The Price of Love by Arnold Bennett (best books to read non fiction TXT) 📖

her brother sent her the exact amount of the steerage fare, and, ready to accept it, she was astounded at Louis' fury against her brother and at the accent with which he had spit out the word "steerage." Her brother and father had gone steerage. However, she gave way to Louis, chiefly because she could not bear to leave him even for a couple of months. She was lodging at Knype, at a total normal expense of ten shillings a week. She possessed over fifty pounds--enough to keep her for six months and to purchase a trousseau, and not one penny would she deign to receive from her affianced.

The disclosure of Mrs. Maldon's will increased the delicacy of her situation. Mrs. Maldon had left the whole of her property in equal shares to Louis and Julian absolutely. There were others who by blood had an equal claim upon her with these two, but the rest had been mere names to her, and she had characteristically risen above the conventionalism of heredity. Mr. Batchgrew, the executor, was able to announce that in spite of losses the heirs would get over three thousand five hundred pounds apiece. Hence it followed that Rachel would be marrying for money as well as for position! She trembled when the engagement was at length announced. And when Louis, after consultation with Mr. Batchgrew, pointed out that it would be advantageous not merely to the estate as a whole, but to himself and to her, if he took over the house at Bycars and its contents at a valuation and made it their married home, she at first declined utterly. The scheme seemed sacrilegious to her. How could she dare to be happy in that house where Mrs. Maldon had died, in that house which was so intimately Mrs. Maldon's? But the manifold excellences of the scheme, appealing strongly to her common sense, overcame her scruples. The dead are dead; the living must live, and the living must not be morbid; it would be absurd to turn into a pious monument every house which death has emptied; Mrs. Maldon, had she known all the circumstances, would have been only too pleased, etc., etc. The affair was settled, and grew into public knowledge.

Rachel had to emerge upon the world as an engaged girl. Left to herself she would have shunned all formalities; but Louis, bred up in Barnes, knew what was due to society. Naught was omitted. Louis' persuasiveness could not be withstood. Withal, he was so right. And though Rachel in one part of her mind had a contempt for "fuss," in another she liked it and was half ashamed of liking it. Further, her common sense, of which she was still proud, told her that the delicacy of her situation demanded "fuss," and would be much assuaged thereby. And finally, the whole thing, being miraculous, romantic, and incredible, had the quality of a dream through which she lived in a dazed nonchalance. Could it be true that she had resided with Mrs. Maldon only for a month? Could it be true that her courtship had lasted only two days--or at most, three? Never, she thought, had a sensible, quiet girl ridden such a whirlwind before in the entire history of the world. Could Louis be as foolishly fond of her as he seemed? Was she truly to be married? "I shan't have a single wedding-present," she had said. Then wedding-presents began to come. "Are we married?" she had said, when they were married and in the conventional clothes in the conventional vehicle. After that she soon did realize that the wondrous and the unutterable had happened to her too. And she swung over to the other extreme: instead of doubting the reality of her own experiences, she was convinced that her experiences were more real than those of any other created girl, and hence she felt a slight condescension towards all the rest. "I am a married woman," she reflected at intervals, with intense momentary pride. And her fits of confusion in public would end in recurrences of this strange, proud feeling.

Then she had to face the return to Bursley, and, later, the At Home which Louis propounded as a matter of course, and which she knew to be inevitable. The house was her toy, and Mrs. Tams was her toy. But the glee of playing with toys had been overshadowed for days by the delicious dread of the At Home. "It will be the first caller that will kill me," she had said. "But will anybody really come?" And the first caller had called. And, finding herself still alive, she had become radiant, and often during the afternoon had forgotten to be clumsy. The success of the At Home was prodigious, startling. Now and then when the room was full, and people without chairs perched on the end of the Chesterfield, she had whispered to her secret heart in a tiny, tiny voice: "These are my guests. They all treat me with special deference. I am the hostess. _I am Mrs. Fores_." The Batchgrew clan was well represented, no doubt by order from authority, Mrs. Yardley came, in surprising stylishness. Visitors arrived from Knype. Miss Malkin came and atoned for her historic glance in the shop. But the dazzlers were sundry male friends of Louis, with Kensingtonian accents, strange phrases, and assurance in the handling of teacups and the choosing of cake.... One by one and two by two they had departed, and at last Rachel, with a mind as it were breathless from rapid flittings to and fro, was seated alone on the sofa.

She was richly dressed in a dark blue taffeta dress that gave brilliance to her tawny hair. Perhaps she was over-richly dressed, for, like many girls who as a rule are not very interested in clothes, she was too interested in them at times, and inexperienced taste was apt to mislead her into an unfitness. Also her figure was too stiff and sturdy to favour elegance. But on this occasion the general effect of her was notably picturesque, and her face and hair, and the expression of her pose, atoned in their charm for the shortcomings and the luxuriance of the frock. She was no more the Rachel that Mrs. Maldon had known and that Louis had first kissed. Her glance had altered, and her gestures. She would ask herself, could it be true that she was a married woman? But her glance and gestures announced it true at every instant. A new languor and a new confidence had transformed the girl. Her body had been modified and her soul at once chastened and fired. Fresh in her memory was endless matter for meditation. And on the sofa, in a negligent attitude of repose, with shameless eyes gazing far into the caverns of the fire, and an unreadable faint smile on her face, she meditated. And she was the most seductive, tantalizing, self-contradictory object for study in the whole of Bursley. She had never been so interesting as in this brief period, and she might never be so interesting again.

Mrs. Tams entered. With her voice Mrs. Tams said, "Shall I begin to clear all these things away, _mam_?" But with her self-conscious eyes Mrs. Tams said to the self-conscious eyes of Rachel, "What a staggering world we live in, don't we?"


II


Rachel sprang from the Chesterfield, smoothed down her frock, shook her hair, and then ran upstairs to the large front bedroom, where Louis, to whom the house was just as much a toy as to Rachel, was about to knock a nail into a wall. Out of breath, she stood close to him very happily. The At Home was over. She was now definitely received as a married woman in a town full of married women and girls waiting to be married women. She had passed successfully through a trying and exhausting experience; the nervous tension was slackened. And therefore it might be expected that she would have a sense of reaction, the vague melancholy which is produced when that which has long been seen before is suddenly seen behind. But it was not so in the smallest degree. Every moment of her existence equally was thrilling and happy. One piquant joy was succeeded immediately by another as piquant. To Rachel it was not in essence more exciting to officiate at an At Home than to watch Louis drive a nail into a wall.

The man winked at her in the dusk; she winked back, and put her hand intimately on his shoulder. She thought, "I am safe with him now in the house." The feeling of solitude with him, of being barricaded against the world and at the mercy of Louis alone, was exquisite to her. Then Louis raised himself on his toes, and raised his left arm with the nail as high as he could, and stuck the point of the nail against a pencil-mark on the wall. Then he raised the right hand with the hammer; but the mark was just too high to be efficiently reached by both hands simultaneously. Louis might have stood on a chair. This simple device, however, was too simple for them.

Rachel said--

"Shall I stand on a chair and hold the nail for you?" Louis murmured--

"Brainy little thing! Never at a loss!"

She skipped on to a chair and held the nail. Towering thus above him, she looked down on her husband and thought: "This man is mine alone, and he is all mine." And in Rachel's fancy the thought itself seemed to caress Louis from head to foot.

"Supposing I catch you one?" said Louis, as he prepared to strike.

"I don't care," said Rachel.

And the fact was that really she would have liked him to hit her finger instead of the nail--not too hard, but still smartly. She would have taken pleasure in the pain: such was the perversity of the young wife. But Louis hit the nail infallibly every time.

He took up a picture which had been lying against the wall in a dark corner, and thrust the twisting wire of it over the nail.

Rachel, when in the deepening darkness she had peered into the frame, exclaimed, pouting--

"Oh, darling, you aren't going to hang that here, are you? It's so old-fashioned. You said it was old-fashioned yourself. I did want that thing that came this morning to be put somewhere here. Why can't you stick this in the spare room?... Unless, of course, you _prefer_...." She was being deferential to the art-expert in him, as well as to the husband.

"Not in the least!" said Louis, acquiescent, and unhooked the picture.

Taste changes. The rejected of Rachel was a water-colour by the late Athelstan Maldon, adored by Mrs. Maldon. Already it had been degraded from the parlour to the bedroom, and now it was to be pushed away like a shame into obscurity. It was a view of the celebrated Vale of Llangollen, finicking, tight, and hard in manner, but with a certain sentiment and modest skill. The way in which the initials "A.M." had been hidden amid the foreground foliage in the left-hand corner disclosed enough of the painter's quiet and proud temperament to show that he "took after" his mother. Yet a few more years, and the careless observer would miss those initials altogether and would be contemptuously inquiring, "Who did this old daub, I wonder?" And nobody would know who did the old daub, or that the old daub for thirty years had been an altar for undying affection, and also a distinguished specimen--admired by a whole generation of townsfolk--of the art of water-colour.

And the fate of Athelstan's sketch was symptomatic. Mrs. Maiden's house had been considered perfect, up