CHAPTER VI.
When Harry uttered the words “My wife!” his brother looked from one to the other for a few moments without a word; then, in a low, sullen voice, he said:
“You have tricked me and deceived me, both of you. It was very clever—very clever indeed, but hardly wise. I won’t take up your time any longer now.” Then, turning to Annie, he continued, “I am much obliged to you for your kind welcome. I must apologize for having brought down your husband’s anger upon you; but, you see, you left me rather in the dark.” Then to Harry—“You will hear from me in a day or two. Our father made me promise to provide for you, and I have a proposal to make which I don’t think you will find ungenerous. Send me an answer as quickly as you can.”
He shook his brother’s hand and then Annie’s and left the room. Harry turned to his wife, looking rather anxious.
“He is going to do something nasty, Annie—I am sure of it. I know George’s manner when he is spiteful, and our chances look very bad, darling. No more Paris, no more pretty gowns, for the present, at any rate!”
But Annie did not answer. With trembling fingers she was pulling to pieces the flower which had fallen from her throat.
“Why, Annie, what is the matter? You look ill—you are crying!”
“I am not ill,” said she, repulsing him. “I am heart-sick, miserable.”
“But you mustn’t give way like that, my darling. George will have to come round. He sha’n’t make my wife spoil her pretty eyes.”
“It is not George,” she said, with fire. “Do you think I am such a coward as to mind not having pretty dresses? What was that he said about forgery?”
“Oh, nothing to make such a fuss about!” answered the young fellow sulkily. “I was hard up, I had no money for our wedding trip, and I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t as if I committed a crime, and copied somebody else’s name, it was my own father’s. I knew it would be all right, and so it was. He hushed it up directly, and said hardly anything about it.”
“You call that nothing!” said Annie, raising her eyes wide with horror to his face.
“Of course I know it was wrong,” replied he impatiently; “but there was nothing else to be done. I could not have married you without, or you would have had to pass your honeymoon in an attic.”
“I would rather have passed it as a tramp on the high-road than as we did, if I had known.”
“Well, you are an ungrateful little cat. When I thought of nothing but pleasing you and buying you pretty things from morning till night.”
“Pretty things that were bought with stolen money!”
“How dare you say such thing to me?” he shouted. “Don’t you know I’m your husband; and do you suppose I am not the best judge of my own conduct? Do you suppose I should ever do anything a gentleman need be ashamed of?”
“I think you have done a thing a beggar would be ashamed of.”
“Thank you, thank you! You call me a beggar and you call me a thief. I shall be a murderer next, I suppose; and, by Jove, it would serve you right if I were. Haven’t I behaved well to you? Didn’t I come to London with you just to stop you from crying? And didn’t I marry you when I knew very well that all my family would disapprove of it?”
“Oh, yes; you made a noble sacrifice. I am deeply grateful to you for throwing yourself away. It spoils the look of it a little, though, that your elder brother was willing to do so, too, if you hadn’t been beforehand with him.”
“You may say what you like; but it is a sacrifice of a man’s liberty to marry at twenty. As for George, I believe you like him better than me all the time. Answer me—do you—did you ever care for him?” demanded he roughly.
“I shall not answer your insulting questions,” said the young wife, in a very calm voice; and, as quickly as she could, she left the room. For she felt as if her heart were breaking; this sharp wrangle had made her almost hysterical, and she did not want to break down before the husband whom, for the time at least, she despised and all but hated.
Already during the few weeks of their wedded life, it had needed all the strength of his outbursts of demonstrative affection, all the bright contentment she felt at her release from schoolroom drudgery, to cloak the fact that they had not one taste, one sympathy in common; that their tempers were ill suited to each other, and the moral standard of the wife as different from that of the husband as light from darkness. This crime, which Harry had made light of, tore down the last shred of illusion from before the eyes of the wife of eighteen. She had made an awful mistake. Carried away by the passionate pleading of a headstrong boy at a time when she felt herself to be utterly friendless, and when his impulsive remorse had seemed to her to show a high and generous nature, she had bound herself by a tie which would last her life to an ignorant, uncouth, unprincipled lad who did not even love her. For already the sensitive woman felt that his caresses were growing careless; and she knew that no husband of a few weeks could have used the words Harry had used to-day to a woman for whom he cared deeply.
Harry had gone out; and for three long hours Annie knelt on the floor by the bed pondering what she should do with her life, and praying for help to show her where her duty lay. She came to a resolution strangely wise for so young a woman; and, when her husband returned, she was as nearly her usual bright self as she could manage to be. Harry, of course, did not appreciate the struggle she had gone through before she could do this, but came to the conclusion that she saw how silly she had been to make such a fuss about a trifle which did not concern her, and thought it was time for him to show a little just indignation at finding his brother’s arm round her.
But she stopped him with surprising promptness, as if his remarks were beneath argument. He began to bluster a little.
“Do you really doubt the propriety of my conduct?” she asked, coldly.
“Well, it is not a usual thing, is it, to find one’s wife—er—er—like that?”
“Is it a usual thing for a wife to be requested by her husband to conceal the fact that she is married, especially from his relatives?”
“Why, no, of course not! And it doesn’t matter now, you see, since I told my father all about it,” said Harry, trying to speak more good-humoredly, since he saw by the steady look of his wife’s eyes, as he had seen before in less serious discussions, that, if the argument went on he would get very much the worst of it.
So the peace was kept between them, though the warmth of their feelings for each other was getting rapidly less. An incident happened a few days later, however, which revived it for a time. George’s promised proposal came, and Harry had scarcely read it before he was at his wife’s feet, pressing his lips to her very dress with all the enthusiasm of a few weeks back.
“He wants us to go to the Grange—not for my sake, though; but to get you there; but he sha’n’t! I’d sweep a crossing rather than let you go there! My generous brother—hang him!”
“To go to the Grange! To live there?”
“Yes; that is his way of fulfilling his promise to our father. He says there are too many burdens on the estate for him to make me a suitable allowance, unless we go and live there. But I wouldn’t let you go there for the world!”
“But, Harry, I should be quite safe with you. You speak of your brother as if he were a savage.”
“So he is. We are all a set of savages; and, being a savage myself, you see, I know how to trust the rest. I tell you you shall not go; and, if you try to persuade me, I shall think you don’t love me.”
He flung his arm round her, and looked up into her face with an air of boyish authority which she did not attempt to resist, though it made her smile. A few months of self-dependence had made her so much older, so much wiser than this spoiled child who was her lord and master.
She knew he could not live long in defiance of his elder brother; she knew he had no money of his own, and no capabilities of making any, or that, if he had any capabilities, he had no intention of using them. He had indeed most of the qualities necessary in a groom and some of those wanted by a jockey; but, being a gentleman, though he could copy their manners and share their tastes, he could follow their occupations only as an amusement. He had given her money so recklessly at first that she, though inclined to be extravagant, had, without saying anything to him about it, put some by in case of an emergency; so that, when his supplies to her stopped rather suddenly, she was able to go on paying their weekly bills without running into debt. But this could not last long; and she began to look out for some music-pupils, still without saying anything to her husband, whose pride would have cried out at the idea of his wife working for her living and his.
It was easy enough by this time to leave some hours in the day unaccounted for. Harry had met some acquaintances in town and picked up some others, and spent but little of his time with his wife, who, he complained, did not take as much trouble to amuse him as at first, and who could always amuse herself with a book—a most unaccountable taste in his eyes, so that she could publish an advertisement, answer others, go for the few replies she got to a neighboring stationer’s, and give a lesson three times a week in Onslow Square without exciting his suspicions.
She knew that Lady Braithwaite and her daughter were now in town, staying with a sister of the former’s at Lancaster Gate, but, as she would have thought nothing less likely than that they should take any notice of her, she stood for a moment in the doorway in silent astonishment when, coming into her sitting-room, after having given a music-lesson, she found Lilian, looking superbly handsome in her deep mourning, walking about examining the pictures and ornaments.
“I think you must be very comfortable here,” said she, coming forward and kissing her, as if they had been affectionate friends of long standing.
Lilian’s manners were charming when she chose, and she was at her best this afternoon—always queenly, but smiling and willing to be pleased with anything. She drew her tiny sister-in-law on to the sofa and sat down beside her. Annie, very glad of this visit, yet hardly daring to believe that Lilian could have heard of her marriage, scarcely knew what to say; but the other saved her the trouble of finding a remark.
“I wish we lived like this. These rooms are neither too large nor too small, while Aunt Constantia’s big rooms are so big that you lose your way in them, and the small ones are so small that, if the door opens inside, it scrapes the opposite wall. I am supposed to be still a child, and therefore of no consequence; so I am put into a nice little cupboard, so compact that Jennings has to open the door and stand in the corridor to brush my hair.”
Annie laughed at the picture of self-willed, spoiled Miss Braithwaite as a victim to neglect, and then asked after Lady Braithwaite.
“Oh, she is quite well, thank you, though of course she hasn’t got over poor papa’s death yet! You heard all about it from Harry, of course?”
“Yes,” said Annie, wondering at the easy way in which her proud sister-in-law thus alluded to their new relationship. She was still more surprised when the other continued:
“It seems so strange to think of Harry as a married man! I suppose he will think I ought not to box his ears any longer now; but you will let me, won’t you? I can’t keep him in order in any other way; but I suppose you can.”
Annie laughed—not very heartily.
“I haven’t tried that plan, certainly. It wouldn’t do for such a little woman as I am; I think I am too small for him,” she added, as if this really had struck her suddenly as a grave objection.
Lilian burst out laughing.
“What an odd little creature you are! I have always heard that a little woman can make a big man as submissive as a dog, and rule him with a rod of iron, while he thinks all the time that he is the master. I am sure you would not condescend to obey Harry.”
“Yes, I do,” said the young wife, seriously—“at least; I do the things he tells me to do; but he doesn’t tell me to do many things.” And the thought flashed through her mind, “He doesn’t take enough interest in me to mind what I do.”
“And you don’t ever want to do anything he doesn’t wish you to do?”
“When I do, I do it without telling him about it.”
Lilian was delighted with this speech, which Annie rather regretted having made.
“I am glad you are not so superhumanly good as I was beginning to fear. Don’t you find him very dull company? He can hardly write his own name, he can’t spell a bit, and he can talk about nothing but horses and guns.”
Annie would not own that she had not enough of her husband’s company to mind it.
“I don’t want him to read when he is with me, and I haven’t asked him to spell much. And I like horses myself, though I don’t know much about them.”
“Well, your life is not so dull as mine, at any rate,” declared Lilian. “You are a married woman, and can go where you like and with whom you like; I wish I could,” she added, petulantly.
“But I have nowhere to go and no one to go with except, of course, Harry,” Annie added, hastily.
“You have got over the silly stage of newly-married life very soon,” said Lilian, amused, but rather surprised. “Now I want to go to a hundred places I can’t go to. Aunt Constantia looks down at my black gown and says, ‘Too soon, my dear, too soon!’ And she and mamma both disapprove of all the persons I like. I never was so wretched in my life—just when I am in mourning too, and want cheering dreadfully!”
“Well, you will soon be able to go out more, and then you will certainly leave off envying my quiet life.”
“Oh, but there will be far worse trials for me then! Now that we are in mourning, at least no one can find fault with my dress; but, when we begin to go out again—and I am to be presented next season—I shall want money; and George is so mean—he says he is so poor, but that is nonsense!—that I know he will open his eyes and say that a hundred a year ought to buy me everything I want, and the same day he will send a groom up to Tattersall’s to buy him a couple of hunters, and wonder at the selfish extravagance of women! It is so silly, too; for the very best thing he can do is to get me well married as soon as possible; and who will see me if I never go out, and who will look at me if I am dressed ‘with tasteful economy?’ As if economy was ever tasteful—as if I did not do my dressmaker credit, too! I assure you I look quite nice when I am well-dressed.”
She threw back her graceful head and smiled at Annie with playful insolence, which was charming in such a beautiful girl; and, having got, for a time, to the end of her grievances, she gave a plaintive sigh, and then laughed at herself.
“I have been taking the privileges of a relative in boring you to death; but really my wrongs were getting too heavy to be borne in silence. It is very good of you to listen without yawning.”
“Oh, you don’t know how glad I am to see you and listen to you! I was afraid you would be so angry about Harry’s marrying me.”
“I won’t pretend we were glad to hear of it; but everything else was swallowed up in papa’s death. I don’t think mamma has quite forgiven either of you yet; but she will come round in time. And, you see, as I told her, if Harry hadn’t married you, George would have done so.”
Annie started, and the color rushed to her face.
“Oh, you need not look surprised! I am sure of it. He was much more in love with you than Harry was; and, to tell you the truth, when you had left Garstone, and nobody could tell what had become of you, I thought George was more likely than Harry to know where you were.”
She rattled on without taking much notice of Annie’s continued agitation. After a minute’s pause for breath, she added:
“And I did credit to your being a good little thing and a clever little thing, for George has far fewer scruples and far less sense of honor than even Harry, I can tell you. Harry is not a bad fellow at heart, though he is such a lout; there is no other word for him. Will you forgive my frankness? I am a pretty good judge of my brothers, and my knowledge may be useful to you.”
She rose from the sofa and took Annie’s trembling hand.
“I have frightened you, worried you. You won’t let me come again. But you will, won’t you?” she added, in a coaxing tone—“for I am so dull. May I come on Thursday, the day after to-morrow, and we will go to the Academy together? It will soon close now, so it will be full of country bumpkins; but I will brave them, if you will. Mamma and Aunt Constantia find it too tiring for them. May I come?”
She asked quite restlessly and anxiously; and Annie, surprised, begged her to come, and promised to be ready at whatever time she pleased.
When Harry returned home, and his wife told him of his sister’s visit, he was even more surprised than she had been.
“Well, she is a queer girl; but I think this beats any freak she has had yet,” he said. “You should just have heard her go on at me—and at you—at Garstone, when she first heard about it—just after our father’s death too. I told her if she didn’t hold her tongue, I would turn her out of the room.” And presently he broke out again, “I wonder what she is up to now?”
Without suspecting any deep-laid plot under Lilian’s friendliness, as her husband seemed to do, Annie was more surprised than ever when Thursday came and Miss Braithwaite drove up in a hansom very punctually, to see how excited she seemed to be over such a simple diversion as a visit to the Academy with her sister-in-law. She was looking radiantly lovely. The mourning, which did not at all set off Annie’s brunette beauty, was the most perfect setting possible for Lilian’s bright, fair complexion and chestnut-brown hair. She was in good spirits too, and so anxious to start that she gave Annie doubtful help in dressing with her own hands. Then they got into the hansom which was waiting outside, and were at Burlington House in five minutes.
Lilian did not care a straw about pictures, and gave most of her attention to the curious crowd which may be seen at the Academy every year during the last week of the season. They had been through two rooms, and were entering a third, when a gentleman came up to them, and the color deepened on Lilian’s face. He was a tall, strikingly handsome man, of slighter build than the Braithwaites, and much better carriage. Lilian introduced him to her companion as “Colonel Richardson.”
Then they all went on together. Miss Braithwaite, being in a brilliant mood, did all the talking; and, as her talk was chiefly addressed to the new-comer, Annie gradually fell behind them and gave her attention entirely to the pictures. As she noticed how happy Lilian looked, how evidently she was taking pains to please, and how attentive Colonel Richardson was to her, it occurred to the quiet little woman behind that this meeting was not accidental; she was not surprised at their pleasure in each other’s society, and thought to herself what a handsome pair they would make. When they had nearly finished their inspection of the pictures, which had become a very transparent pretext to Annie’s eyes, they turned to her, and Lilian dropped out of the conversation to allow Colonel Richardson to talk to her companion. He could talk about the pictures very well, she found, though he had ignored them a good deal that day; and, when he presently asked permission to call upon her and lend her a book with valuable engravings which he had brought from Italy, she could not easily refuse.
So, two days later, he called and brought the book; and while he was there Lilian came in, and they both stayed to tea. Annie, who was always rather overpowered by the brilliant and rather exacting Miss Braithwaite, was a sweet and gracious little hostess, but listened more than she talked. And Colonel Richardson called after that very frequently. It generally happened that Lilian was there; but that did not seem surprising, for she had got into the habit of spending a good deal of time with the gentle little sister-in-law who made such an amused and therefore amusing listener to her chatter. Sometimes Harry was there; and the influence of the elder man—Colonel Richardson was between thirty-five and forty—upon the younger soon became very strong. The latter worshiped his new friend, and would follow him about like his shadow when he could, so that the colonel had to get him a mount or a seat on a drag to get rid of him.
One evening Harry came home from visiting his aunt and his mother with “a good joke” to tell his wife.
“Aunt Constantia and my mother have found a mare’s nest,” said he, with his usual elegance of speech. “They have discovered that the colonel is a most dangerous man, that he comes here not to see me, who can talk about horses and shooting and all the things he likes, but to make love to you and Lilian! Why, he never speaks to either of you if I’m here! He has too much sense to go dangling after any woman. I told my aunt I could look after my wife, and Lilian could look after herself. She is not the girl to throw herself at any man’s head.”
“But there is no reason why she should not accept his attentions.”
“No reason! What—is his wife no reason?” asked Harry, sharply.
“His wife! Is he married?” cried Annie, in a low, frightened voice.
“Of course he is. Been married for the last ten years!”