Marriage a la mode by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best book club books TXT) 📖

he had been much happier with Daphne than he had thought he should be, up to the time of their coming to Heston. She wasn't easy to live with, and she had been often, before now, ridiculously jealous; but you could not, apparently, live with a woman without getting very fond of her--he couldn't--especially if she had given you a child; and if Daphne had turned against him now, for a bit--well, he could not swear to himself that he had been free from blame; and it perhaps served him right for having gone out deliberately to the States to marry money--with a wife thrown in--in that shabby sort of way.

But, now, to straighten out this coil; to shake himself finally free of Chloe, and make Daphne happy again! He vowed to himself that he could and would make her happy--just as she had been in their early days together. The memory of her lying white and exhausted after child-birth, with the little dark head beside her, came across him, and melted him; he thought of her with longing and tenderness.

With a deep breath he raised himself on his seat; in the old Greek phrase, "the gods breathed courage into his soul"; and as he stretched out an indifferent hand toward Chloe's letters on the trunk, Roger Barnes had perhaps reached the highest point of his moral history; he had become conscious of himself as a moral being choosing good or evil; and he had chosen good. It was not so much that his conscience accused him greatly with regard to Chloe. For that his normal standards were not fine enough. It was rather a kind of "serious call," something akin to conversion, or that might have been conversion, which befell him in this dusty room, amid the night-silence.

As he took up Chloe's letters he did not notice that the door had quietly opened behind him, and that a figure stood on the threshold.

A voice struck into the stillness.

"Roger!"

He turned with a movement that scattered all his own letters on the floor. Daphne stood before him--but with the eyes of a mad woman. Her hand shook on the handle of the door.

"What are you doing here?" She flung out the question like a blow.

"Hallo, Daphne!--is that you?" He tried to laugh. "I'm only looking up some old papers; no joke, in all this rubbish." He pointed to it.

"What old papers?"

"Well, you needn't catechize me!" he said, nettled by her tone, "or not in that way, at any rate. I couldn't sleep, and I came up here to look for something I wanted. Why did you shut your door on me?"

He looked at her intently, his lips twitching a little. Daphne came nearer.

"It must be something you want very badly--something you don't want other people to see--something you're ashamed of!--or you wouldn't be searching for it at this time of night." She raised her eyes, still with the same strange yet flaming quiet, from the littered floor to his face. Then suddenly glancing again at the scattered papers--"That's your hand-writing!--they're your letters! letters to Mrs. Fairmile!"

"Well, and what do you make of that?" cried Roger, half wroth, half inclined to laugh. "If you want to know, they are the letters I wrote to Chloe Fairmile; and I, like a careless beast, never destroyed them, and they were stuffed away here. I have long meant to get at them and burn them, and as you turned me out to-night----"

"What is that letter in your hand?" exclaimed Daphne, interrupting him.

"Oh, that has nothing to do with you--or me----" he said, hastily making a movement to put it in his coat pocket. But in a second, Daphne, with a cry, had thrown herself upon him, to his intense amazement, wrestling with him, in a wild excitement. And as she did so, a thin woman, with frightened eyes, in a nurse's dress, came quickly into the room, as though Daphne's cry had signalled to her. She was behind Roger, and he was not aware of her approach.

"Daphne, don't be such a little fool!" he said indignantly, holding her off with one hand, determined not to give her the letter.

Then, all in a moment--without, as it seemed to him, any but the mildest defensive action on his part--Daphne stumbled and fell.

"Daphne!--I say!----"

He was stooping over her in great distress to lift her up, when he felt himself vehemently put aside by a woman's hand.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, sir! Let me go to her."

He turned in bewilderment. "Miss Farmer! What on earth are you doing here?"

But in his astonishment he had given way to her, and he fell back pale and frowning, while, without replying, she lifted Daphne--who had a cut on her forehead and was half fainting--from the ground.

"Don't come near her, sir!" said the nurse, again warding him off. "You have done quite enough. Let me attend to her."

"You imagine that was my doing?" said Roger grimly. "Let me assure you it was nothing of the kind. And pray, were you listening at the door?"

Miss Farmer vouchsafed no reply. She was half leading, half supporting Daphne, who leant against her. As they neared the door, Roger, who had been standing dumb again, started forward.

"Let me take her," he said sternly. "Daphne!--send this woman away."

But Daphne only shuddered, and putting out a shaking hand, she waved him from her.

"You see in what a state she is!" cried Miss Farmer, with a withering look. "If you must speak to her, put it off, sir, at least till to-morrow."

Roger drew back. A strange sense of inexplicable disaster rushed upon him. He sombrely watched them pass through the door and disappear.

* * * * *

Daphne reached her own room. As the door closed upon them she turned to her companion, holding out the handkerchief stained with blood she had been pressing to her temple.

"You saw it all?" she said imperiously--"the whole thing?"

"All," said Miss Farmer. "It's a mercy you're not more hurt."

Daphne gave a hysterical laugh.

"It'll just do--I think it'll do! But you'll have to make a good deal out of it."

And sinking down by the fire, she burst into a passion of wild tears.

The nurse brought her sal volatile, and washed the small cut above her eyebrow.

"It was lucky we heard him," she said triumphantly. "I guessed at once he must be looking for something--I knew that room was full of papers."

A knock at the door startled them.

"Never mind." The nurse hurried across the room. "It's locked."

"How is my wife?" said Roger's strong, and as it seemed, threatening voice outside.

"She'll be all right, sir, I hope, if you'll leave her to rest. But I won't answer for the consequences if she's disturbed any more."

There was a pause, as though of hesitation. Then Roger's step receded.

Daphne pushed her hair back from her face, and sat staring into the fire. Everything was decided now. Yet she had rushed upstairs on Miss Farmer's information with no definite purpose. She only knew that--once again--Roger was hiding something from her--doing something secret and disgraceful--and she suddenly resolved to surprise and confront him. With a mind still vaguely running on the legal aspects of what she meant to do, she had bade the nurse follow her. The rest had been half spontaneous, half acting. It had struck her imagination midway how the incident could be turned--and used.

She was triumphant; but from sheer excitement she wept and sobbed through the greater part of the night.


PART III


CHAPTER IX

It was a cheerless February day, dark and slaty overhead, dusty below. In the East End streets paper and straw, children's curls, girls' pinafores and women's skirts were driven back and forward by a bitter wind; there was an ugly light on ugly houses, with none of that kind trickery of mist or smoke which can lend some grace on normal days even to Commercial Street, or to the network of lanes north of the Bethnal Green Road. The pitiless wind swept the streets--swept the children and the grown-ups out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to seize upon their own.

* * * * *

In one of these side streets stood a house larger than its neighbours, in a bit of front garden, with some decrepit rust-bitten-railings between it and the road. It was an old dwelling overtaken by the flood of tenement houses, which spread north, south, east, and west of it. Its walls were no less grimy than its neighbours'; but its windows were outlined in cheerful white paint, firelight sparkled through its unshuttered panes, and a bright green door with a brass knocker completed its pleasant air. There were always children outside the Vicarage railings on winter evenings, held there by the spell of the green door and the firelight.

Inside the firelit room to the left of the front pathway, two men were standing--one of whom had just entered the house.

"My dear Penrose!--how very good of you to come. I know how frightfully busy you are."

The man addressed put down his hat and stick, and hastily smoothed back some tumbling black hair which interfered with spectacled eyes already hampered by short sight. He was a tall, lank, powerful fellow; anyone acquainted with the West-country would have known him for one of the swarthy, gray-eyed Cornish stock.

"I am pretty busy--but your tale, Herbert, was a startler. If I can help you--or Barnes--command me. He is coming this afternoon?"

Herbert French pointed his visitor to a chair.

"Of course. And another man--whom I met casually, in Pall Mall this morning--and had half an hour's talk with--an American naval officer--an old acquaintance of Elsie's--Captain Boyson--will join us also. I met him at Harvard before our wedding, and liked him. He has just come over with his sister for a short holiday, and I ran across him."

"Is there any particular point in his joining us?"

Herbert French expounded. Boyson had been an old acquaintance of Mrs. Roger Barnes before her marriage. He knew a good deal about the Barnes story--"feels, so I gathered, very strongly about it, and on the man's side; and when I told him that Roger had just arrived and was coming to take counsel with you and me this afternoon, he suddenly asked if he might come, too. I was rather taken aback. I told him that we were going, of course, to consider the case entirely from the English point of view. He still said, 'Let me come; I may be of use to you.' So I could only reply it must rest with Roger. They'll show him first into the dining-room."

Penrose nodded. "All right, as long as he doesn't mind his national toes trampled upon. So these are your new quarters, old fellow?"

His