The Marriage of Elinor

There was a little fragrance and air of the visitor still in the room, a little disturbance of the usual arrangements, a surreptitious, quite unjustifiable look as of pleasure in Elinor's eyes, which were less expanded, and if as liquid as ever, more softly bright than before. Something white actually lay on the sofa, a small garment which Mrs. Dennistoun whisked away. They were conscious of John's critical eye upon them, and received him with a warmth of conciliatory welcome which betrayed that consciousness. Mrs. Dennistoun drew a chair for him to the other side of the fire. She took her own place in the middle at the table with a large piece of white knitting, to which she gave her whole attention, and thus the deliberation began.

"Elinor wants to know, John, what you think we ought to do – to make quite sure – that there will be no risk, about the baby."

"I must know more of the details of the question before I can give any advice," said John.

"John," said Elinor, raising herself in her chair, "here are all the details that are necessary. I have come away. I have come home, finding that life was impossible there. That is the whole matter. It may be, probably it is, my own fault. It is simply that life became impossible. You know you said that I was not one to endure, to put up with things. I scoffed at you then, for I did not expect to have anything to put up with; but you were quite right, and life had become impossible – that is all there is any need to say."

"To me, yes," said John, "but not enough, Elinor, if it ever has to come within the reach of the law."

"But why should it come within the reach of the law? You, John, you are a lawyer; you know the rights of everything. I thought you might have arranged it all. Couldn't you try to make a kind of a bargain? What bargain? Oh, am I a lawyer, do I know? But you, John, who have it all at your fingers' ends, who know what can be done and what can't be done, and the rights that one has and that another has! Dear John! if you were to try, don't you think that you could settle it all, simply as between people who don't want any exposure, any struggle, but only to be quiet and to be let alone?"

"Elinor, I don't know what I could do with so little information as I have. To know that you found your life impossible is enough for me. But you know most people are right in their own eyes. If we have some one opposed to us who thinks, for instance, that the fault was yours?"

"Well," she cried, eagerly, "I am willing to accept that: say that the fault was mine! You could confirm it, that it was likely to be mine. You could tell them what an impatient person I was, and that you said I was not one to try an experiment, for I never, never could put up with anything. John, you could be a witness as well as an advocate. You could prove that you always expected – and that I am quite, quite willing to allow that it was I – "

"Elinor, if I could only make you understand what I mean! I am told that I am not to mention any names?"

"No, no names, no names! What is the good? We both know very well what we mean."

"But I don't know very well what you mean. Don't you see that if it is your fault – if the other party is innocent – there can be no reason in the world why he should consent to renounce his rights. It is not a mere matter of feeling. There is right in it one way or another – either on your side or else on the other side; and if it is on the other side, why should a man give up what belongs to him, why should he renounce what is – most dear to him?"

"Oh, John, John, John!" she made this appeal and outcry, clasping her hands together with a mixture of supplication and impatience. Then turning to her mother – "Oh, tell him," she cried, "tell him!" – always clasping those impatient yet beseeching hands.

"You see, John," said Mrs. Dennistoun, "Elinor knows that the right is on her side: but she will consent to say nothing about it to any one – to give herself out as the offender rather – that is to say, as an ill-disciplined person that cannot put up with anything, as you seem to have said."

John laughed with vexation, yet a kind of amusement. "I never said it nor thought it: still if it pleases her to think so – The wiser thing if this separation is final – "

"If it is final!" Elinor cried. She raised herself up again in her chair, and contemplated the unfortunate John with a sort of tragic superiority. "Do you think that of me," she said, "that I would take such a step as this and that it should not be final? Is dying final? Could one do such a thing as this and change?"

"Such things have been done," said John. "Elinor, forgive me. I must say it – it is all your life that is in the balance, and another life. There is this infant to be struggled over, perhaps rent in two by those who should have united to take care of him – and it's a boy, I hear. There's his name and his after-life to think of – a child without a father, perhaps the heir of a family to which he will not belong. Elinor – tell her, aunt, you understand: is it my wish to hand her back to – to – No, I'll speak no names. But you know I disliked it always, opposed it always. It is not out of any favour to – to the other side. But she ought to take all these things into account. Her own position, and the position in the future of the child – "

Elinor had crushed her fan with her hands, and Mrs. Dennistoun let the knitting with which she had gone on in spite of all fall at last in her lap. There was a little pause. John Tatham's voice itself had began to falter, or rather swelled in sound as when a stream swells in flood.

"I do not go into the question about women and what they ought to put up with," said John, resuming. "There's many things that law can do nothing for – and nature in many ways makes it harder for women, I acknowledge. We cannot change that. Think what her position will be – neither a wife nor with the freedom of a widow; and the boy, bearing the name of one he must almost be taught to think badly of – for one of them must be in the wrong – "

"He shall never, never hear that name; he shall know nothing, he shall be free of every bond; his mind shall never be cramped or twisted or troubled by any – man – if I live."

This Elinor said, lifting her pale face from her hands with eyes that flashed and shone with a blaze of excitement and weakness.

"There already," said John, "is a tremendous condition – if you live! Who can make sure that they will live? We must all die – some sooner, some later – and you wearing yourself out with excitement, that never were strong; you exposing your heart, the weakest organ – "

"John," said Mrs. Dennistoun, grasping him by the arm, "you are talking nonsense, you don't know what you are saying. My darling! she was never weak nor had a feeble heart, nor – anything! She will live to bring up his children, her baby's children, upon her knees."

"And what would it matter?" said Elinor – looking at him with clear eyes, from which the tears had disappeared in the shock of this unlooked-for suggestion – "suppose I have no more strength than that, suppose I were to die? you shall be his guardian, John, bring him up a good man; and his Heavenly Father will take care of him. I am not afraid."

A man had better not deal with such subjects between two women. What with Mrs. Dennistoun's indignant protest and Elinor's lofty submission, John was at his wits' end. "I did not mean to carry things to such a bitter end as that," he said. "You want to force me into a corner and make me say things I never meant. The question is serious enough without that."

There was again a little pause, and then Elinor, with one of those changes which are so perplexing to sober-minded people, suddenly turned to him, holding out both her hands.

"John – we'll leave that in God's hands whatever is to happen to me. But in the meantime, while I am living – and perhaps my life depends upon being quiet and having a little peace and rest. It is not that I care very much for my life," said Elinor, with that clear, open-eyed look, like the sky after rain – "I am shipwrecked, John, as you say – but my mother does, and it's of – some – consequence – to baby; and if it depends upon whether I am left alone, you are too good a friend to leave me in the lurch. And you said – one night – whatever happened I was to send for you."

John sprang up from his seat, dropping the hands which he had taken into his own. She was like Queen Katherine, "about to weep," and her breast strained with the sobbing effort to keep it down.

"For God's sake," he cried, "don't play upon our hearts like this! I will do anything – everything – whatever you choose to tell me. Aunt, don't let her cry, don't let her go on like that. Why, good heavens!" he cried, bursting himself into a kind of big sob, "won't it be bad for that little brat of a baby or something if she keeps going on in this way?"

Thus John Tatham surrendered at discretion. What could he do more? A man cannot be played upon like an instrument without giving out sounds of which he will, perhaps, be ashamed. And this woman appealing to him – this girl – looking like the little Elinor he remembered, younger and softer in her weakness and trouble than she had been in her beauty and pride – was the creature after all, though she would never know it, whom he loved best in the world. He had wanted to save her, in the one worldly way of saving her, from open shipwreck, for her own sake, against every prejudice and prepossession of his mind. But if she would not have that, why it was his business to save her as she wished, to do for her whatever she wanted; to act as her agent, her champion, whatever she pleased.

He was sent away presently, and accepted his dismissal with thankfulness, to smoke his cigar. This is one amusing thing in a feminine household. A man is supposed to want all manner of little indulgences and not to be able to do without them. He is carefully left alone over "his wine" – the aforesaid glass of claret; and ways and means are provided for him to smoke his cigar, whether he wishes it or not. He had often laughed at these regulations of his careful relatives, but he was rather glad of them to-night. "I am going to get Elinor to bed," said Mrs. Dennistoun. "It has, perhaps, been a little too much for her: but when you have finished your cigar, John, if you will come back to the drawing-room for a few minutes you will find me here."

John did not smoke any cigar. It is all very well to be soothed and consoled by tobacco in your own room, at your own ease: but when you are put into a lady's dining-room, where everything is nice, and where the curtains will probably smell of smoke next morning: and when your mind is exercised beyond even the power of the body to keep still, that is not a time to enjoy such calm and composing delights. But he walked about the room in which he was shut up like a wild beast in his cage, sometimes with long strides from wall to wall, sometimes going round, with that abstract trick of his, staring at the pictures, as if he did not know every picture in the place by heart. He forgot that he was to go back to the drawing-room again after Elinor had been taken to bed, and it was only after having waited for him a long time that Mrs. Dennistoun came, almost timidly, knocking at her own dining-room door, afraid to disturb her visitor in the evening rites which she believed in so devoutly. She did go in, however, and they stood together over the fire for a few minutes, he staring down upon the glow at his feet, she contemplating fitfully, unconsciously, her own pale face and his in the dim mirror on the mantelpiece. They talked in low tones about Elinor and her health, and her determination which nothing would change.

"Of course I will do it," said John; "anything – whatever she may require of me – there are no two words about that. There is only one thing: I will not compromise her by taking any initiative. Let us wait and see what they are going to do – "

"But, John, might it not be better to disarm him by making overtures? anything, I would do anything if he would but let her remain unmolested – and the baby."

"Do you mean money?" he said.

Mrs. Dennistoun gave him an abashed look, deprecatory and wistful, but did not make any reply.

"Phil Compton is a cad, and a brute, and a scamp of the first water," said John, glad of some way to get rid of his excitement; "but I do not think that even he would sell his wife and his child for money. I wouldn't do him so much discredit as that."

"Oh, I beg your pardon, John," Mrs. Dennistoun said.

CHAPTER XXVI

John left the Cottage next morning with the full conduct of the affairs of the family placed in his hands. The ladies were both a little doubtful if his plan was the best – they were still frightened for what might happen, and kept up a watch, as John perceived, fearing every step that approached, trembling at every shadow. They remembered many stories, such as rush to the minds of persons in trouble, of similar cases, of the machinations of the bad father whose only object was to overcome and break down his wife, and who stole his child away to let it languish and die. There are some circumstances in which people forget all the shades of character, and take it for granted that a man who can go wrong in one matter will act like a very demon in all. This was doubly strong in Mrs. Dennistoun, a woman full of toleration and experience; but the issues were so momentous to her, and the possible results so terrible, that she lost her accustomed good sense. It was more natural, perhaps, that Elinor, who was weak in health and still full of the arbitrariness of youth, should entertain this fear – without considering that Phil was the very last man in the world to burden himself with an infant of the most helpless age – which seemed to John an almost quite unreasonable one. Almost – for, of course, he too was compelled to allow, when driven into a corner, that there was nothing that an exasperated man might not do. Elinor had come down early to see her cousin before he left the house, bringing with her in her arms the little bundle of muslin and flannel upon the safety of which her very life seemed to depend. John looked at it, and at the small pink face and unconscious flickering hands that formed the small centre to all those wrappings, with a curious mixture of pity and repugnance. It was like any other blind new-born kitten or puppy, he thought, but not so amusing – no, it was not blind, to be sure. At one moment, without any warning, it suddenly opened a pair of eyes, which by a lively exercise of fancy might be supposed like Elinor's, and seemed to look him in the face, which startled him very much, with a curious notification of the fact that the thing was not a kitten or a puppy. But then a little quiver came over the small countenance, and the attendant said it was "the wind." Perhaps the opening of the eyes was the wind too, or some other automatic effect. He would not hold out his finger to be clasped tight by the little flickering fist, as Elinor would have had him. He would none of those follies; he turned away from it not to allow himself to be moved by the effect, quite a meretricious one, of the baby in the young mother's arms. That was all poetry, sentiment, the trick of the painter, who had found the combination beautiful. Such ideas belonged, indeed, to the conventional-sacred, and he had never felt any profane resistance of mind against the San Sisto picture or any of its kind. But Phil Compton's brat was a very different thing. What did it matter what became of it? If it were not for Elinor's perverse feeling on the subject, and that perfectly imbecile prostration of her mother, a sensible woman who ought to have known better, before the little creature, he would himself have been rather grateful to Phil Compton for taking it away. But when he saw the look of terror upon Elinor's face when an unexpected step came to the door, when he saw her turn and fly, wrapping the child in her arms, on her very heart as it seemed, bending over it, covering it so that it disappeared altogether in her embrace, John's heart was a little touched. It was only a hawking tramp with pins and needles, who came by mistake to the hall door, but her panic and anguish of alarm were a spectacle which he could not get out of his eyes.

"You see, she never feels safe for a moment. It will be hard to persuade her that that man, though I've seen him about the roads for years, is not an emissary – or a spy – to find out if she is here."

"I am sure it is quite an unnecessary panic," said John. "In the first place, Phil Compton's the last man to burden himself with a child; in the second, he's not a brute nor a monster."

"You called him a brute last night, John."

"I did not mean in that way. I don't mean to stand by any rash word that may be forced from me in a moment of irritation. Aunt, get her to give over that. She'll torture herself to death for nothing. He'll not try to take the child away – not just now, at all events, not while it is a mere – Bring her to her senses on that point. You surely can do that?"

"If I was quite sure of being in my own," Mrs. Dennistoun said, with a forlorn smile. "I am as much frightened as she is, John. And, remember, if there is anything to be done – anything – "

"There is nothing but a little common sense wanted," said John. But as he drove away from the door, and saw the hawker with the needles still about, the ladies had so infected him that it was all he could do to restrain an inclination to take the vagrant by the collar and throw him down the combe.

"Who's that fellow hanging about?" he said to Pearson, who was driving him; "and what does he want here?"

"Bless you, sir! that's Joe," Pearson said. "He's after no harm. He's honest enough as long as there ain't nothing much in his way; and he's waiting for the pieces as cook gives him once a week when he comes his rounds. There's no harm in poor Joe."

"I suppose not, since you say so," said John; "but you know the ladies are rather nervous, Pearson. You must keep a look-out that no suspicious-looking person hangs about the house."

"Bless us! Mr. John," said Pearson, "what are they nervous about? – the baby? But nobody wants to steal a baby, bless your soul!"

"I quite agree with you," said John, much relieved (though he considered Pearson an old fool, in a general way) to have his own opinion confirmed. "But, all the same, I wish you would be doubly particular not to admit anybody you don't know; and if any man should appear to bother them send for me on the moment. Do you hear?"

"What do you call any man, sir?" said Pearson, smartly. He had ideas of his own, though he might be a fool.

"I mean what I say," said John, more sharply still. "Any one that molests or alarms them. Send me off a telegram at once – 'You're wanted!' That will be quite enough. But don't go with it to the office yourself; send somebody – there's always your boy about the place – and keep about like a dragon yourself."

"I'll do my best, sir," said Pearson, "though I don't know what a dragon is, except it's the one in the Bible; and that's not a thing anybody would want about the place."

It was a comfort to John, after all his troubles, to be able to laugh, which he did with a heartiness which surprised Pearson, who was quite unaware that he had made any joke.

These fears, however, which were imposed upon him by the contagion of the terrors of the others, soon passed from John's mind. He was convinced that Phil Compton would take no such step; and that, however much he might wish his wife to return, the possession of the baby was not a thing which he would struggle over. It cannot be denied, however, that he was anxious, and eagerly inspected his letters in the morning, and looked out for telegrams during the day. Fortunately, however, no evil tidings came. Mrs. Dennistoun reported unbroken peace in the Cottage and increasing strength on the part of Elinor; and, in a parenthesis with a sort of apology, of the baby. Nobody had come near them to trouble them. Elinor had received no letters. The tie between her and her husband seemed to be cut as with a knife. "We cannot of course," she said, "expect this tranquillity to last."

And it came to be a very curious thought with John, as week after week passed, whether it was to last – whether Phil Compton, who had never been supposed wanting in courage, intended to let his wife and child drop off from him as if they had never been. This seemed a thing impossible to conceive: but John said to himself with much internal contempt that he knew nothing of the workings of the mind of such a man, and that it might for aught he knew be a common incident in life with the Phil Comptons thus to shake off their belongings when they got tired of them. The fool! the booby! to get tired of Elinor! That rumour which flies about the world so strangely and communicates information about everybody to the vacant ear, to be retailed to those whom it may concern, provided him, as the days went by, with many particulars which he had not been able to obtain from Elinor. Phil, it appeared, had gone to Glenorban – the great house to which he had been invited – alone, with an excuse for his wife, whose state of health was not appropriate to a large party, and had stayed there spending Christmas with a brilliant houseful of guests, among whom was the American lady who had captivated him. Phil had paid one visit to the lodge to see Elinor, by her mother's summons, at the crisis of her illness, but had not hesitated to go away again when informed that the crisis was over. Mrs. Dennistoun never told what had passed between them on that occasion, but the gossips of the club were credibly informed that she had bullied and stormed at Phil, after the fashion of mothers-in-law, till she had driven him away. Upon which he had returned to his party and flirted with Mrs. Harris more than ever. John discovered also that the party having dispersed some time ago, Phil had gone abroad. Whether in ignorance of his wife's flight or not he could not discover; but it was almost impossible to believe that he would have gone to Monte Carlo without finding out something about Elinor – how and where she was. But whether this was the cause of his utter silence, or whether it was the habit of men of his class to treat such tremendous incidents in domestic life with levity, John Tatham could not make out. He was congratulating himself, however, upon keeping perfectly quiet, and leaving the conduct of the matter to the other party, when the silence was disturbed in what seemed to him the most curious way.

One afternoon when he returned from the court he was aware, when he entered the outer office in which his clerk abode, of what he described afterwards as a smell fit to knock you down. It would have been described more appropriately in a French novel as the special perfume, subtle and exquisite, by which a beautiful woman may be recognised wherever she goes. It was, indeed, neither more nor less than the particular scent used by Lady Mariamne, who came forward with a sweep and rustle of her draperies, and the most ingratiating of her smiles.

"It appears to be fated that I am to wait for you," she said. "How do you do, Mr. Tatham? Take me out of this horrible dirty place. I am quite sure you have some nice rooms in there." She pointed as she spoke to the inner door, and moved towards it with the air of a person who knew where she was going, and was fully purposed to be admitted. John said afterwards, that to think of this woman's abominable scent being left in his room in which he lived (though he also received his clients in it) was almost more than he could bear. But, in the meantime, he could do nothing but open the door to her, and offer her his most comfortable chair.

She seated herself with all those little tricks of movement which are also part of the stock-in-trade of the pretty woman. Lady Mariamne's prettiness was not of a kind which had the slightest effect upon John, but still it was a kind which received credit in society, being the product of a great deal of pains and care and exquisite arrangement and combination. She threw her fur cloak back a little, arranged the strings of her bonnet under her chin, which threw up the daintiness and rosiness of a complexion about which there were many questions among her closest friends. She shook up, with what had often been commented upon as the prettiest gesture, the bracelets from her wrists. She arranged the veil, which just came over the tip of her delicate nose, she put out her foot as if searching for a footstool – which John made haste to supply, though he remained unaffected otherwise by all these pretty preliminaries.