CHAPTER IX
Itwas striking twelve when Bridget and her husband reached home. She pushed open a door on the left of the hall, and touched the button of the electric light. The fire was still smouldering on the hearth. She moved towards it, shivering a little, as she wrapped her cloak closer round her, and drew up an easy chair, into which she sank wearily. Her husband came in a moment later. “Why doesn’t Smithers leave a decent fire?” he asked irritably, kicking the logs together with his heel, till he had stirred them into a blaze.
There was silence. Travers took some whiskey from the spirit stand on the table, and half filled a glass with it.
“Beastly dull evening!” he remarked, taking his cigar-case out of his pocket, and examining its contents.
“I wasn’t bored,” Bridget said, shortly.
“No? You haven’t lost the faculty, my dear,—deliciously fresh, if a triflebourgeois,—of swearing eternal friendship on an evening’s acquaintance.There is something verypiquantabout you, Bridget. In the midst of this jaded, effete civilization, you often remind me of the rustic beauty,—the Miller’s, or the Village Innkeeper’s lovely daughter!”
He cut off the end of his cigar with great deliberation as he spoke.
Bridget watched with interest the sharp, direct thrust of the pen-knife. He glanced furtively at her, but her face was apparently unmoved. He could not decide whether the momentary curl of the lip which he fancied he detected was a trick of the firelight.
“Thisisthe first time you have met that man, Carey, of course?” he observed after a moment, in the same lazy, mocking voice.
“No, it is not the first time.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Indeed? He only landed on Monday, or so I was informed to the point of exhaustion to-night. It seemed to be generally understood that the fact was interesting. I’m sorry it failed to thrill me. Yet you have met him, you say?”
“I knew him five years ago, before he left England.”
“Really? This interests me,” he turned his face towards her. “I always understood that your distinguished friends in those days were not numerous. Were you at Rilchester? Ah!I see. Yet I should hardly have thought that a man like Carey— Still—when the daughter is pretty—” He paused, smiling with half closed eyes.
Bridget flushed. The slow color began to mount in her cheeks; it spread to her neck. The man watched her carefully. His smile became a little more pronounced.
“I met Mr. Carey at a concert,” she said, and rose as she spoke, resting her elbow on the mantel-piece, and facing him. Her voice was still perfectly cool.
“And dispensed with the ceremony of an introduction?” He tapped the tips of his fingers together languidly in applause. “Charming! so idyllic, sonatural. What a pity it is that so also do even the costers. Well? and then? Please go on, I’m really not in the least bored. That was not the extent of your acquaintance, of course?”
“No, I met him again,” she went on quietly, fixing her eyes on her husband’s face.
“By request, of course?”
“Yes, by request. It was through Mr. Carey that my stories were published.” She paused—“and through him therefore, indirectly, that I met you.”
He glanced sharply at her. “I owe Mr. Carey a thousand thanks,” he said, ironically. “To him,then, I—and the world—owe a great pleasure; I can’t conscientiously say a greatliterarypleasure, for from what I remember of them the stories were entirely free from any taint of literary quality whatever; but they were described, I think, aspowerfulandvital, full of human interest, weren’t they? It sounds a little exhausting. Power and vitality always strike me as exhausting, but then the masses have so much energy. It is Mr. Carey I must thank, then, for my wife? I have no adequate words to express my indebtedness.”
Bridget was silent. She stood absolutely motionless. Her face was like a mask.
“Then, if it is not an impertinent question to put to one’s wife, I gather that you and Carey were great friends?—and the rest possibly?”
Bridget broke into a short, scornful laugh.
“Since you ask me, I think the questionisa little impertinent!” she said, lightly.
The man’s face darkened. “Why?” he asked.
“Well! I have long since ceased to inquire what is the relationship between you andyourmany friends.”
“You recognize no difference in our relative positions, then?”
“Not the slightest. Why should I?” she returned, calmly.
“Then you refuse to answer my question?”
“Absolutely.”
“There can be only one interpretation to put on your silence.”
“I know, of course, the interpretation you will put upon it. But that it would be the same one whether I speak or am silent, I am equally convinced.”
“You flatter me!” Travers exclaimed. He flung away the end of his cigar, and rose. “There’s a fire in the smoking room, I suppose?”
“Yes,—one moment, before you go,” Bridget said. She was very pale.
“I should like to go home to-morrow,” she began.
He shrugged his shoulders. “My dear, I’m perfectly willing. Why consult me about such a trifle? Indeed, if I must choose between having my mother-in-law here, or your departure, ungallant though it seems, I prefer the latter evil. Though my acquaintance with Mrs. Ruan has been very limited,—I met her twice at lunch, I think, the last time she paid us a visit,—I have already exhausted her as a type. I’m afraid I can get nothing further out of her.”
“I should like to go home to-morrow,” Bridget repeated, mechanically, “and I shall not come back.”
There was a moment’s pause. The clock ticked loud and insistently in the silence.
Travers slowly raised his eyes to his wife’sface, and looked her deliberately up and down before he laughed.
“Carey doesn’t waste his time, evidently,” he said.
Bridget moved back a step abruptly. She locked her hands tightly together before she spoke.
“That,” she replied, in a low distinct voice, “is a cowardly insinuation, and you know it to be a false one. Will you deny that I have spoken of this to you before? that I have urged it upon you as best for both of us? The fact that you have always treated the matter contemptuously doesn’t alter the case at all. I have lived this life too long,” she went on. “I see, I realize every day, every hour, that I’ve been weak and cowardly not to have insisted upon my freedom before! But—but—” her low passionate voice broke a little—“Idreadedto do it, for mother chiefly, and I always thought, hoped I was to blame, that I hadn’t tried enough, that—” she paused. “HeavenknowsI have tried!” she cried, with a change of voice, raising her head, and looking him full in the face. “Paul! speak honestly. If you can, for one moment, lay aside that sneering, cynical,hatefultrick of speech of yours; speak like a human being for once, and say if there is in your heart one spark of love or affection for me any more!”
He quailed for one moment before her brilliant eyes. Then he recovered himself.
“Love? My dear child, you are remarkably young! You are a very beautiful woman, Bridget,” he said critically, turning his head languidly on one side, with an impartial air. “It’s a pity you waste yourself upon Adelphi melodrama. Why not try Ibsen even? Ibsen is dull, but not altogether meretricious.”
“You have answered my question,—in your own way, of course, but you have answered it,” she said, slowly. “You have no love for me, yet you are unwilling to let me go. Because people say—because some people praise my looks, it pleases you to think of me as your property,—yours, exclusively. You have taken care to try to crush everything that is best in me,—everything that makes me anindividual, aperson, my work, my hopes, my ideals. It is my beauty only you want to keep! That is your side of the matter. As for me—” she stopped. “I have only one active feeling left towards you.”
He bent a little towards her.
“And that is?”
“Contempt!” she answered swiftly, with a deep breath. “You will admit, I think (except of course that the case admits of an excellent opportunity for a paradox), that with these as the predominant feelings on either side, our marriagecan hardly be described as a success! I never realized so terribly as to-night,” she went on, after a moment, the scorn in her voice giving place to intense earnestness, “how terribly, how irrevocably, we two people have drifted apart. Why, I scarcely notice your insults now! I hardly noticed them to-night. I am indifferent. Words which, three years ago, I think I should havediedto hear from your lips, don’t touch me, don’t affect me. Oh, I feel degraded, hateful in my own sight, to have lived with you, as your wife, so long! I’m no better than any poor woman in the street out there!” she cried with a gesture. “Better? I’m worse—worse!Perhaps they don’t always despise and hate the men who— But I will be vile no longer. I can’t breathe in this life.” Her hand went swiftly to her throat, as though she felt physical suffocation. “For the sake of this cowardly keeping up of appearances, I’ve filled the house with people I dislike, I’ve had to listen to and learn their empty, meaningless, surface-clever talk—to lead their artificial, unnatural life. I’m tired of it—weary of it all—already; and here I am,”—she flung out her hands with a quick, vivid gesture,—“young and strong, with years and years before me perhaps. I will not waste my life like this! I too am an individual! I too have my art to think of—you and your friends, with that word foreveron your lips, till one sickens at the sound of it, cannot reasonably deny my right to its expression. But I must have freedom—real, natural life. I must touch what is vital, enduring, again.”
She paused, shaken and trembling, resting her hand against the mantel-piece to steady herself.
“I’m really sorry to interrupt you; for though it’s a style I don’t admire, you do it well—excellently well. Still, there are a few practical points to be considered when you descend from the rarefied atmosphere, which seems already to have affected your breathing.” He regarded her with an air of mild curiosity as he spoke, adjusting his eye-glasses with precision.
“In the first place, is it a legal separation you require? Secondly, how do you propose to live? You will return to your parents possibly? At Rilchester you will, of course, get what you require in the way of natural life,” he continued impartially. “There is something very vital and enduring about beer, for instance.” He paused, took off his eye-glasses and wiped them carefully before he held them up to the light.
“I shall go home first,” Bridget said. Her voice was quiet and steady again. “Possibly afterwards I shall stop with the Mansfields for a time, and try to get some teaching. In any case, I shall write. I am not afraid that I shall beunable to earn a living—enough for me, at least,” she added with calmness.
“And—suppose I object?”
“It is too late for you to object,” she replied quickly. “I am determined. I will not live with you. If you had any love for me, any love whatever,” she repeated, “I would stay. I would try to make you love me more. I would doanythingfor you,” she said brokenly. “But, as it is, all that is left to me is to get back my self-respect. From this moment I mean that we shall be strangers to each other.”
She drew her cloak, with its fleecy white fur, round her shoulders, and turned from the fire as though to leave the room.
The man rose and swiftly caught her hands.
“Really?” he whispered. “Idon’t. You’re much too beautiful to part with easily, Bridget!”
He grasped both her hands roughly in one of his, and with the other drew her to him. His face was close to hers. Bridget’s eyes met his glittering ones, as she raised them, startled and incredulous.
She tore herself free with all the strength of her slender arms, and stood confronting him, her eyes blazing, her breath coming in quick, panting sighs. “I think I am the most miserable fool alive!” she whispered, with fierce self-scorn. “I once mistook you for agentleman, at least. Ican’t forgive myself! Stay where you are!” she cried sharply, raising her voice. “You will notdareto touch me. I’m going to leave this house now, at once, since you are not to be trusted.”
She gathered her cloak over her gleaming dress, still keeping her eyes on his face, and crossed the room, closing the door behind her.
Travers stood where she had left him. He heard the sharp imperative whistle for a cab. The jingle of harness followed almost immediately; there was a dance at the opposite house in the Square—he remembered seeing the row of hansoms waiting, as they drove up. A moment later, he stood, his head thrust forward, listening mechanically to the beat of horses’ hoofs on the frosty road.