CHAPTER IX
The friendship between Kingston and Isabel did not progress apace. Its development was jerky, uneven, unsatisfactory. Kingston was at once restrained and spurred on by resentment. He resented the fact of the friendship, was perpetually reluctant, suspicious, filled with a strange, alert uneasiness. Isabel, for her part, found the relation less careless and smooth thanher friendships usually were. It brought an usually poignant satisfaction, and, in revenge, an unusually poignant feeling of strain and annoyance at Kingston’s refusal to meet her half-way. Normally she should not have cared a straw—by all her rules she did not care a straw—yet, none the less, the guarded hostility with which he met her advances stimulated and exasperated her to the point of defiance.
The two women did not find, as their acquaintance grew, that any intimacy ripened between them. Gundred retained her desire to keep Isabel by her side as a foil, but not even the ardour that the contrast was to keep alive in Kingston could quite reconcile her to the mental eccentricities and untidinesses of Isabel. In Gundred’s mind nothing was ever disorderly or misplaced; second-hand ideas lay neatly labelled in rows; the chaos of Isabel’s thoughts, her incessant flurry of pursuit after some wild notion or other, her ransackings of her intellectual store to find some lost fancy, to run down some far-fetched theory, were so many evidences, to Gundred, of her cousin’s unmethodical, ill-balanced nature. All thought, to Gundred, was clear, simple, obvious; she never entertained any opinion that had not been sanctioned by fashion and much previous use; she could not imagine why anyone should accept new notions, much less go wild-goose-chasing them up and down the cloudy domain of ideas. What had been thought before by wise, good teachers was quite good enough for her; to want more, to ask questions, to test ‘truths’ by reason, seemed forward, ill-bred, and unwomanly. She put down all Isabel’s vagaries of mind to her disastrous colonial education, and believed at first that a few weeks’ association with ‘nice people’—the nice people being, in the context, herself—would cure her cousin of such vagabond tendencies. So by smiles and indifferenceshe repressed Isabel’s ebullitions; and when she found that her conduct had no effect beyond excluding herself from the conversation, she resigned herself calmly to the inevitable.
Irritated at first by Isabel’s mental jumps and flights, Gundred, after her attempts at repression had failed, grew tired and bored, made no effort to follow her cousin’s mental movements, and, with a mildly reproving air which nobody noticed, stood graciously aloof from Isabel’s dialogues with Kingston. She let them talk, and, by way of tacitly rebuking her cousin, ostentatiously ceased to take any interest in what they said.
With Kingston, as was inevitable, this course insensibly began to shift her relationship. As the days went by, he talked more and more to Isabel, until by degrees she became insensibly the target for everything he said. Imperceptibly he grew to ignore his wife, thanks to the attitude that she assumed. However, she was perfectly, increasingly happy. For, as his intellectual intimacy with Isabel advanced, he grew more and more the warm lover of his wife. And she, the apparently cold and ethereal, by the irony of her own limitations, came at last to base the triumph of her wifehood on the strength of her husband’s embraces. His raptures, his compliments, his kisses, grew in number and ardour; she had her heart’s desire. No thought of jealousy could ever have approached her; for intellectual intimacy she had no taste, no wish. As long as she had Kingston’s arms, Isabel was perfectly welcome to a monopoly of his tongue. She, Gundred, was his wife, and nothing could alter the glory of that. She triumphed in the successful development of their relations.
That men like to chatter and overflow and sweat off in talk the superfluous energy of their minds she knewto be an accepted fact. Some women are born for men to talk to, but the ultimate triumph belongs to the wife, the woman who orders the man’s dinner, sees to his comforts, has him for her property at bed and board. As long as his body remains faithful and loyal, who cares where his undisciplined mind may go roving from hour to hour? So Gundred was glad to compound for Kingston’s increasing affection by welcoming the distractions in which his mind indulged, and even, in the rare moments when she could divert her attention from her own bliss, was vaguely sorry for Isabel, reduced to so poor and undignified a rôle as that of wash-pot to the intellectual offscourings of a married man. But Isabel, after all, had brought the humiliation on herself, and Gundred soon returned to the contemplation of the mastery which she had established over her husband’s affection by providing him with someone to talk to. Wifely tact, she felt, had been splendidly justified. She never stopped to consider that the means by which she had achieved her end in themselves betrayed the disastrous weakness of her position. Her idea of temptation was limited to physical allurements; husbands, she knew, were only led away by bad, beautiful women, never by untidy, talkative ones. Her position was absolutely safe and dominant; the more freely her husband’s mind was allowed to wander and kick up its heels, the more securely was her husband’s body bound in the bonds of its allegiance. Infidelity is only a matter of the flesh. Without physical desire there can be no adultery.
So passed the remaining days of their stay at Brakelond. Then the three removed to Ivescar, and, with the setting, the colour of the whole drama changed. Human life and death was the keynote of Brakelond; its Castle seemed built and mortared with the tears and tragedies of innumerable generations. Every stone waspermeated with the history of ten thousand men and women, who, through eight centuries, had brought to bear upon the building the fire and fury of their individual existences. Outside the walls rolled down the skirt of forest, and below lay the sea; but forest and sea were subordinate in the scheme, decorations and embroideries on the main theme. And the main theme was the incessant human note that resounded in every detail of the old tragic Castle.
At Ivescar, on the other hand, man was a new-comer, an accident, a thing irrelevant and even incongruous. High up in its narrow mountain-valley lay the house, amid a plantation of stunted, wind-swept pines. It had the air of having been put there, not of having grown. Brakelond had sprung and waxed from the rock it stood on; it was the last crowning development of the land it dominated. Ivescar was an artificial product, unrelated to the soil, the work of alien brains and alien natures. Twenty centuries might pass over it without bringing it into any closer kindred with its surroundings, without softening the raw, crude note of novelty that it would always strike among the solemn eternal hills. It was a large sandstone building, of the most solid Early-Victorian Tudor design, as Isabel’s instinct had foretold. In the middle rose a big square tower, finished off with a stone lacework of circles and spikes. It had a flagstaff, a cupola with a bell in it, and a huge conservatory that had been put there because it was expensive to set up, and now remained there because it would be expensive to remove. On three sides of it stretched a bare lawn, and on the fourth its less honourable quarters were shrouded in sparse plantation, created at great outlay, with much difficulty and no success. The one level space of ground in the glen had been picked out, all its irregularities trimmed away, and the pretence of apark elaborately maintained under the mountain-slopes that rose stark and stern on either side. A little river struggled down from the end of the valley, and found its way among stones and mosses through the young woodland. Where it passed within sight of the house, at the other side of the flat lawn, it had been civilized and sedulously constrained into decorum. Its banks had been widened, made uniform and flat. Dammed at one end, it had been made to stretch out into a square shallow lake, whose grey and steely surface reflected the staring yellow of the house against the grey hills and sky behind, with a dreariness impossible to conceive. Coarse, rank grasses grew along its margin, and its shoals, malodorous and muddy, were abristle with melancholy rushes.
Behind and on either side of Ivescar rose the fells—steep slopes of grass and scree, carrying up to the white precipices that hemmed the little valley in. High above these again, but out of sight, rose the mass of the great mountains, each standing on its plinth of limestone. Here and there the line of a wall betrayed the existence of humanity, but otherwise, except for the house in its artificial wood, with its artificial lawn and lake, the landscape utterly ignored the world of men. It was grand, primeval, solitary, remote from all the small mortal concerns of life. As it had been since the dawn of history, so it remained to-day. Peoples had come and gone, dynasties towered and crashed; but the little glen under the shadow of the Simonstone had wrought out its own fate untroubled by the clatter and tinkle of collapsing empires. Silent and serene as it stood, the finger of man had never scarred its tranquillity, the voice of man had never broken into the current of its dream. And yet, in the midst of this immortal solitude, the fancy of a rich manufacturer had planted this insolent mushroom of ahouse, this brazen assertion of a fact which the hills had always chosen to ignore, though Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norman had vainly striven to enforce it on their consciousness, as they fought out their ephemeral fights across the flanks of Ravensber, or made their settlement on the flat crown of the Simonstone. The valley and the mountains had taken their unruffled course. Had the house been less clamorous, the assault on their notice less insistent, they might in time have come to assimilate the signs and the presence of man. A quieter dwelling might insensibly have melted into their scheme, have been merged into the vast individuality of the hills. But Ivescar was too flaunting, too blatant, too eternally new. It compelled attention, was an unceasing penny-whistle across the great harmony of silence. And so, unable to make Ivescar one with themselves, the mountains took the only other course, refusing all compromise, and forced the incongruity of the building upon the world’s notice, by the blank contempt with which they ignored it. Their unnoticing disdain made its yellow stones, its pretentious tower appear even more undignified than ever, emphasizing every detail of their parvenu richness, their uneasy vulgarity. Man at Brakelond was the dominant note of Castle and country; here the note was an isolated discord. Man was nothing, his works an offence, amid the enormous loneliness of the fells.
Gundred, however, found herself warmly approving of Ivescar. True, the country just round was “dreadfully black and barren, very ugly and uncultivated”; but the house was roomy, airy, warm, comfortable, quite suitable and pleasant in every way. It would hold plenty of people, and had been built with an eye to the convenience of house-parties. Carpets and curtains and cushions were all opulent and softly luxurious. They compared well, to her taste, with thebare floors, the flags, the worn matting of Brakelond. She resolved on a few improvements, but, on the whole, was very well satisfied. A building produced by one mind may, perhaps, have a less complicated personality, a simpler sense of unity, than one built up by the varying tastes of twenty succeeding generations. Ivescar was plain and direct in scheme. There was a good collection of pictures, bought, all together, by James Darnley from the previous owner, who had accumulated them because he imagined it a suitable thing to do; otherwise Ivescar was tormented by no ambitions whatever, artistic or dramatic. It only aimed, with a good-humoured whole-heartedness, at being altogether comfortable. Gundred entered into its spirit, and in an environment so congenial her abandonment of all attempt to share in conversation with Kingston and Isabel became at once more complete and less noticeable. She passed into entire absorption in the details of daily life, lost any wish to be in touch with intellectual life, took the colour of her surroundings so perfectly that neither she herself nor the others realized how completely she had withdrawn from their company.
As for Isabel, the exasperating vividness of the woman leapt into more violent relief than ever against the smug complacency of Ivescar. At Brakelond Isabel had been a part of the place; her individuality had toned in with all the other individualities that had gone to make up Brakelond. As one organ note is inconspicuous among a crowd of other organ notes, so Isabel’s nature had there been merged in a crowd of other similar natures. Here, however, at Ivescar the organ note of her personality sounded harsh and tremendous, almost terrifying, amid the clacking babble of mediocrity for ever kept up by the house. Only trifling, futile people had had part in the building andthe life of Ivescar; their influence had left the place a pleasant little chorus of tinkling inanities; and, by contrast, the fierce song of Isabel’s nature rose dominant, tyrannous, obliterating all the lesser voices around.
Kingston by degrees began to notice the disappearance of his wife and the supremacy of her cousin in his mind. Occasionally he showed a dim foreknowledge of the inevitable by brief spasms of anger against Isabel, by fruitless attempts to carry Gundred with them in their flights. But by now Gundred’s mental immobility had begun to be an annoyance to him, and he was always glad to relinquish his efforts and fall back into the familiar swing of dialogue with Isabel. The faint air of greatness which for a time had been reflected on Gundred from the walls of Brakelond had now faded utterly. She was swallowed up in household details, could be seen meditating on ‘menus’ while the most fantastic notions were flying swiftly between her husband and her cousin. Her life was now consumed in coping with the cook; she was completely happy in her task, and it was with growing readiness and growing wrath that Kingston let her drop from his mental intimacy. She filled up time by talks with her mother-in-law, who had a dower house down the valley. The somewhat woolly mind of Lady Adela was very congenial to Gundred, and her small, clear-cut nature found it both harmonious and restful—like her own, though so utterly unlike. The two women took refuge in each other; and Gundred, taken up by the house and Lady Adela, would not have had the leisure, even had she had the acumen, to remark how completely she was passing out of her husband’s life.
‘Is the house insured?’ asked Isabel one morning. Kingston and she were sitting together under the long wall of the picture-gallery.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘I always forgetthings like that. My dear,’ he cried, calling to his mother, who had walked up across the fields with her knitting, and now had established herself in one of the cushioned window-seats close to Gundred, who was methodically checking a Stores List—‘my dear, is the house insured?’
Lady Adela answered in the affirmative, and Gundred made haste to clutch her share in a conversation that she could understand, by swiftly affirming that, if not, it ought to be at once.
‘Otherwise one feels it such a responsibility to live in a house—yes?’ she added.
‘I don’t like betting and gambling,’ replied Isabel, assuming a manner of exaggerated rectitude.
‘My dear!’ protested Lady Adela, looking mildly up at her over her spectacles. If Lady Adela could dislike anyone, she disliked her daughter-in-law’s new cousin. Deep in her heart she condemned Isabel as strong-minded. Tiresome and strong-minded.
‘It’s a gamble with Fate, you know,’ explained Isabel; ‘all insurance is, of course—having a bet on with the Almighty that He won’t burn down your house or throw your train off the rails.’
‘My dear!’ protested Lady Adela again.
‘You have such strange fancies, Isabel,’ said Gundred coldly. ‘You always think of things that no one else would think of.’
Clearly, as delivered in Gundred’s neat, precise tones, this was the final expression of righteous disapproval.
‘My feet must be extraordinarily small,’ said Isabel to Kingston. ‘I seem to be always putting them into it. They go into the most incredibly tiny loopholes. I don’t believe I could walk across the lid of a pepper-pot without putting my foot into it somehow.’ She stuck out both her feet in front of her, and gazed at them dispassionately.
The action may have been an instinctive appeal for admiration. The feet, though large, were beautifully shaped, with a suggestion of strength and swiftness in their lines. But Kingston angrily compelled himself to notice that they overlapped their shoes, that one shoe had lost its buckle, and that the stocking above each descended in wrinkles that betrayed a weakness in the matter of suspenders.
‘Cover them up,’ he said. ‘Mine eyes dazzle.’
‘They haven’t died young yet, though,’ replied Isabel, finishing the quotation. ‘Perhaps they will, though—the feet, I mean.’
‘Why do you ask about insurance, Isabel?’
‘I was thinking that you might welsh the Powers that be, and burn the house down, and get the money to build a decent one. This great garish glassy palace is not a bit at home here among the hills. You want something sombre and quiet and self-sufficient as they are—something that will be at ease with them. This house of yours is about as much at ease among the hills as a brewer’s wife having tea with half a dozen Dowager-Empresses. You want a building that won’t be fussy and assertive.’
‘Then want must be my master. You have the most placid way of suggesting things. Do you always get what you want yourself, quite irrespective of the means?’
‘What is the use of wanting things,’ said Isabel defiantly, ‘if one doesn’t get them? One might as well never want them.’
‘But what about other people? If they object? If you can only win over their dead bodies?’
‘Oh, they must look out for themselves. Every herring must hang by its own tail. It is everybody’s business to get what they want. If they can prevent me from doing as I wish, why, then they may; and if they can’t, well, I romp in; and if they get in myway while I am doing it, why, so much the worse for them. They go under.’
‘There’s your crude individualism again,’ protested Kingston. Then he turned to his wife, determined to bring her into the dialogue. She was soberly conversing with Lady Adela over the Stores List.
‘Are you an individualist, Gundred?’ asked her husband. ‘Isabel’s a terror; she has no respect for other people.’
Gundred finished her sentence calmly.
‘Besides, they say that spotted ones are bad for the eyesight,’ she concluded, then prepared to answer her husband. ‘What did you say, dear? Of course one must respect other people, or how are other people to do the same to us?’
Unlike Kingston, Isabel was inclined to resent her cousin’s invasion.
‘Oh, Gundred doesn’t count,’ she cried. ‘Gundred’s a civilized woman. Now, you and I are only pagans, Kingston.’
‘My dear, dear child,’ exclaimed Lady Adela, unspeakably distressed, ‘Kingston is nothing of the kind, I am sure!’
‘Don’t trouble about Isabel,’ explained Gundred. ‘She is always talking nonsense—yes? Nobody ever cares what she says. Go on talking to Kingston, Isabel, but really you must not interrupt us any more. We have our duties, Kingston, and you idle people must not disturb us.... Dear Lady Adela, do you really think we want a dozen of those common table-cloths?’
Kingston and Isabel were silent for a moment, listening to Gundred’s conversation with her mother-in-law.
‘Well, I always believe it is best in the long run to get rather too much than too little,’ replied Lady Adela, pondering the question.
‘Besides,’ amended Gundred, with a more cheerful air, ‘they might give one discount on a quantity.’ Nothing should induce her to waste the superabundant Darnley wealth. She licked the tip of her pencil, prepared to tick off table-clothes with a lavish hand.
‘Would you say at eight and six each, or at nine shillings?’ she asked anxiously, poising the pencil in indecision.
‘Oh, for the servants, my dear, eight and six will be ample. They wear out their things in no time. It is quite shameful that they should be wanting new ones already. I got them a whole supply only the year before last.’
Gundred cluck-clucked.
‘Dear, dear,’ she said, ‘that Mrs. Bosket must really be a very careless woman—yes? And she tells me that new sheets are wanted as well—sheets and pillow-cases, dear mamma.’
‘My child, how truly dreadful!’ answered Lady Adela. ‘You must certainly keep a close eye on Mrs. Bosket, though I do trust the poor thing is honest.’
‘Oh, perfectly, and most obliging, but not equal to responsibility. One so often finds that in a household. And it is so important to have an efficient head—yes? I feel that one cannot safely leave her the ordering of things like this, for instance. I have to do it myself.’
Had she had ten housekeepers—had she been the daughter of two reigning sovereigns—Gundred would still have insisted on ordering the table-cloths herself. It was her nature, but she made a virtue of her nature’s necessity, and fell to weighing the comparative merits of pillow-cases at half a crown and at three and six. Half a crown was eventually fixed on.
Isabel looked at Kingston. She saw that Gundred’s dialogue had irritated him. Why his annoyance was so keen she hardly knew. He himself would havebeen puzzled to account for it. Her eyes triumphed as she watched him, and obviously rejoiced at the defeat of his effort to pull Gundred into their talk.
‘That’s all you are likely to get out of Gundred for an hour or two,’ she murmured.
‘Martha is a much more pleasant, useful person than tiresome, head-in-the-air Mary,’ he flashed back at her resentfully.
‘Especially to talk to,’ replied Isabel mildly. ‘As a matter of fact, a man wants both sorts—a Martha-wife and a Mary-wife: the Martha-wife to air the beds and order the dinner, and the Mary-wife to look at and talk to. Most of the tragedies in history have arisen from a man’s failure to get the two in one person. Lucky men have an aunt or a sister, as well as a wife, to fill the second part; but generally a man either has a Mary-wife who talks brilliantly, but feeds him on cold mutton, or a Martha-wife who will order a good dinner, but can only talk about the servants. And then he looks round for someone to think about meals, while Mary discusses the soul; or to discuss the soul while Martha is interviewing the cook. And then there are complications. The whole system is wrong. People ought to be much freer to get what they like.’
Kingston resented Isabel’s tranquil description of the Martha-wife. It had nothing to do with any case they knew of. To talk about it was silly impertinence.
‘Individualism again,’ he answered. ‘You are an anarchist, Isabel, like all egoists. Anarchy never pays in the long run.’
‘No,’ admitted Isabel, ‘one has to pay for it in the long run, of course. But until the bill comes in one has a good time—quite worth the price one has to give.... Ask the lady behind you. There is a triumphantinstance of the Mary-wife, and the egoist, and the individualist, all in one. She died for it at last, but she had all she wanted while she lived. That is me; I’ll die gladly, but I mean to have all I want till then.’
Kingston turned to look at the picture to which Isabel pointed. From a background as dark as her end there smiled out at him, enigmatically, whimsically, the face, so much more prudish than passionate, of a woman so much more passionate than prudish—the face of Anne, “Marquis” of Pembroke, concubine and Queen.
‘So there is your model,’ he answered her contemptuously. ‘Well, she had her way, and her way led her to the block on Tower Green.’
‘Let it. What does that matter? It had led her first over the scarlet cloth of a throne. The price was heavy, yes, but she always knew it would be. I expect she was even glad to die at last, and have rest, and be out of all her glorious, dreadful suspense. And the splendour she bought was worth it. What do I care for the bill I may have to settle some day? If I want a thing, that means I intend to have it. Do you think a beggarly consideration of economy would stop me? Thank Heavens, I am not a miser. Why, to haggle over Fate’s account would be like Gundred wrestling for a twopenny discount off a pillow-case. No, Queen Anne and I know better, don’t we, your Grace?’
Isabel rose and stared into the picture. The pursed lips, the sly, slanting eyes beneath their demure lids, responded mysteriously to her gaze. This was not the woman that Holbein drew in the last hours of her tragedy, weary, worn, and haggard; this was the Queen of his earlier paintings, as he and Lucas Cornelisz saw her in the radiance of triumphant battle, the fierce adventuress-soul that, with nothing in her favour—neither beauty nor position nor wealth—and with everything against her in the fight—a kingdom,a wife, a Church—yet by sheer force of brilliancy, courage, and charm, fought her way at last, through the wreckage of a religion, to the throne of a Queen.
‘Your Grace,’ said Isabel, ‘you and I are friends. You were a pagan like me. What you wanted nothing could stop you from getting, neither armies of enemies nor any silly dread of the price to pay at the end.’
‘I wish you joy of your friend,’ said Kingston, filled with inexplicable hostility. ‘Ask her what she thought of it all at the end; ask her what she felt that last night at Greenwich, when the King had deserted her, when she was still treated as Queen by people bowing and backing and saying “Your Grace” to her, who in their hearts were all stealthy enemies from whom there was no escape (with bets among themselves as to when her head would be off and a new Queen crowned); when she had to be brave and royal among all those crowding black, invisible dangers, under the descending shadow of the axe. Don’t you think she wished then that she had not been such a pitiless individualist? Don’t you think she wished then that she had been allowed to live and die plain Lady Northumberland?’
‘Brave and royal you were, your Grace,’ cried Isabel to the picture. ‘You never regretted, did you? If you had, you would have been a poor lath-and-plaster creature, unworthy of what you did. Your nerves gave way for an hour or so. They had been at full stretch for three terrible years of crowned suspense. So it was no wonder they snapped just for a moment in your fall. But it was not death you were afraid of; it was just the crash and the dying. You were a Queen at heart. You fought for your life as a Queen, and in the end it was as a Queen you died. Nobody else, not even in that strong, brutal time, died in such an exaltation of gladness.’
‘An egoist should not be an idealist as well,’ protestedKingston. ‘You make too pompous a song about a peddling adventuress put shamefully out of the way by a political job.’
‘Take care,’ cried Isabel. ‘When I knew her Grace, she was not a lady to be spoken lightly of. Her enemies only killed her because they did not dare to let her live. Even her worst enemies dreaded her cleverness and her courage. And her dying words must have taken the skin off her husband’s back when he heard them. The demure gentleness of them, the vitriolic irony of them! You may have been “spiteful, flighty, and undignified,” your Grace, but you were splendid, terrible, indomitable. And you must have been marvellously charming when you chose, you plain, prudish-looking creature with six fingers and the devil’s temper. There’s a Mary-wife for you, to hold the interest and curiosity of the King, while his poor good Martha of a Katherine was everlastingly saying her beads and hemming shirts.’
‘My dear Isabel, I tell you that the song of history is “Pay, pay, pay.” If you want to follow Anne Boleyn, you must follow her all along the road.’
‘My dear Kingston, history may sing “Pay, pay, pay,” but it sings to deaf ears when it tries to impose its twaddling threat on well-bred souls. Only stupid, parvenu people ever think of reckoning up the cost of anything beforehand. It’s the hall-mark of recent wealth to be sparing of its pence. One does not bother about such things. One buys first, and only asks the price when the time comes to pay the bill.’
‘And then the price may make you bankrupt.’
‘Oh no. Fate’s bills are paid in courage, and I hope one would never be bankrupt of that. I think I shall always be able to settle up. One plunges, like Queen Anne. Your Grace did not stop to haggle. You and I go boldly forward, order what we want from theStores of Life, and don’t give a thought to discounts and reductions and Summer Sales. And then, when the time comes, we fork up with a will, and pay out our uttermost penny.’
For a moment Kingston did not answer her. He stood looking into the secretive face of the Queen. Gundred’s voice broke the silence.
‘I know where one can get them at two and six,’ she was heard remarking in her clear, level tones.
‘There’s Queen Katherine arranging the household,’ laughed Isabel, with insolent regardless frankness, ‘and here is Queen Anne ordering a crown across the counter of life. No discount asked, and only the best required.’
Kingston looked at her with rage in his eyes. She was always saying crude things like that—things that roused in him swift opposition and dislike. Yet he remained helpless, as if bound by a spell. And her indifference to everyone’s opinion was so profound, her scorn of conventions so sincere that no reproach could be brought home to her. She had no common standard for measurement by the rules of the world. One might as well have attempted to reprove a savage for going naked, or an Englishwoman for going clothed.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I hope your bill will be as heavy as Queen Anne’s; then we shall see how you behave when it comes to paying for it.’
‘But perhaps I have not really decided what I shall order from the shop-keeper?’
‘Oh, well, I neither know nor care,’ replied Kingston savagely. ‘And you don’t seem to have the decent instincts of the real honest buyer, either. From the anarchistic things you were saying a few minutes ago, I should have thought you would have been a shop-lifter, pure and simple, going in and stealing whatever you wanted, without a thought of paying for it.’
This time he had touched her. She flushed.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘When it comes to the big things of life, I am as honest as the day. Love and hope and so on I should expect and intend to pay the top price for—pay it thoroughly to the last farthing, sooner or later. I am only an anarchist in little things. I might steal for a fancy, and assert my individualism for a whim, but really, really, Queen Anne hasn’t a thought of bilking when she orders her crown. Whatever I buy I shall pay good money for, Kingston—pay it ungrudgingly, if I have to die for it.’
Her earnest face, as she turned it to his, burning and eager, had a strange fascination. He turned roughly away towards his wife.
‘We are talking about Anne Boleyn,’ he cried, raising his voice to penetrate Gundred’s attention—‘how she had her fun, and then paid the money.’
‘And nine is twenty-one,’ answered Gundred, completing her sentence in mechanical tones.... ‘What, dear? Oh yes, Anne Boleyn, poor little thing! so dreadfully treated by her husband. The first martyr of the Church of England.... And now, about prunes, mamma?’
Kingston, angry and disappointed, turned again to Isabel. Primly, inscrutably, Queen Anne smiled down upon them from the wall. She had heard about that martyrdom before. She knew better. She had been the martyr of ambition, not of dogma; she sold her life for a crown, not by any means for a faith. And she thought her martyrdom the grander. In her passionate mysterious heart she pondered Isabel’s brave declaration, and wondered whether the modern woman, too, would be content to pay her debt, when the time should come, for the big things she had ordered at the counter of Fate. Beneath the riddle of her smile Kingston and Isabel fell once morea-talking, while across the room Gundred was still ticking off groceries, and exchanging plans of household economy with her mother-in-law.