.
He now remembered how during these years
there had been minor causes of disagreement,
trifling matters—or so he had considered them-to
which Rosaleen attached far more importance than
he had done.
The constant criticism and interference of his
half-sister, the dislike and jealousy of those town
folk who regarded themselves as having a right to
the close friendship and intimacy of David Ban-


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 183
field’s young wife, these were the things—forming
such unimportant asides to the course of that
hidden struggle -—which Rosaleen had brought
forward when begging her husband, with pas-
sionate energy, to allow her to go back to her
profession.
But to-night, the grey fear with which he now
regarded his own future life at Market Dalling
brought to David Banfield a sudden understanding
of what Rosaleen had felt, caged, as he had caged
her, in the little town to which he was now
reluctantly turning his laggard steps, and which
had been, till so few years ago, the centre of his
universe.
He told himself that had he had the courage,
had he been possessed of the necessary imagina-
tion, to make another life for himself and for her,
none of this need have happened.
But why torture himself uselessly? He and
Rosaleen had now drifted as far apart as a man and
a woman can drift. What he had done to-night
was in its way as irrevocable as what she on her
side had done—nay more, the very fact that he
had Matilda Wellow so completely at his mercy
made Banfield feel, as a less simple-hearted,
generous-minded man would never have felt, how
impossible it was for him to draw back. . . .
\Vhile returning to what had now become his
place of bondage, David Banfield made a deter-
mined effort to dam the mental flood-gates through
which had run so strange a stream of violent revolt
and emotion, and he was so far rewarded that
almost at once something occurred which had the
effect of bracing him up, of hardening him in his


184 STUDIES IN WIVES
determination to do what he believed to be
ri ht.
gAs he walked down the silent, shuttered High
Street at the end of which stood the Brew House,
he saw that his hall light had not been ex-
tinguished; and as he opened the front door, he
was confronted with the spare form and the gaunt
though not ill-visaged countenance of Mary Scan-
lan, the elderly Irishwoman who had for so
long waged triumphant battle with her master’s
sister, Mrs. Rigby. Utterly different as the two
women were, they yet, as Banfield sometimes
secretly told himself, not without a certain sore
amusement, had strong points of resemblance the
one with the other.
Impelled by some obscure instinct that thus was
he certain to be strengthened in the course of
action to which he had just pledged himself,
Banfield invited the woman into the dining-room,
which had been, since his wife’s departure, used
by him as living and eating room in one.
Very deliberately he lit the gas, and then turned
and faced his housekeeper. “ I think it right that
you should be among the first to know,” he said,
“ that I am going to be married again—to Miss
Wellow.”
There was a moment’s pause. Banfield ex-
pected either a word of sullen acquiescence or an
outburst of anger; he had known Mary Scanlan
in both moods, but now she surprised him by
assuming a very disconcerting attitude.
“ If that’s the case,” she said slowly, twisting
and untwisting a corner of the black apron that she
was wearing, “ I will be getting ready little Rosy’s


186 STUDIES IN WIVES
invariably called him “ Mr. Banfield ” ; it was one
of the woman’s many Irish idiosyncrasies which
irritated his sister.
“ I don’t think I can stay on here, sir,” repeated
Mary Scanlan in a low, hesitating voice. “ I don’t
hold with a man, a gentleman I mean, having two
wives. I can’t say a word of excuse for my poor
Miss Rosaleen—I beg your pardon, sir, I mean
Mrs. Banfield. I know she behaved very wickedly
and strangely, but still you see, Mr. Banfield, to
my thinking and according to my holy religion,
she’s the woman who owns you, sir, and no one
else can ever take her place.”
“I know, I know,” he said hastily. “But
Mary, why don’t you consult your priest? If
you explain the circumstances to him, he may
take a different view of the matter to what you
do.”
“ No, that he wouldn’t!” exclaimed Mary
Scanlan, with a touch of her old passionate
temper, “ and if he did, I shouldn’t be said by
him !”
She hesitated, and then in a low tone asked the
strange question, made the amazing suggestion,
“ I suppose you wouldn’t be after seeing Miss
Rosaleen, Mr. Banfield ‘2 Not if I gave you her
address ‘2”
Banfield made a nervous movement of recoil.
“ Mary,” he said sternly, “ you forget your-
self !” and turning, left her in possession of the
room.
How describe the days that followed 2—short
days full of intense joy and looking forward to


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR '2 189
there that the news of his hasty marriage had
reached her—that fact would not have seemed to
her any reason why David should not now do the
right and proper thing by his second bride.
Thus it was owing to Mrs. Rigby that Matilda
was at last roused to a sense of what was due to
herself. Banfield, with some discomfiture, dis-
covered that Miss Wellow would take it ill of him
not to pay her the compliment of going to the
London tailor for his wedding clothes—“ and
then,” had observed his sister briskly, “ you’ll be
able to bring Tiddy back something handsome in
the way of jewellery ; for that’s a thing you owe'
not only to her, David, but also to yourself.”
II.
David Banfield, just arrived in London, stood
in an hotel bedroom overlooking the trees in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Staring out at the leafy screen, which seemed to
him so lacking in country freshness, there came to
his mind poignant memories of a very different
room and a very different outlook not half a mile
away from where he stood, for he and Rosaleen had
spent the first days of their married life in one of
those vast hotels which, overlooking the Embank-
ment and the river, are filled with light and air,
as well as instinct with a certain material luxury
which had pleased his young wife’s taste more than
his own.
With a quick movement he pushed up the old-
fashioned guillotine window as far as it would go,


192 STUDIES IN WIVES
of the letter which he knew only too well she must
be anxiously awaiting.
Had Banfield been a stronger man he would have
left London. But that, or so he told himself, there
was no need to do ; and as the hours dragged on,
bringing him closer to the moment which must see
his return to Market Dalling—to Matilda Wellow—-
the fact that he and Rosaleen were in a material
sense so near to one another began to affect his
imagination in strangest and most poignant
fashion.
Walking aimlessly along the hot airless streets of
London in July, he found himself ever furtiver
seeking her. . . . Such chance meetings are not
impossible ; they happen every day. Why
should such a thing not come to him as well as to
another ?
And so in the summer twilight, not once but
many times, some woman’s form—slender, grace-
ful, light-footed as was Rosaleen’s—would create
for a moment the illusion that she was there, close
to him, would bring the wild hope that in a
moment his hungry heart would be satisfied, his
conscience cheated._ And then the woman in whom
he had seen for a moment his poor lost love, would
turn her head—and Banfield, cast down but un-
dismayed, would again pursue his eager, aimless
search.
On the last evening of his stay in London, this
obsession became so intense that Banfield saw
Rosaleen in every woman’s shape that passed him
by. He grew afraid ; and after an hour spent in
the peopled streets, he told himself that that way
madness lay.


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 193
With eyes fixed on the dusty pavements, he
made his way back to his hotel, and sitting down
he wrote a letter—a kind, cheerful letter—to
Matilda \Vellow, telling her that he would be with
her the next afternoon at five o’clock. And then,
for the first time since he had known that Rosaleen
was in London, his sleep was restful and unbroken.
But in the early morning he dreamed a curious
dream ; Rosaleen, the beloved, the longed-for
woman, was again with him,—elusive, mysterious,
teasing as she had ever been,—and Banfield,
waking in the early dawn, felt tears of joy standing
on his face.
When he got up in the morning, and faced the
day which was to see him go back to Market
Dalling, he felt as must feel a man who sees stretch-
ing before him a lifelong period of servitude; but
with that feeling came the gloomy belief that he
had conquered the temptation that had so beset
him, and this being so, he argued that he had at
least a right to see the place where Rosaleen now
lived.
Having come to this specious understanding with
himself, Banfield felt his heart lighten. He told
himself that he would wait till he was within some
two hours of the time when he knew he must leave
London, and, having so decided, he checked his
impatience by various devices, packing his port-
manteau, paying his bill, doing first one thing and
then another, till the moment came for him to
start walking along the Embankment to West-
minster. .
When at last he reached the broad, wind-swept
space out of which he had been told turned Abbey
ii

13


196 STUDIES IN WIVES
I didn’t expect you yet. Miss Lonsdale will
be in long before you leave, I hope ; she’s
almost as anxious about my voice as I am—
and the faith she has in you, why, it’s something
wonderful !”
To Banfield, the words recalled, not Rosaleen
his wife, but Rosaleen the girl, the dear bewitching
stranger he had first known and wooed, though
never won. Unconsciously he visualised the
speaker; he seemed to see the quick, bird-like
movements with which she was taking off her hat,
and smoothing her hair before the glass. He even
saw her smiling——smiling as she used to smile at
him in the very early days of their acquaint-
ance.
He knew that he ought to cry out—tell her that
it was he, her husband, David Banfield, who was
there, and not the stranger whom she had ap-
parently been expecting; but though he opened
his lips, no word would come.
At last the door swung open quickly, and for a
moment Banfield saw her face, lit up by that touch
of wholly innocent coquetry of which your pretty
Irishwoman seems to have the secret.
Then, as suddenly she realised the identity of the
tall man standing between her and the window, a
peculiar—to Banfield a very terrible—change of
expression stiffened Rosaleen’s face into watchful
fear and attention.
“What is it 2” she asked. “Tell me quickly,
David ! Is Rosy ill, or—or dead ?”
“ Rosy ?” he stammered. “ She’s all right. I
heard this morning——”
“ -And I yesterday,” she breathed quickly.


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR '2 201
“ Poor old Mary !” she exclaimed. “ I suppose
everyone at Market Dalling thinks I’m a bad
woman? Your sister, of course, always hoped
that I was a bad woman ‘2”
She looked at him as if half expecting him to
make some kind of denial. But he remained
silent. What answer, what denial could he make ‘2
Of course, everyone at Market Dalling thought
Rosaleen a bad woman. For the matter of that,
none of them had ever thought well of her, not
even his own people, not even his sister and her
husband had made any attempt to understand her.
Rosaleen’s imprudent question made yet another
matter, one which Banfield had succeeded for a
few moments in completely forgetting, become once
more very present to him. With a feeling of
terrible self-reproach there rose before him the
helpless figure of Matilda Wellow.
“ It’s not only you,” he said slowly, “ but I
myself who need to make a fresh start. I haven’t
so much right to blame you as you, Rosaleen,
perhaps think—for I myself did a very wrong, a
wicked thing—”
She slipped away from under his hand and got
up, facing him.
“ It’s absurd for you to say that,” she exclaimed
petulantly, “ why, you couldn’t do anything
wicked, David, if you tried! For the matter of
that, I never could see—I never have seen—why
people are—why people make—” she seemed to
be seeking for a word, a phrase; and it was in a
whisper that she added the words, “ beasts of
themselves.”
Banfield stared at her, not understanding; for


202 STUDIES IN WIVES
the moment he was too absorbed in his own feel-
ings, in his own remorse, to take much heed of
what she was saying.
“ Well ?” he asked, “ well, Rosaleen, shall we
both forgive each other—and make a fresh be-
ginning ?”
“ Yes,” she whispered, hanging her head as
might have done a naughty child. With a gesture
of surrender, she held out her hands. “ I’m
ashamed of what I did, David—and I’ll try
to be a better wife to you than I’ve been up to
now.”
Poor Banfield ! As he took her in his arms his
heart beat with suffocating joy; almost any other
man would have felt her words, her implied prayer
for forgiveness, curiously inadequate.
She looked at him with a peculiar, earnest look,
as if trying to make up her mind to a certain
course, and then, with a quick movement, she
shook herself free and disappeared into the back
room.
He heard the sound of a drawer opening,
the fumbling of a key. A moment later she
came back and thrust a small packet into his
hand.
“ There,” she said, “ open that, read what’s
inside, and then we’ll burn it. Thank God, Rosy
will never know now the shame you put on her
mother. I’ve often thought how you would feel
reading it, if I—died—before—you—did !” and
each word was punctuated by an angry sob.
The little packet which Rosaleen had placed in
Banfield’s hand was tied with blue ribbon, and on
it was written :—“ In case of my death, to be


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR ? 203
forwarded to Mr. Banfield, The Brew House,
Market Dalling.”
It was Rosaleen’s fingers which untied the
knotted ribbon and which showed him, laid amid
her little store of jewellery,—he had noticed that
she still wore her wedding ring,—a sheet of note-
paper on which was an attestation, sworn before a
Commissioner of Oaths, that the letter which she
had written to him, the confession which had
suflEiced to procure him his divorce, had been—
false.
“ But why ‘2” he stammered. “ Rosaleen—
why ‘2”
“ Because I hated the life you made me lead at
Market Dalling ! I hate Market Dalling and the
hateful people who live there ! You wouldn’t
even let me play or sing on Sunday. And then,
your sister Kate! She never gave me a kind
word or look ! D’you think that was pleasant ‘2”
she asked fiercely,—then more gently she added,
“ But I’m ashamed, I’ve always been ashamed of
that letter, and I’d no idea, Dave, that it would
make you do what it did.”
The door behind them opened. Rosaleen turned
round; she brushed the angry tears from her
cheeks; there came over her tremulous mouth a
charming, rather shy smile.
“ Doctor,” she said quietly, “ you’ve just come
in time to see my husband. David, this is Dr.
Bendall, who was so kind to me when I was ill.”
Banfield held out his hand. . . .


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 205
greener than were those of her neighbours on
either side; and as to David and Tiddy, she now
told herself, almost speaking the words aloud in
her anxiety to make them true, that she was
pleased—very pleased—with the way everything
was going on.
Thus she was glad that the rather absurd secrecy,
so insisted on by her brother, would come to an
end to-morrow. Of course a few old friends had
been told in confidence of the engagement—but
considering that this was so, the secret had been
very well kept. It was not as if David were a
real widower; Mrs. Rigby could not help hoping
that he would be spared some of the silly remarks,
the foolish congratulations, which fall to the
ordinary engaged man. It must be bad enough
for him, so the sister told herself, to put up with
Tiddy’s sentimental raptures. Still, it was a
comfort to know that Matilda Wellow was well
aware that she was in luck’s way! How Tiddy
studied David in everything—any other man
would have been spoilt !
For the first time, a smile, not a very kind
smile, came over Mrs. Rigby’s shrewd, rather hard
face.
During the last month, Matilda had actually
given up eating potatoes and butter, because some
fool had told her that in that way she might hope
to regain the youthful slenderness of her figure!
As for David, his betrothed’s little attentions evi-
dently touched him, and no one could say that he
was not an attentive lover. Think of the ring he
had sent Tiddy, the ruby ring which had arrived
yesterday morning, and which must have cost—


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 207
the material of which Tiddy’s wedding gown was
to be made ; a white and grey stripe, a thin, gauzy
stuff not nearly substantial enough—or so Mrs.
Rigby had thought—for the purpose to which it
was destined. And then he had persuaded Matilda
to go to a new dressmaker, a Frenchwoman who
had been lady’s maid to one of his grand county
acquaintances, and who had just set up for herself
in Market Dalling. More wonderful still, David
had made a rough drawing from some old picture
that had taken his fancy of the hat he desired
Matilda to wear on her wedding day ! It was a
white hat trimmed with long grey feathers, quite
unlike Tiddy’s usual style. . . .
Suddenly looking up, Mrs. Rigby felt a thrill of
something like superstitious fear, for there, making
her way round the corner from the summer-house,
came, walking very slowly, a woman at once like
and unlike Matilda Wellow, clad in a silvery-look-
ing gown and wearing a white hat trimmed with
long grey feathers.
As the figure advanced down the path, it took
unmistakable shape and substance; here, without
a doubt, was Matilda wearing what were to be her
wedding garments, and, as Mrs. Rigby suddenly
became aware, a Matilda quite unlike her usual
homely self !
Who would have thought that simply leaving off
potatoes and butter for a month would have made
such a change ! Or was that change due to the art
of the French dressmaker ‘2 The silvery-flounced
skirt fell in graceful, billowy folds to the ground,
for Miss Wellow was not even holding up her gown,
as a more sensible woman would have done. The


208 STUDIES IN WIVES
muslin ’kerchief edged with real lace, outlined the
wearer’s still pretty shoulders, and the hat—well,
the hat was certainly becoming, especially now
that Tiddy’s cheeks were flushed—~as well they
might be, considering what a fool the woman was
making of herself !
Mrs. Rigby felt rather cross at having been so
startled ; she got up, and walked out to meet her
guest, determined not to be drawn into any praise
of the becoming hat and gown.
“ I hope David won’t keep us waiting long,” she
said tartly. “ I suppose he thought that he must
put on his dress suit,” and her expression showed
clearly that in the matter of overdressing there
was not much to choose between her brother and
the woman who was to become his wife.
“ David will not be here to-night, Kate. He
came, but he has gone away again—back to
London.”
Miss Wellow spoke in a low, collected voice, and
certain little irritating mannerisms with which she
usually punctuated her words were absent. Per-
haps it was the quiet, expressionless way in which
she made her surprising statement that caused
Mrs. Rigby, as she afterwards averred to her
husband, at once to feel that something was
wrong.
“ Gone back to London ?” the sister repeated.
“ Why, whatever has he done that for? What
business took him back to London, to-day ?” and
she looked searchineg at the other’s flushed
face.
“ Kate,” said Miss Wellow, again speaking in
the soft, emotionless voice which was so unlike her


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 209
U
own, “ I have got to tell you something which I
fear will upset you—and make you very angry
with poor David. Kate—he has gone back to
Rosaleen.”
Mrs. Rigby withdrew her eyes quickly from
Matilda Wellow’s face. She did not then realise
that the words which had just been spoken would
for ever spoil to her this fragrant, familiar corner
of her garden. All she felt now was a fierce, in-
stinctive wish to get under shelter,—to hear what-
ever shameful thing had to be heard within four
walls,—and so she put out her right hand and
pushed her visitor before her into the sitting-room.
Then, keeping her back to the window, she
forced Miss Wellow to turn round.
“ Now tell me the truth,” she commanded,
“ and Tiddy—above all, don’t let yourself be
upset, and don’t get hysterical ! I know what it
is—you and David have had some silly quarrel.
I saw from the first that you were making yourself
too cheap! He can’t go back to Rosaleen; he
divorced her—and she’s with another man. Be-
sides, David is my brother ! He wouldn’t dare do
such a wicked thing ! You have no right, Tiddy,
to accuse him of such shameful behaviour !” She
spoke with quick, savage decision.
But Miss Wellow faced her with a strange, un-
toward courage——“ I won’t have you speak so of
him—of David, I mean !” she exclaimed passion-
ately, “ you’re his sister and ought to take his
art !”
p Then her voice broke, and with a touch of her
old feebleness she added, “ If you had heard him
telling me about it, even you, Kate, who are so
14


212 STUDIES IN W IVES
know anything, but I did just think it possible,”
he said.
But his triumph, if triumph it was, was short-
lived. ‘
“ Why didn’t you tell me then ‘2 A decent
woman would never have thought of such a thing,
but men have such disgusting minds !” cried his
wife sharply. She added suspiciously, “ But how
did you learn what’s happened '2 Did David
write to you ‘2”
“ He came into the office on his way back to
the station,” said Mr. Rigby, briefly. “ And,
Kate—I’ve promised to see to things for him.
Rosy will join them ”—he gave a little cough—
“ the day after to-morrow, and they will all sail
for South Africa as soon as matters can be settled
up. It’s better so, my dear.”
Suddenly Miss Wellow bent down. Her hand
fumbled blindly among the soft, voluminous
flounces of her skirt.
“ I’ve got something here,” she said in a muffled
voice, “ that I want you to give Rosy, Matt. But
though I know it’s there, I can’t find the pocket ;
you know I had one put in because David once
said that he didn’t like a woman without a pocket
in her dress. I’ve found it—here it is !”—she took
a step forward, and standing close to her old friend,
thrust into his unresisting hand a small hard
substance. He looked down and saw it was the
ruby ring. “ You can give this to the child,” she
said breathlessly, “ I don’t want to see her again—
with love from Auntie Tiddy.”
But this was more than Mrs. Rigby could
stand.


SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR 2 213
“ Well, it’s a good thing,” she exclaimed to her
husband, “ that Tiddy takes it like that! No
man would ever have dared to treat me so ! But
as long as she doesn’t care—still, she needn’t
take David’s part against his own sister, who has
the right ”
But what right David’s sister had was never
explained, for Miss Wellow suddenly swayed
forward ; she would have fallen to the ground had
not Mr. Rigby caught her.
“ Why, she’s fainted!” he said pitifully, “ she
does care—more than you think, Kate. But she
will come round soon—too soon,” he muttered to
himself.

It was the same night, or rather the next morn-
. ing, for the dawn was beginning to make its grey
way into the bed-chamber of Mr. and Mrs. Rigby;
it threw into dim relief the large, almost square
four-poster, under the chintz-covered canopy of
which the husband and wife lay, rigid as if carved
in stone.
“ Kate,” said Matt, “ are you awake ‘2”
He could just see her head lying on the other
pillow beside him. Her still abundant hair was
loosened and gave her a look of youth. Tears had
made a furrow down her cheeks.
“ Yes,” said Mrs. Rigby, “ I am awake, Matt.
What is it you want ‘2”
“ I’m afraid, my dear, that you are very much
upset.” There were understanding, sympathy,
ay, and tenderness expressed in the way Mr.
Rigby uttered the homely word.
His wife, for the first time in their twenty-five


214 STUDIES IN WIVES
years of married life, felt a responsive thrill. For
the first time she was unfaithful to Nat Bower.
“ It’s of you I’m thinking,” she whispered.
“ I’ve been trying all night to forget David,—my'
poor little David,—but it’s terrible to me to
think that you, Matt, married into a family that
could be guilty of such shameful behaviour !”


VI
THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE


. O
.w.3lLaMm-~_ 4.- — - “-


218 STUDIES IN WIVES
his still empty plate before he broke the seal
and glanced over the typewritten sheet of note-
paper.
Snoaruas COURT, THROGMORTON Sr,
November 4th, 190-.
DEAR JAMES,
In reply to your letter of yesterday’s date,
I have been to Bedford Row and seen Greenfield,
and he thinks it probable that the decree will be
made absolute to-day; in that case you will have
received a wire before this letter reaches you.
Your affect. brother,
WM. A. TAPSTER.
In the same handwriting as the signature were
added two holograph lines: “ Glad you have the
children home again. Maud will be round to see
them soon.”
Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of
the letter, and there came upon him an instinctive
feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes travelled
down again to the postscript—“ Maud will be
round to see them soon.”
Well, he would see about that! But he did
not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling
as he then felt would have done, “ I’ll be damned
if she will !” knowing the while that Maud cer-
tainly would.
His brother’s letter, though most satisfactory as
regarded its main point, put Mr. Tapster out of
conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he rang
twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the
parlour-maid as she hurried through her duties,
and yet not daring to rebuke her for having


THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE 219
neglected to answer the bell the first time he
rang.
After a pause, he rose and turned towards the
door—but, no, he could not face the large, cheer-
less drawing-room upstairs; instead, he sat down
by the fire, and set himself to consider his future,
and, in a more hazy sense, that of his now mother-
less children.
But very soon, as generally happens to those
who devote any time to that least profitable of
occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would
have them be, but to the past—that past which
he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
memory.
Till rather more than a year ago few men of
his age—he had then been sixty, he was now
sixty-one—enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his
own point of view, a better-filled life than James
Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the
spendthrift, the adulterer,—in a word, all those
whose actions bring about their own inevitable
punishment ! He had always been self-respecting
and conscientious,—not a prig, mind you, but
inclined rather to the serious than to the fiippant
side of life, and so inclining he had found content-
ment and great material prosperity. '
Not even in those days to which he was now
looking back so regretfully had Mr. Tapster always
been perfectly content; but now the poor man,
sitting alone by his dining-room fire, only remem-
bered what had been good and pleasant in his
former state. He was aware that his brother
William—and William’s wife, Maud—both thought


THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE 221
~nn»s- .a». -..
open to him, he would never have taken action.
All would have been forgiven and forgotten, had
not William—and more especially Maud—said he
must divorce Flossy, if not for his own sake, ah !
what irony ! then for that of his children.
Of course he felt grateful to his brother William
and to his brother’s wife for all they had done for
him since that sad time. Still, in the depths of
his heart Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame, and
sometimes almost to hate, his kind brother and
sister. To them both—or rather to Maud—he
really owed the break-up of his life, for, when all
was said and done, it had to be admitted (though
Maud did not like him to remind her of it) that
Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable Lon-
don people should have known better than to take
a furnished house at a disreputable French water-
ing-place—a place full of low English !
Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-
control that he, James Tapster, could refrain from
telling Maud what he thought of her conduct in
this matter, the more so that she never seemed to
understand how greatly she—and William—had
been to blame.
On one occasion Maud had even said how sur-
prised she had been that James had cared to go
away to America, leaving his pretty young wife
alone for as long as three months. Why hadn’t
she said so at the time, then ‘2 Of course, he had
thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked
after and kept out of mischief by Maud—and
William. But he had been—in more than one
sense, alas !—bitterly deceived.
D


THE DEGREE MADE ABSOLUTE 223
back with a certain complacency to his one legal
adventure. Nothing could have been better done,
or more admirably conducted, than the way the
whole matter had been carried through. His
brother William, and William’s solicitor, Mr.
Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely.
True, there had been a few uncomfortable moments
in the witness-box, but everyone, including the
Judge, had been most kind.
As for his Counsel, the leading man who makes
a speciality of these sad affairs, not even James
Tapster himself could have put his own case in a
more delicate and moving fashion. “ A gentle-
man possessed of considerable fortune,” so had he
been justly described, and Counsel, without undue
insistence on irrelevant detail, had drawn a touch-
ing—and a true—picture of Mr. Tapster’s one
romance, his marriage eight years before to the
twenty-year-old daughter of an undischarged bank-
rupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen
Flossy’s dreadful ingratitude in its true colours
till he had heard his Counsel’s moderate comments
on the case.
This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy’s dreadful
ingratitude terribly clearly, and he wondered, not
for the first time, how his wife could have had the
heart to break up his happy home !
Why, but for him and his offer of marriage,
Flossy Ball—that had been his wife’s maiden
name—would have had to have earned her own
living! And as she had been very pretty, very
“ fetching”, she would probably have married
some good-for-nothing young fellow of her own
age lacking the means to support a wife in decent


THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE 225
however, decided on the amount named; should
I see reason to alter my mind, our arrangement
leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
allowance.”
But though this conversation had taken place
some months ago, and though Mr. Tapster still
held true to his generous resolve, as yet Flossy
had not reappeared.
Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he
only knew where she was, what she was doing,—
whether she was still with that young fellow, for
instance,-—he would think much less about her
than he did now. Only last night, when going
for a moment into the night nursery,—poor Mr.
Tapster now only enjoyed his children’s company
when he was quite sure that they were asleep,—
he had had an extraordinary, almost a physical,
impression of Flossy’s presence; he certainly had
felt a faint whiff of her favourite perfume. Flossy
had been fond of scent, and though Maud always
said that the use of scent was most'unladylike, he,
James, did not dislike it.
With sudden soreness Mr. Tapster now recalled
the one letter Flossy had written to him just
before the actual hearing of the divorce suit.
It had been a wild, oddly-worded appeal to him
to take her back, not—as Maud had at once per-
ceived on reading the letter—because she was
sorry for the terrible thing she had done, but
simply because she was beginning to hanker after
her children. Maud had described the letter as
shameless and unwomanly in the extreme; and
even William, who had never judged his pretty
young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had
15


234- STUDIES IN WIVES
young once ; for the matter of that he didn’t feel
old—not to say old—even now. But he had
always been perfectly sane—she knew that well
enough ! As for her calling herself mad, that was
a mere figure of speech. Of course, in a sense
she had been mad to do what she had done,
and he was glad that she now understood this,
but her saying so simply begged the Whole
question, and left him no wiser than he was
before.
There was a long, tense silence between them.
Then Mr. Tapster slowly rose from his armchair
and faced his wife.
“ I see,” he said, “ that William was right. I
mean, I suppose I may take it that that young
fellow has gone and left you ‘2”
“ Yes,” she said, with a curious indifference,
“ he has gone and left me. His father made
him take a job out in Brazil just after the case
was through.”
“ And what have you been doing since then ‘2”
asked Mr. Tapster suspiciously. “ How have you
been living ‘2”
“ His father gives me a pound a week.” Flossy
still spoke with that curious indifference. “ I
tried to get something to do,”—she hesitated,
then offered the lame explanation, “just to have
something to do, for I’ve been awfully lonely and
miserable, James. But I don’t seem to be able
to get anything.”
“ If you had written to Mr. Greenfield or to
William, they would have told you that I had
arranged for you to have an allowance,” he said,
and then again he fell into silence. . . .


THE DEGREE MADE ABSOLUTE 235
Mr. Tapster was seeing a vision of himself
magnanimous, forgiving, —taking the peccant
Flossy back to his heart, and becoming once
more, in a material sense, comfortable! If he
acceded to her wish, if he made up his mind to
forgive her, he would have to begin life all over
again, move away from Cumberland Crescent to
some distant place where the story was not
known,——perhaps to Clapham, where he had spent
his boyhood.
But how about Maud ? How about William ?
How about the very considerable expense to
which he had been put in connection with the
divorce proceedings ? Was all that money to be
wasted ‘2
Mr. Tapster suddenly saw the whole of his little
world rising up in judgment, smiling pityingly at
his folly and weakness. During the whole of a
long and of what had been, till this last year,
a very prosperous life, Mr. Tapster had always
steered his safe course by what may be called the
compass of public opinion, and now, when navigat-
ing an unknown sea, he could not afford to throw
that compass overboard, so——
“ No,” he said. “ No, Flossy. It would not
be right for me to take you back. It wouldn’t do.”
“Wouldn’t it?” she asked piteously. “Oh!
James, don’t say no like that, all at once ! People
do forgive each other—sometimes. I don’t ask
you to be as kind to me as you were before;
only to let me come home and see after the
children !”
But Mr. Tapster shook his head. The children !
Always the children! He noticed, even now,


238 STUDIES IN WIVES
But still, new that it was over, he was glad the
interview had taken place, for henceforth—or so
at least Mr. Tapster believed—the Flossy of the
past, the bright, pretty, prosperous Flossy of
whom he had been so proud, would cease to haunt
him.
He remembered with a feeling of relief that she
was going to his brother William; of course she
would then, among greater renunciations, be com-
pelled to return the two keys, for they—that is,
his brother and himself—would have her in their
power. They would not behave unkindly to her
—far from it ; in fact, they would arrange for her
to live with some quiet, religious lady in a country
town a few hours from London. Mr. Tapster had
not evolved this scheme for himself; it had been
done in a similar case—one of those cases which,
in the long ago, when he was still a single man,
had aroused his pitying contempt for husbands
who allow themselves to be deceived.
Then Mr. Tapster began going over each incident
of the strange little interview, for he wanted to
tell his brother William exactly what had taken
lace.
p His conscience was quite clear except with
regard to one matter, and that, after all, needn’t
be mentioned to William. He felt rather ashamed
of having asked the question which had pro-
voked so wild an answer—so unexpected a
retort.
Mad ? What had Flossy meant by asking him
if he had ever been mad 2 No one had ever used
the word in connection with James Tapster before
—save once. Oddly enough, that occasion also


THE DEGREE MADE ABSOLUTE 241
thing very exciting must be going on just opposite
his front door—that is, close to the Enclosure
railings.
Mr. Tapster got up from his chair, and walked in
a leisurely way to the wide window ; he drew aside
the thick red rep curtains, and lifted a corner of
the blind.
Then, through the slightly foggy haze, he saw
that which greatly surprised him and made him
feel actively indignant, for a string of people,
men, women, and boys, were hurrying into the
Enclosure garden—that sacred place set apart for
the exclusive use of the nobility and gentry who
lived in Cumberland Crescent and the adjoining
terraces.
What an abominable thing! Why, the grass
would all be trampled down; and these dirty
people, these slum folk who seem to spring out
of the earth when anything of a disagreeable or
shameful nature is taking place—a fire, for instance,
or a brawl—might easily bring infectious diseases
on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters
and their like run about playing their innocent
games. Some careless person had evidently left
the gate unlocked, and the fight, or whatever
it was, must be taking place inside the Enclo-
sure!
Had this been an ordinary night, Mr. Tapster
would have gone back to the fire, but now the
need for human companionship was so strong
upon him that he stayed at the window, and
went on staring at the curious shadow-filled scene.
Soon he saw with satisfaction that something
like order was to be restored. A stalwart police-
16


242 STUDIES IN WIVES
man—in fact, his friend the officer who was
always at point duty some yards from his house—
now stood at the gate of the Enclosure, forbidding
any further passing through.
Mr. Tapster tried in vain to see what was going
on inside the railings, but everything beyond the
brightly-lighted road was wrapped in grey dark-
ness. Someone suddenly held up high a flaming
torch, and the watcher at the window saw that
the shadowy crowd which had managed to force
its way into the Park hung together, like bees
swarming, on the further lawn through which
flowed the ornamental water. With the gleaming
of the yellow, wavering light there had fallen a
sudden hush and silence, and Mr. Tapster won-
dered uneasily what those people were doing there,
and what it was they were pressing forward so
eagerly to see.
Then he realised that it must have been a fight
after all, for now the crowd was parting in two,
and down the lane so formed Mr. Tapster saw
coming towards the gate, and so in a sense towards
himself, a rather pitiful little procession. Some-
one had evidently been injured, and that seriously,
for four men, bearing a sheep-hurdle on which
lay a huddled mass, were walking slowly towards
the guarded gate, and he heard distinctly the
grufi’iy uttered words : “ Stand back, please—back
there ! We’re going to cross the road.”
The now large crowd suddenly swayed forward;
indeed, to Mr. Tapster’s astonished eyes, they
seemed to be actually making a rush for his
house; and a moment later they were pressing
round his area railings.


244- STUDIES IN WIVES
side ! In the hall he saw that it was a policeman
—in fact, the officer on point duty close by—
who had opened his front door, and apparently
with a latch-key.
In the moment that elapsed before the constable
spoke, Mr. Tapster’s mind had had time to formu-
late a new theory. How strange he had never
heard that the police have means of access to
every house on their beat! The fact surprised
but did not alarm him, for our hero was one of
the great army of law-abiding citizens in whose
eyes a policeman is no human being, subject to
the same laws, the same temptations and pas-
sions which affiict ordinary humanity. No, no; in
Mr. Tapster’s eyes a constable could do no wrong,
although he might occasionally stretch a point to
oblige such a man as was Mr. Tapster himself.
But what was the constable saying—speaking,
as constables always do to the Mr. Tapsters of this
world, in respectful and subdued tones ?
“ Can I just come in and speak to you, sir?
There’s been a sad accident—your lady fallen in
the water; we found these keys in her pocket,
and then someone said she was Mrs. Tapster,”—
and the policeman held out the two keys which
had played a not unimportant part in Mr. Tapster’s
interview with Flossy.
“ A man on the bridge saw her go in,” went on
the policeman, “ so she wasn’t in the water long
—something like a quarter of an hour—for we
soon found her. I suppose you would like her
taken upstairs, sir 2”
“ No, no,” stammered Mr. Tapster, “ not up-
stairs. The children are upstairs.”


THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE 245
Mr. Tapster’s round, prominent eyes were
shadowed with a great horror and an even greater
surprise. He stood staring at the man before
him, his hands clasped in a wholly unconscious
gesture of supplication.
The constable gradually edged himself back-
wards into the dining-room. Realising that he
must take on himself the onus of decision, he
gave a quiet look round.
“ If that’s the case,” he said firmly, “ we had
better bring her in here. That sofa that you
have there, sir, will do nicely, for her to be laid
upon while they try to bring her round. We’ve
got a doctor already—”
Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much
bewildered to propose any other plan ; and then
he turned—tumed to see his hall invaded by a
strange and sinister quartette. It was composed
of two policemen and of two of those loafers of
whom he so greatly disapproved; they were
carrying a hurdle, from which Mr. Tapster quickly
averted his eyes.
But though he was able to shut out the sight
he feared to see, he could not prevent himself from
hearing certain sounds—those, for instance, made
by the two loafers, who breathed with osten-
tatious difficulty as if to show they were unaccus-
tomed to hearing even so comparatively light a
burden as Flossy drowned.
There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay ;
the doorway of the dining-room was found to be
floclil narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left in the
a .
An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious


THE DEGREE MADE ABSOLUTE 247
The doctor raised himself and straightened his
cramped shoulders and tired arms. With a look
of great concern on his face he approached the
bereaved husband.
“ I’m afraid it’s no good,” he said ; “ the shock
of the plunge in the cold water probably killed her.
She was evidently in poor health, and—and ill
nourished. But, of course, we shall go on for
some time longer, and——”
But whatever he had meant to say remained
unspoken, for a telegraph boy, with the impudence
natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and
through the crowded room.
“ James Tapster, Esquire ?” he cried in a high,
childish treble.
The master of the house held out his hand
mechanically. He took the bqu envelope and
stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to
perceive that some fool had apparently imagined
CunIberland Crescent to be in South London ;
before his eyes swam the line, “ Delayed in trans-
mission.” Then, opening the envelope, he saw
the message for which he had now been waiting
so eagerly for some days, but it was with indiffer-
ence that he read the words :
“ The Decree has been made Absolute.”
THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD