Demos

Adela’s position would not suffer the risk of ever so slight a difference between herself and her husband. She had come to fear him, and now there was growing in her a yet graver fear of herself.

The condition of her health favoured remissness and postponement. An hour of mental agitation left her with headache and a sense of bodily feebleness. Emma Vine she felt in the end obliged to dismiss from her thoughts; the difficulty concerning Alice she put off from day to day.

The second week of her visit was just ending, and the return to Wanley was in view, when, on entering the drawing-room in the afternoon, she found Hubert Eldon sitting there with Mrs. Westlake. If it had been possible to draw back her foot and escape unnoticed! But she was observed; Hubert had already risen. Adela fancied that Stella was closely observing her; it was not so in reality, but the persuasion wrung her heart to courage. Hubert, who did make narrow observance of her face, was struck with the cold dignity of her smile. In speaking to him she was much less friendly than at the Boscobels’. He thought he understood, and was in a measure right. A casual meeting in the world was one thing; a visit which might be supposed half intended to herself called for another demeanour. He addressed a few remarks to her, then pursued his conversation with Mrs. Westlake. Adela had time to consider his way of speaking; it was entirely natural, that of a polished man who has the habit of society, and takes pleasure in it. With utter inconsistency she felt pain that he could be so at his ease in her presence. In all likelihood he had come with no other end save that of continuing his acquaintance with Mrs. Westlake. As she listened to his voice, once more an inexplicable and uncontrollable mood possessed her—a mood of petulance, of impatience with him and with herself; with him for almost ignoring her presence, with herself for the distant way in which she had met him. An insensate rebellion against circumstances encouraged her to feel hurt; by a mystery of the mind intervening time was cancelled, and it seemed unnatural, hard to bear, that Hubert should by preference address another than herself. An impulse similar to that which had forced her to speak his name in conversation with Stella now constrained her to break silence, to say something which would require a reply. Her feeling became a sort of self-pity; he regarded her as beneath his notice, he wished her to see that his indifference was absolute; why should he treat her so cruelly?

She added a few words to a remark Mrs. Westlake made, and, the moment she had spoken, was sensible that her tone had been strangely impulsive. Stella glanced at her. Hubert, too, turned his eyes, smiled, and made some reply; she had no understanding of what he said. Had not force failed her she would have risen and left the room. Her heart sank in yet crueller humiliation; she believed there were tears in her eyes, yet had no power to check them. He was still addressing Mrs. Westlake; herself he deemed incapable of appreciating what he said. Perhaps he even—the thought made clanging in her ears, like a rude bell—perhaps he even regarded her as a social inferior since her marriage. It was almost hysteria, to such a pitch of unreason was she wrought. Her second self looked on, anguished, helpless. The voices in the room grew distant and confused.

Then the door was opened and the servant announced—

‘Mr. Mutimer.’

It saved her. She saw her husband enter, and an ice-cold breath made frigid her throbbing veins. She fixed her eyes upon him, and could not remove them; they followed him from the door to where Stella stood to receive him. She saw that he almost paused on recognising Eldon, that his brows contracted, that involuntarily he looked at her.

‘You know Mr. Eldon,’ Stella said, perhaps in not quite her ordinary voice, for the meeting could in no case be a very happy one.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Mutimer, scarcely looking at Hubert, and making an idle effort at a bow.

Hubert did not reseat himself. He took leave of Stella cordially; to Adela he inclined himself at respectful distance.

Mrs. Westlake supplied conversation. Adela, leaving her former chair, took a seat by her friend’s side, but could not as yet trust her voice. Presently her husband addressed her; it was for the first time; he had not even given his hand.

‘Alice is very anxious that you should dine with her before you go home. Do you think Mrs. Westlake could spare you this evening?’

And, on Stella’s looking an inquiry, he added:

‘My sister, Mrs. Rodman. I don’t think you know her?’

Adela had no choice but to procure her hostess’s assent to this arrangement.

‘I’ll call for you at seven o’clock,’ Mutimer said.

Adela knew that he was commanding himself; his tone was not quite discourteous, but he had none of the genial satisfaction which he ordinarily showed in the company of refined people. She attributed his displeasure to her neglect of Alice. But it did not affect her as it had been wont to; she was disposed to resent it.

The time between his departure and seven o’clock she spent by herself, unoccupied, sitting as if tired. She put off the necessary changing of garments till there was scarcely time for it. When at length she was summoned she went down with flushed face.

‘I feel as if I were going to have a fever,’ she said to Stella in the drawing-room. She could not help uttering the words, but laughed immediately.

‘Your hand is really very hot,’ Stella replied.

Mutimer had a cab at the door, and was waiting in the hall.

‘You’re a long time,’ was his greeting, with more impatience than he had ever used to her.

When they were together in the hansom:

‘Why did you refuse Alice’s invitation before?’ he asked with displeasure.

‘I didn’t think she really wished me to accept it.’

She spoke without misgiving, still resenting his manner.

‘Didn’t think? Why, what do you mean?’

She made no reply.

‘You didn’t ask her to call, either?’

‘I ought to have done so. I am very sorry to have neglected it.’

He looked at her with surprise which was very like a sneer, and kept silence till they reached the house.

One of the ladies whom Adela had already met, and a gentleman styled Captain something, were guests at dinner. Alice received her sister-in-law with evident pleasure, though not perhaps that of pure hospitableness.

‘I do hope it won’t be too much for you,’ she said. ‘Pray leave as soon as you feel you ought to. I should never forgive myself if you took a cold or anything of the kind.’

Really, Alice had supplied herself with most becoming phrases. The novels had done much; and then she had been living in society. At dinner she laughed rather too loud, it might be, and was too much given to addressing her husband as ‘Willis;’ but her undeniable prettiness in low-necked evening dress condoned what was amiss in manner. Mr. Rodman looked too gentlemanly; he reminded one of a hero of polite melodrama on the English-French stage. The Captain talked stock-exchange, and was continually inquiring about some one or other, ‘Did he drop much?’

Mutimer was staying at the house over-night. After dinner he spoke aside with Adela.

‘I suppose you go back to-morrow?’

‘Yes, I meant to.’

‘We may as well go together, then. I’ll call for you at two o’clock.’

He considered, and changed the hour.

‘No, I’ll come at ten. I want you to go with me to buy some things. Then we’ll have lunch here.’

‘And go back for my luggage?’

‘We’ll take it away at ten o’clock and leave it at the station. I suppose you can be ready?’

‘Yes, I can be ready,’ Adela answered mechanically.

He drove back with her to Avenue Road in the Rodmans’ carriage, and left her at the door.

Mr. Westlake was expected home to-night, but had telegraphed to say that he would return in the morning. Stella had spent the evening alone; Adela found her in the boudoir with a single lamp, reading.

‘Are you still feverish?’ Stella asked, putting to her cheek the ungloved hand.

‘I think not—I can’t say.’

Stella waited to hear something about the evening, but Adela broke the silence to say:

‘I must leave at ten in the morning. My husband will call for me.’

‘So early?’

‘Yes.’

There was silence again.

‘Will you come and see me before long, Stella?’

‘I will,’ was the gentle reply.

‘Thank you. I shall look forward to it very much.’

Then Adela said good-night, speaking more cheerfully.

In her bedroom she sat as before dinner. The fever had subsided during the past two hours, but now it crept into her blood again, insidious, tingling. And with it came so black a phantom of despair that Adela closed her eyes shudderingly, lay back as one lifeless, and wished that it were possible by the will alone to yield the breath and cease. The night pulsed about her, beat regularly like a great clock, and its pulsing smote upon her brain.

To-morrow she must follow her husband, who would come to lead her home. Home? what home had she? What home would she ever have but a grave in the grassy churchyard of Wanley? Why did death spare her when it took the life which panted but for a moment on her bosom?

She must leave Stella and go back to her duties at the Manor; must teach the children of New Wanley; must love, honour, obey her husband. Returning from Exmouth, she was glad to see her house again; now she had rather a thousand times die than go back. Horror shook her like a palsy; all that she had borne for eighteen months seemed accumulated upon her now, waited for her there at Wanley to be endured again. Oh! where was the maiden whiteness of her soul? What malignant fate had robbed her for ever of innocence and peace?

Was this fever or madness? She rose and flung her arms against a hideous form which was about to seize her. It would not vanish, it pressed upon her. She cried, fled to the door, escaped, and called Stella’s name aloud.

A door near her own opened, and Stella appeared. Adela clung to her, and was drawn into the room. Those eyes of infinite pity gazing into her own availed to calm her.

‘Shall I send for some one?’ Stella asked anxiously, but with no weak bewilderment.

‘No; it is not illness. But I dread to be alone; I am nervous.’

‘Will you stay with me, dear?’

‘Oh, Stella, let me, let me! I want to be near to you whilst I may!’

Stella’s child slept peacefully in a crib; the voices were too low to wake it. Almost like another child, Adela allowed herself to be undressed.

‘Shall I leave a light?’ Stella asked.

‘No, I can sleep. Only let me feel your arms.’

They lay in unbroken silence till both slept.

CHAPTER XXIII

In a character such as Mutimer’s there will almost certainly be found a disposition to cruelty, for strong instincts of domination, even of the nobler kind, only wait for circumstances to develop crude tyranny—the cruder, of course, in proportion to the lack of native or acquired refinement which distinguishes the man. We had a hint of such things in Mutimer’s progressive feeling with regard to Emma Vine. The possibility of his becoming a tyrannous husband could not be doubted by any one who viewed him closely.

There needed only the occasion, and this at length presented itself in the form of jealousy. Of all possible incentives it was the one most calamitous, for it came just when a slow and secret growth of passion was making demand for room and air. Mutimer had for some time been at a loss to understand his own sensations; he knew that his wife was becoming more and more a necessity to him, and that too when the progress of time would have led him to expect the very opposite. He knew it during her absence at Exmouth, more still now that she was away in London. It was with reluctance that he let her leave home, only his satisfaction in her intimacy with the Westlakes and his hopes for Alice induced him to acquiesce in her departure. Yet he could show nothing of this. A lack of self-confidence, a strange shyness, embarrassed him as often as he would give play to his feelings. They were intensified by suppression, and goaded him to constant restlessness. When at most a day or two remained before Adela’s return, he could no longer resist the desire to surprise her in London.

Not only did he find her in the company of the man whom he had formerly feared as a rival, but her behaviour seemed to him distinctly to betray consternation at his arrival. She was colourless, agitated, could not speak. From that moment his love was of the quality which in its manifestations is often indistinguishable from hatred. He resolved to keep her under his eye, to enforce to the uttermost his marital authority, to make her pay bitterly for the freedom she had stolen. His exasperated egoism flew at once to the extreme of suspicion; he was ready to accuse her of completed perfidy. Mrs. Westlake became his enemy; the profound distrust of culture, which was inseparable from his mental narrowness, however ambition might lead him to disguise it, seized upon the occasion to declare itself; that woman was capable of conniving at his dishonour, even of plotting it. He would not allow Adela to remain in the house a minute longer than he could help. Even the casual absence of Mr. Westlake became a suspicious circumstance; Eldon of course chose the time for his visit.

Adela was once more safe in the Manor, under lock and key, as it were. He had not spoken of Eldon, though several times on the point of doing so. It was obvious that the return home cost her suffering, that it was making her ill. He could not get her to converse; he saw that she did not study. It was impossible to keep watch on her at all moments of the day; yet how otherwise discover what letters she wrote or received? He pondered the practicability of bribing her maid to act as a spy upon her, but feared to attempt it. He found opportunities of secretly examining the blotter on her writing-desk, and it convinced him that she had written to Mrs. Westlake. It maddened him that he had not the courage to take a single open step, to forbid, for instance, all future correspondence with London. To do so would be to declare his suspicions. He wished to declare them; it would have gratified him intensely to vomit impeachments, to terrify her with coarseness and violence; but, on the other hand, by keeping quiet he might surprise positive evidence, and if only he did!

She was ill; he had a distinct pleasure in observing it. She longed for quiet and retirement; he neglected his business to force his company upon her, to laugh and talk loudly. She with difficulty read a page; he made her read aloud to him by the hour, or write translations for him from French and German. The pale anguish of her face was his joy; it fascinated him, fired his senses, made him a demon of vicious cruelty. Yet he durst not as much as touch her hand when she sat before him. Her purity, which was her safeguard, stirred his venom; he worshipped it, and would have smothered it in foulness.

‘Hadn’t you better have the doctor to see you?’ he began one morning when he had followed her from the dining-room to her boudoir.

‘The doctor? Why?’

‘You don’t seem up to the mark,’ he replied, avoiding her look.

Adela kept silence.

‘You were well enough in London, I suppose?’

‘I am never very strong.’

‘I think you might be a bit more cheerful.’

‘I will try to be.’

This submission always aggravated his disease—by what other name to call it? He would have had her resist him, that he might know the pleasure of crushing her will.

He walked about the room, then suddenly:

‘What is that man Eldon doing?’

Adela looked at him with surprise. It had never entered her thoughts that the meeting with Eldon would cost him more than a passing annoyance—she knew he disliked him—and least of all that such annoyance would in any way be connected with herself. It was possible, of course, that some idle tongue had gossiped of her former friendship with Hubert, but there was no one save Letty who knew what her feelings really had been, and was not the fact of her marriage enough to remove any suspicion that Mutimer might formerly have entertained? But the manner of his question was so singular, the introduction of Eldon’s name so abrupt, that she could not but discern in a measure what was in his mind.

She made reply:

‘I don’t understand. Do you mean how is he engaged?’

‘How comes he to know Mrs. Westlake?’

‘Through common friends—some people named Boscobel. Mr. Boscobel is an artist, and Mr. Eldon appears to be studying art.’

Her voice was quite steady through this explanation. The surprise seemed to have enabled her to regard him unmoved, almost with curiosity.

‘I suppose he’s constantly there—at the Westlakes’?’

‘That was his first visit. We met him a few evenings before at the Boscobels’, at dinner. It was then he made Mrs. Westlake’s acquaintance.’

Mutimer moved his head as if to signify indifference. But Adela had found an unexpected relief in speaking thus openly; she was tempted to go further.

‘I believe he writes about pictures. Mrs. Boscobel told me that he had been some time in Italy.’

‘Well and good; I don’t care to hear about his affairs. So you dined with these Boscobel people?’

‘Yes.’

He smiled disagreeably.

‘I thought you were rather particular about telling the truth. You told Alice you never dined out.’

‘I don’t think I said that,’ Adela replied quietly.

He paused; then:

‘What fault have you to find with Alice, eh?’

Adela was not in the mood for evasions; she answered in much the same tone as she had used in speaking of Hubert.

‘I don’t think she likes me. If she did, I should be able to be more friendly with her. Her world is very different from ours.’

‘Different? You mean you don’t like Rodman?’

‘I was not thinking of Mr. Rodman. I mean that her friends are not the same as ours.’

Mutimer forgot for a moment his preoccupation in thought of Alice.

‘Was there anything wrong with the people you met there?’

She was silent.

‘Just tell me what you think. I want to know. What did you object to?’

‘I don’t think they were the best kind of people.’

‘The best kind? I suppose they are what you call ladies and gentlemen?’

‘You must have felt that they were not quite the same as the Westlakes, for instance.’

‘The Westlakes!’

He named them sneeringly, to Adela’s astonishment. And he added as he walked towards the door:

‘There isn’t much to be said for some of the people you meet there.’

A new complexity was introduced into her life. Viewed by this recent light, Mutimer’s behaviour since the return from London was not so difficult to understand; but the problem of how to bear with it became the harder. There were hours when Adela’s soul was like a bird of the woods cage-pent: it dashed itself against the bars of fate, and in anguish conceived the most desperate attempts for freedom. She could always die, but was it not hard to perish in her youth and with the world’s cup of bliss untasted? Flight? Ah! whither could she flee? The thought of the misery she would leave behind her, the disgrace that would fall upon her mother—this would alone make flight impossible. Yet could she conceive life such as this prolonging itself into the hopeless years, renunciation her strength and her reward, duty a grinning skeleton at her bedside? It grew harder daily. More than a year ago she thought that the worst was over, and since then had known the solace of self-forgetful idealisms, of ascetic striving. It was all illusion, the spinning of a desolate heart. There was no help now, for she knew herself and the world. Foolish, foolish child, who with her own hand had flung away the jewel of existence like a thing of no price! Her lot appeared single in its haplessness. She thought of Stella, of Letty, even of Alice; they had not been doomed to learn in suffering. To her, alone of all women, knowledge had come with a curse.

A month passed. Since Rodman’s departure from Wanley, ‘Arry Mutimer was living at the Manor. Her husband and ‘Arry were Adela’s sole companions; the former she dreaded, the approach of the latter always caused her insuperable disgust. To Letty there was born a son; Adela could not bend to the little one with a whole heart; her own desolate motherhood wailed the more bitterly.

Once more a change was coming. Alice and her husband were going to spend August at a French watering-place, and Mutimer proposed to join them for a fortnight; Adela of course would be of the party. The invitation came from Rodman, who had reasons for wishing to get his brother-in-law aside for a little quiet talk. Rodman had large views, was at present pondering a financial scheme in which he needed a partner—one with capital of course. He knew that New Wanley was proving anything but a prosperous concern, commercially speaking; he divined, moreover, that Mutimer was not wholly satisfied with the state of affairs. By judicious management the Socialist might even be induced to abandon the non-paying enterprise, and, though not perhaps ostensibly, embark in one that promised very different results—at all events to Mr. Rodman. The scheme was not of mushroom growth; it dated from a time but little posterior to Mr. Rodman’s first meeting with Alice Mutimer. ‘Arry had been granted appetising sniffs at the cookery in progress, though the youth was naturally left without precise information as to the ingredients. The result was a surprising self-restraint on ‘Arry’s part. The influence which poor Keene had so bunglingly tried to obtain over him, the more astute Mr. Rodman had compassed without difficulty; beginning with the loan of small sums, to be repaid when ‘Arry attained his majority, he little by little made the prospective man of capital the creature of his directions; in something less than two more years Rodman looked to find ample recompense for his expenditure and trouble. But that was a mere parergon; to secure Richard Mutimer was the great end steadily held in view.

Rodman and his wife came to Wanley to spend three days before all together set out for the Continent. Adela accepted the course of things, and abandoned herself to the stream. For a week her husband had been milder; we know the instinct that draws the cat’s paws from the flagging mouse.

Alice, no longer much interested in novels, must needs talk with some one; she honoured Adela with much of her confidence, seeming to forget and forgive, in reality delighted to recount her London experiences to her poor tame sister-in-law. Alice, too, had been at moments introduced to her husband’s kitchen; she threw out vague hints of a wonderful repast in preparation.

‘Willis is going to buy me a house in Brighton,’ she said, among other things. ‘I shall run down whenever I feel it would do me good. You’ve no idea how kind he is.’

There was, in fact, an ‘advancement clause’ in Alice’s deed of settlement. If Mr. Rodman showed himself particularly anxious to cultivate the friendship of Mr. Alfred Waltham, possibly one might look for the explanation to the terms of that same document.

There came a Sunday morning. Preparations for departure on the morrow were practically completed. The weather was delightful. Adela finished breakfast in time to wander a little about the garden before it was the hour for church; her husband and Rodman breakfasted with her, and went to smoke in the library. Alice and ‘Arry did not present themselves till the church bells had ceased.

Adela was glad to be alone in the dusky pew. She was the first of the congregation to arrive, and she sat, as always, with the curtains enclosing her save in front. The bells ringing above the roof had a soothing effect upon her, and gave strange turns to her thought. So had their summoning rung out to generation after generation; so would it ring long after she was buried and at rest. Where would her grave be? She was going for the first time to a foreign country; perhaps death might come to her there. Then she would lie for ever among strangers, and her place be forgotten. Would it not be the fitting end of so sad and short a life?

In the front of the pew was a cupboard; the upper portion, which contained the service books, was closed with a long, narrow door, opening downwards on horizontal hinges; the shelf on which the books lay went back into darkness, being, perhaps, two feet broad. Below this shelf was the door of the lower and much larger receptacle; it slid longitudinally, and revealed a couple of buffets, kept here to supplement the number in the pew when necessary. Adela had only once opened the sliding door, and then merely to glance into the dark hollows and close it again. Probably the buffets had lain undisturbed for years.