At The Relton Arms Part 10

"Why do you say that?" she asked, in the same tone.

"Because he might have married you, and he has just missed it," he breathed in reply; and their heads drew closer together and remained so for a few seconds. They had had enough in their two lives to make them either sure friends or enemies. And morality is mainly a question of circ.u.mstance, and largely dependent on the chances of detection.

"Why are you so good to me?" she asked.

"Am I?" he said with a smile, and he removed one of his hands to brush off the ash of his cigarette. "I am only what you make me. I have always been in your hands, you know."

"Rubbis.h.!.+" she said, and laughed unnaturally, and freed herself from his touch and walked away to the window. Norah's voice came from the orchard, calling him, and he went out through the door. Lady Joan sat on the window ledge and thought over what he had been saying, and then about the words of her letter to Jack, and then that it was time to walk back to the Court and speak about the mending of a certain fence to the man. And finally she thought about nothing at all as she yielded to the drowsiness of the hot spring morning, and rested her cheek against a background of green creepers and became conscious of nothing but a confused medley of well-known sounds,--the loud ticking of the clock in the way trifles a.s.sert their importance after an event, the tuneless humming of the child on the floor, the warning bell of the postman's bicycle as he came round the corner of the street, and the splash of the ducks he frightened into the pond as he came. Then she raised her heavy eyelids, and saw the musician looking at her with a strange, frightened expression on his face.

"Yes?" she said quickly, with a tight feeling at her breast.

He had a telegram in his hand.

"Joan, dear, can you bear to hear something? I--I know I am a weak fool, but some one must tell you, and Norah won't, and I would sooner die than give you any pain, but--Joan--"

His agitation and her own anxiety almost made her hate him.

"Tell me what there is to tell," she cried fiercely, and s.n.a.t.c.hed at the telegram, and then recoiled from it as it fluttered away on the floor.

"No, don't!" she said the instant after, "I think I know it. Jack--"

"Yes, dear. That is it. Jack will never--Jack will never have your letter," and the musician put out his hand to her. She did not take it, nor heed him.

"It was a railway accident--they have not cabled much," he faltered; but she did not help him by a word or a look, and they stood silent for an interminable minute.

Then she spoke through her dry lips with a little forced laugh.

"What a pity I did not wait for the next mail," she said; "what a character for constancy I might have had!"

He had just time to put out his arm to catch her as she fell suddenly forward.

"It is extraordinary how quietly Joan has taken it," Norah said on the evening of the same day. "I often wonder if she does feel things as we do, or whether Mrs. Reginald Routh is not right about her after all. You know, she always did say that Joan's hatred of music meant a lack of heart; of course, that is putting it rather strongly, and I shouldn't call her heartless myself--because n.o.body is quite that; but still, she has been strangely cool about poor Jack, and she has not even mentioned the mourning. I should not be surprised if she did not wear black at all, she is so inclined to be eccentric. I am glad I wrote to Peter Robinson's in time for the post; I shall get the patterns to-morrow. I don't know when I have felt so upset, though of course it does not do to talk about it. I wish there were a piano here; it would do us both so much good, wouldn't it, dear?"

Digby looked at his wife's gentle face as she bent it over her needlework, and he counted the regular folds of her soft gray gown and the coils of brown hair round her head, and he made a few mental reflections on the marvellous nature of woman.

"I cannot conceive what it must be to live without the love of music,"

she went on unconsciously in her low tuneful voice. "Music is like religion in that way, I think; we may try to do without it when we are happy, but we want it terribly when the trials come. Now, what _has_ Joan to fall back upon to-night, do you suppose?"

"I don't know, but I will go and see," muttered the musician; he felt he had had as much as he could stand just then, and he took up his straw hat significantly. The old brown felt one had been gently but firmly suppressed soon after his marriage.

"What was that you said, Digby?"

"I will go and make her come down here to be cheered up. You are too tired to come, eh, childie?" said Digby; and he kissed her before he pushed open the creaking door and went out into the moonlight.

The butler said Lady Joan was busy in her boudoir and wished to be left undisturbed. But Digby managed to gain admittance a few minutes later, and he found occasion to add a few more reflections to his mental synopsis of woman.

"How nice of you to come, and what a cold creature you are! Come and sit near the fire; I waged a war with Mrs. Binks and had a wood fire lighted because I felt chilly, which shocked the conventional old thing very much indeed, because there never has been a fire lighted in here between spring-cleaning and Michaelmas, since the memory of man. But why should I listen to Mrs. Binks or any one else if I don't choose? At all events, it is nice and cosey, and I am going to tell you all my ideas. But tell me first why you came. What are you laughing at?"

She looked up at him sharply from the hearthrug where she had flung herself down to stir the fire, and he stroked his moustache hurriedly.

"I am not laughing, Joan. I came to take you back to Norah--to be cheered up."

"Oh. It was very kind of you--both. How is the baby?" said she, turning a log dexterously over on its side and making the sparks fly up the chimney and send a red glow over her face.

"The baby is--ah--quiescent. Mrs. Haxtell is not. I think on the whole you had better not go there for amus.e.m.e.nt. My family affairs are only funny from the outside just at present. I think you had better give me your new ideas instead. What have you been thinking about all day?"

"That is what I am going to tell you." She stood up and leaned against the mantelshelf, and looked over his head at the bookshelves on the wall. "First of all, I hated myself for a whole hour. I thought I had got outside myself and was looking at myself like--oh, like another woman would look at me, Norah for instance. And I didn't enjoy myself for that hour at all. I almost made up my mind to go abroad again; but it was lunchtime, and over the mayonnaise, which was particularly good to-day, I came to the conclusion that it was like running away, and everybody would say I had gone 'to get over it,' and I could not tolerate that for a moment, could I?"

"Of course not, no. I know I may smoke, mayn't I? And then?"

"Then--" she made an effort not to alter her voice, and exaggerated its pitch in the attempt, "oh, then it became very apparent from the att.i.tude of all the servants that they had heard the news about--Jack.

That is to say, Thomas spoke to me in a whisper at lunch, and never handed me anything twice, and the coachman never sent up for orders at all, and I only just stopped the maids in time from pulling down all the blinds, and Mrs. Binks has been drinking tea in the servants' hall in her black silk dress ever since three o'clock, and did not answer my bell until I rang the second time, and then she appeared with a clean handkerchief in her hand, and a face as long as a fiddle. Aren't servants fond of a tragedy? And am I very heartless to notice all these things, Digby?"

"Heartless? No," he said with emphasis, remembering what his wife had said in the inn; "and after lunch, please?"

"Oh, after lunch I went to sleep. And when I woke up I felt better. I was able to think without getting sentimental over it. Don't you see, it is like this. There isn't anybody."

"I don't understand," said the musician.

"I could hardly expect you to," she said dryly; "there is somebody for you. But for me there is n.o.body, and I am getting old, and I feel frightened sometimes. Remember, that is an admission. I don't know why I am telling you all this, because I want to get to the end. At all events, I had a sort of sensation that I had tried more than most women to gain something, and I had hopelessly missed it; so it was time to turn round and do something, as I should have to go on living all the same. Now, there were two courses open to me: one was to turn the literary cynic and write a novel in which I could vent my spite against my own particular Fate by personifying myself in an ill-used heroine, who talks epigrams from the moment she gets out of bed in the morning, and who loves to a.s.sure her men acquaintances that they may mention questionable topics before her if they like. And the other was to repent and do good works, and become the fas.h.i.+onable philanthropist, and tell the poor and fatherless that they have got to be improved in their condition whether they think they want improving or not. Guess which I chose! Oh, I do wonder if you will guess right;" and she dropped on her knees beside him and looked into his face.

"If you were any ordinary clever woman, I should guess the first; but--"

he paused and looked at the eager, scornful face, and smiled to himself, "no, that wouldn't do for you, Joan. And yet, neither would the other. I can't imagine you walking through the village in awful, hideous garments, carrying a rice pudding and a Bible. Oh, Joan, surely _you_ are not going in for that self-indulgent bosh known as charity?"

"That is where you are so like a man!" She flung herself away from him, and began walking about the room and talking quickly. "You are right about the novel, yes. You see, if I were to write a book it would be so frightfully personal that I should have to take a pseudonym to begin with. And where is the satisfaction of jeering at your friends when they don't know you are doing it? But I don't know why you should take up the old, played-out notion of charity as the only alternative. Who wants to go about with Bibles and rice puddings? Nous avons change tout cela, mon ami! Why, there is no such thing as charity left now; haven't you learnt that from Sir Marcus? It is philanthropy nowadays, my good sir, equally self-indulgent, of course, but more modern and ten times more entertaining. The Bible never need come in at all, and no one sees the rice puddings, _they're_ all managed by committees; all you have to do is to lend your name for the circulars of the league, and hold meetings over afternoon tea in your drawing-room, and _talk_. That is all. _Now_ do you see what I mean?"

"I gather that you mean to take up philanthropy as a new form of diversion; but I am afraid I do not quite recognize the full advantages of the scheme. I don't see--"

"Of course you don't," cried Lady Joan, cheerfully, "you have no cause to see. _I_ don't see the full advantages of married life, for instance. But I am really going to be serious now, so don't interrupt.

In the first place, I am not going to be philanthropic in the country; that only means being hopelessly under the thumb of one's rector, or hopelessly at variance with him; besides, it is so mortally dull, and--I don't mean to be dull just now. So I am going up to Pont Street in October, and I shall organize a regular philanthropic campaign. Oh, I am going to have a fine time! I shall sing for concerts in the East End, I shall paint match-boxes and gridirons and send them to fancy fairs, I shall play with the children in the hospitals, and teach the children of Whitechapel--thank Heaven! no amount of philanthropy can ever spoil the children--I shall even give sumptuous receptions, at which we shall discuss the evils of the sweating-system and the possibility of distributing certain portions of bread and soup to the deserving poor during the cold weather. Who knows that I may not speak on a platform before long? There is always the bearing-rein to fall back upon, if all the others fail; or the prevention of cruelty to birds, now that wearing feathers is out of fas.h.i.+on; or compulsory vaccination, or hygiene and rational dress and other horrors which are so excellent for the poor.

Think of my reputation, Digby! It will be so a.s.sured that even Mrs.

Reginald Routh will not dare to cast a stone at me, and I shall be able to say just what I choose about _anybody_. Why, philanthropy, properly managed, is as telling as music! Won't it be glorious fun, Digby?

Hey-day, what a noise I am making!"

He got up and stirred the logs in the low grate with his foot. She was lying on the sofa, looking at him.

"Well, have you nothing to say to my beautiful idea?" she asked presently.

The musician gulped at something in his throat.

"It is surprising," he began, with an attempt at his old impressive manner, "how difficult it is to make ourselves understood, especially in our most intimate relations."

"What are you talking about?" said Lady Joan.

"I mean," went on the musician, desperately, "that I don't know how to tell you all that is in my mind, dear. Perhaps it is best left unsaid. I don't know; but--when you ask me what I think of it, I can only feel that it is all sad, dreadfully sad. I'm afraid I have not made it very clear, have I?"

She moved her feet, and he came and sat down on the end of the sofa.