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

I am sure that he will wish to see me. Will you kindly give him my card? I will come in and wait."

And she brushed past the maid, who was intimidated by the visitor's fashionable dress and by the drooping feathers of her Paris hat, in which the sharp olive-skinned face with its magnificent eyes was picturesquely framed. The girl gave way unwillingly, showed Mrs. Floyd into a small study looking on the front garden, and left her.

* * * * *

"Elsie!" cried Herbert French, springing from the low chair in which he had been lounging in his shirt-sleeves with a book when the parlour-maid found him, "Elsie!"

His wife, who was at the other end of the lawn, playing with the children, the boy on her back and a pair of girl twins clinging to her skirts, turned in astonishment and hurried back to him.

"Mrs. Floyd?" They both looked at the card in bewilderment. "Who is it? Mrs. Floyd?"

Then French's face changed.

"What is this lady like?" he asked peremptorily of the parlour-maid.

"Well, sir, she's a dark lady, dressed very smart----"

"Has she very black eyes?"

"Oh yes, sir!"

"Young?"

The girl promptly replied in the negative, qualifying it a moment afterward by a perplexed "Well, I shouldn't say so, sir."

French thought a moment.

"Thank you. I will come in."

He turned to his wife with a rapid question, under his breath. "Where is Roger?"

Elsie stared at him, her colour paling.

"Herbert!--it can't--it can't----"

"I suspect it is--Mrs. Barnes," said French slowly. "Help me on with my coat, darling. Now then, what shall we do?"

"She can't have come to force herself on him!" cried his wife passionately.

"Probably she knows nothing of his being here. Did he go for a walk?"

"Yes, towards Sandown. But he will be back directly."

A quick shade of expression crossed French's face, which his wife knew to mean that whenever Roger was out by himself there was cause for anxiety. But the familiar trouble was immediately swallowed up in the new and pressing one.

"What can that woman have come to say?" he asked, half of himself, half of his wife, as he walked slowly back to the house. Elsie had conveyed the children to their nurse, and was beside him.

"Perhaps she repents!" The tone was dry and short; it flung a challenge to misdoing.

"I doubt it! But Roger?" French stood still, pondering. "Keep him, darling--intercept him if you can. If he must see her, I will come out. But we mustn't risk a shock."

They consulted a little in low voices. Then French went into the house and Elsie came back to her children. She stood thinking, her fine face, so open-browed and purely lined, frowning and distressed.

* * * * *

"You wished to see me, Mrs. Barnes?"

French had closed the door of the study behind him and stood without offering to shake hands with his visitor, coldly regarding her.

Daphne rose from her seat, reddening involuntarily.

"My name is no longer what you once knew it, Mr. French. I sent you my card."

French made a slight inclination and pointed to the chair from which she had risen.

"Pray sit down. May I know what has brought you here?"

Daphne resumed her seat, her small hands fidgeting on her parasol.

"I wished to come and consult with you, Mr. French. I had heard a distressing account of--of Roger, from a friend in America."

"I see," said French, on whom a sudden light dawned. "You met Boyson at Niagara--that I knew--and you are here because of what he said to you?"

"Yes, partly." The speaker looked round the room, biting her lip, and French observed her for a moment. He remembered the foreign vivacity and dash, the wilful grace of her youth, and marvelled at her stiffened, pretentious air, her loss of charm. Instinctively the saint in him knew from the mere look of her that she had been feeding herself on egotisms and falsehoods, and his heart hardened. Daphne resumed:

"If Captain Boyson has given you an account of our interview, Mr. French, it was probably a one-sided one. However, that is _not_ the point. He _did_ distress me very much by his account, which I gather came from you--of--of Roger, and although, of course, it is a very awkward matter for me to move in, I still felt impelled for old times' sake to come over and see whether I could not help you--and his other friends--and, of course, his mother----"

"His mother is out of the question," interrupted French. "She is, I am sorry to say, a helpless invalid."

"Is it really as bad as that? I hoped for better news. Then I apply to you--to you chiefly. Is there anything that I could do to assist you, or others, to----"

"To save him?" French put in the words as she hesitated.

Daphne was silent.

"What is your idea?" asked French, after a moment. "You heard, I presume, from Captain Boyson that my wife and I were extremely anxious about Roger's ways and habits; that we cannot induce him, or, at any rate, we have not yet been able to induce him, to give up drinking; that his health is extremely bad, and that we are sometimes afraid that there is now some secret in his life of which he is ashamed?"

"Yes," said Daphne, fidgeting with a book on the table. "Yes, that is what I heard."

"And you have come to suggest something?"

"Is there no way by which Roger can become as free as I now am!" she said suddenly, throwing back her head.

"By which Roger can obtain his divorce from you--and marry again? None, in English law."

"But there is--in Colonial law." She began to speak hurriedly and urgently. "If Roger were to go to New Zealand, or to Australia, he could, after a time, get a divorce for desertion. I know he could--I have inquired. It doesn't seem to be certain what effect my action--the American decree, I mean--would have in an English colony. My lawyers are going into it. But at any rate there is the desertion and then"--she grew more eager--"if he married abroad--in the Colony--the marriage would be valid. No one could say a word to him when he returned to England."

French looked at her in silence. She went on--with the unconscious manner of one accustomed to command her world, to be the oracle and guide of subordinates:--

"Could we not induce him to go? Could you not? Very likely he would refuse to see me; and, of course, he has, most unjustly to me, I think, refused to take any money from me. But the money might be provided without his knowing where it came from. A young doctor might be sent with him--some nice fellow who would keep him amused and look after him. At Heston he used to take a great interest in farming. He might take up land. I would pay anything--anything! He might suppose it came from some friend."

French smiled sadly. His eyes were on the ground. She bent forward.

"I beg of you, Mr. French, not to set yourself against me! Of course"--she drew herself up proudly--"I know what you must think of my action. Our views are different, irreconcilably different. You probably think all divorce wrong. We think, in America, that a marriage which has become a burden to either party is no marriage, and ought to cease. But that, of course"--she waved a rhetorical hand--"we cannot discuss. I do not propose for a moment to discuss it. You must allow me my national point of view. But surely we can, putting all that aside, combine to help Roger?" "To marry again?" said French, slowly. "It can't, I fear, be done--what you propose--in the time. I doubt whether Roger has two years to live."

Daphne started.

"Roger!--to live?" she repeated, in horror. "What is really the matter? Surely nothing more than care and a voyage could set right?"

French shook his head.

"We have been anxious about him for some time. That terrible attack of septic pneumonia in New York, as we now know, left the heart injured and the lungs weakened. He was badly nursed, and his state of mind at the time--his misery and loneliness--left him little chance. Then the drinking habit, which he contracted during those wretched months in the States, has been of course sorely against him. However, we hoped against hope--Elsie and I--till a few weeks ago. Then someone, we don't know who, made him go to a specialist, and the verdict is--phthisis; not very advanced, but certain and definite. And the general outlook is not favourable."

Daphne had grown pale.

"We must send him away!" she said imperiously. "We must! A voyage, a good doctor, a dry climate, would save him, of course they would! Why, there is nothing necessarily fatal now in phthisis! Nothing! It is absurd to talk as though there were."

Again French looked at her in silence. But as she had lost colour, he had gained it. His face, which the East End had already stamped, had grown rosy, his eyes sparkled.

"Oh, do say something! Tell me what you suggest?" cried Daphne.

"Do you really wish me to tell you what I suggest?"

Daphne waited, her eyes first imploring, then beginning to shrink. He bent forward and touched her on the arm.

"Go, Mrs. Barnes, and ask your husband's forgiveness! What will come of it I do not know. But you, at least, will have done something to set yourself right--with God."

The Christian and the priest had spoken; the low voice in its intensity had seemed to ring through the quiet sun-flooded room. Daphne rose, trembling with resentment and antagonism.

"It is you, then, Mr. French, who make it impossible for me to discuss--to help. I shall have to see if I can find some other means of carrying out my purpose."

There was a voice outside. Daphne turned.

"Who is that?"

French ran to the glass door that opened on the veranda, and trying for an ordinary tone, waved somebody back who was approaching from without. Elsie came quickly round the corner of the house, calling to the new-comer.

But Daphne saw who it was and took her own course. She, too, went to the window, and, passing French, she stepped into the veranda.

"Roger!"

A man hurried through the dusk. There was an exclamation, a silence. By this time French was on the lawn, his wife's quivering hand in his. Daphne retreated slowly into the study and Roger Barnes followed her.

"Leave them alone," said French, and putting an arm round his wife he led her resolutely away, out of sound and sight.

* * * * *

Barnes stood silent, breathing heavily and leaning on the back of a chair. The western light from