Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (56 page)

‘If it wasn’t for these damned Sundays I’d kill her in a very short time from the mere fatigue of the thing, without troubling about a man. But it’s just the Sunday comes in and gives her rest enough to last out the week ensuing, and there doesn’t seem to be any man either that appears likely to suit her tastes — and, good God! what a fool I have been! I might have seen all along that she is, as the vulgar say, “Intense,” meaning aesthetically inclined, and that under the circumstances it was excessively unlikely that she should fall in love with any of the men one meets in society — not even a lionised author. I had imagined that His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Katzenberg-Hoh-muth’s titles might have fascinated her — still I might have known that she was too intellectual to care for titles, besides which, it’s only a foreign one — and yet there were lords enough too. And then, of course, she would hardly see enough of any man in society to fall in love with him. No, I see my mistake. I must have some
intellectual
man constantly in the house — only the difficulty is to find an intellectual man who is young and at all handsome. As a rule intellectual young men are not given that way. However, I think I know a young man that would do — and the best of it is that he has no moral scruples whatever. I’ll write to him at once and ask him to call. I might tell him I am about to write a book, and that he can help me with it, as a sort of secretary. Meanwhile I must get ill, so as to keep her in the house. Oh, damn this collar stud, will it never come undone’ — for all this soliloquy had taken place in his toilet-chamber, where he was undressing himself.

He turned to the cheval glass that stood under the electric light in order to get a better view of the refractory shirt stud. As he caught sight in the glass of his face, rendered more vivid by the strong light, he started, and then stared fixedly at his own reflection.

‘Good God!’ he said, ‘how pale I look myself. It strikes me I must have forgotten the rouge this evening. No, it’s that that makes me look ghastly. I’ll wash it off and see how I look then,’ and he proceeded to the washstand, and in hopes of deceiving himself rubbed the rouge off with a hard nail-brush and then returned to the cheval glass.

Before coming into the range of its reflection he hesitated for a moment, dreading the truth it would reveal; but the suspense was too much for him, and he moved into the view of the mirror and regarded his imaged self therein, and all the while his heart went pit-a-pat as a schoolgirl’s does at the footstep of her lover. With a shudder at his own ghastliness he drew himself away again; but once more he drew a long breath and regarded the reflection, steeling himself to carefully note each new wrinkle and furrow and trying not to shudder at the pallor that overspread it all.

‘My God, I have been mad — mad! I have been killing myself as well as her. I ought to have known that I am too old for it now — and it has been all useless. I am dying — I know it — I have not more than a few months or days to live — and it is all because this damned girl wanted my money,’ he added, with a sudden access of fury, ‘and I cannot kill her, and I shall die unloved, for who will love an old, old man like me — a very old man.’

His voice sank into a strange comic-pathetic whispered sigh, until suddenly he burst into a passionate fit of sobbing, for he had learnt at last that ‘all is vanity.’

Being possessed of a marvellous physique, he had hitherto gone on his way through life up to his present great age without noticing the encroachments that time and his frequent excesses had had on him. Hitherto he had hardly realised that he was no longer in the prime of life, and consequently, with the idea of wearing his wife out, he had plunged into the maelstrom of a London season with almost the same vivacity that he would have exhibited half a century before, and this attempt had consummated the ruin of his vital energies; and thus, when the ghastly truth was forced upon him, he fell a-crying, with all the hopeless pain at heart that a child feels at the loss of a favourite toy. And the weaker his body grew the stronger burnt the flame of his hatred for his wife, until he could hardly dissimulate it, in spite of his marvellous histrionic powers. In the general course of events strong hatreds or strong affections were alien to his cold, selfish nature. But it was his wife who had made manifest first to him that his powers of attracting the opposite sex had deteriorated. When a man has imagined himself, rightly or wrongly, to be a ‘
devil among women’,
he bids fair, as a general rule, to drag that belief along with him until he stumbles, toothless and blear-eyed, into his grave.

Edith had been unlucky enough to deprive her husband of this pleasant conceit, and his vanity and self-love clamoured out loudly for revenge; moreover, it showed him that his end was drawing nigh much more rapidly than he had hitherto cared to own, and Mr Kasker-Ryves hated the thought of death, not only because of the disagreeable associations connected with it, but because, although he was not quite certain as to the probability of Retributive Justice being exacted in a future state, he was perfectly convinced that if there
was
such a place as hell it would be his destined abode. Not that he saw the evil of his ways as a whole, but there was one episode of life that he would gladly have changed if he were able. It was quite an ordinary story, an everyday one, that of a woman that had loved him, whom he had ruined, and who, brokenhearted, had eased herself of the woes of this life; but, strangely enough, it was only after she had taken her own life that he realised that he had loved her. It may have been owing to the fact that her committing suicide for love of him flattered his vanity — very probably it was so — but the thought of her death, when it came into his mind, would cause him such terrible mental agony as almost always to bring on a fit of illness, even at this late date. In fact he dreaded this memory with the abject, cringing fear that a dog has of its master when he calls it sternly, with a sharp-lashed whip displayed. And indeed his very dread of this memory caused him to take the greater pleasure in tormenting his wife, inasmuch as it gave his mind employment, and kept the memory away while he watched the torture she was undergoing, or rather that he was trying to make her undergo, for hitherto he had succeeded but partially, only indeed, to the extent of making her hate him and grow almost distracted at the thought of being linked to him infrangibly. But this was not sufficient for Mr Kasker-Ryves. He knew very well his wife’s conscientiousness, or, as he called it, nursery morality, and he wished to make her feel the irksomeness of her marriage ties when she would fain have broken them in favour of someone else, and he hoped thus to drive her into her grave from the mere hopelessness of longing, for hopeless longing he knew it would remain. Therefore he had dragged her into the vortex of society in the vain hope of finding a man that would prove fatal to her peace of mind.

Hitherto he had failed, and as the reader has seen, he determined on a new plan for bringing her into closer contact with a different type of young man from that to be found in society, namely, a person with some intellect. How this scheme would have succeeded is scarcely problematical, but before he could put it into action several deterrent circumstances occurred. In the first place, he was seized with a violent attack of gout that prostrated him for the time and left him a physical wreck, with a mind like a furnace of hot desires. He knew death was approaching him rapidly, and he was filled with a maddening craving to torture his wife to death before his own end — and yet, rack his brains how he would, he could discover no torment strong enough to kill her. She was at an age when love should be the ruling passion — and yet he could find no one whom she would love.

And so the long months dragged on slowly for them both. The season drew to its close, town grew empty, and people fled to Baden or Homburg — and then the summer drifted by and the autumn came in, with its moon hanging great and golden in a black cloudless sky, looking quietly down on poor passion-torn Edith, wearing herself out in assiduously nursing her querulous, loathsome husband, and shuddering still at every touch she needs must give him in the fulfilment of her duty. And never husband before had a more tender, careful nurse than did Mr Kasker-Ryves in this wife of his, though she knew his black villainy of soul, and knew too that he hated her Yet she nursed him and waited on his every whim and to serve him yet more fully struggled hard not to show her agony of mind at the torment he inflicted on her, for she could not or would not believe that he wilfully pained her. It was her atonement for her sin in vowing to love, honour, and obey him when she
could
only ‘obey.’ Moreover, she had returned to her ancient struggling not to think of her love, in her strong endeavour to do that which was right towards her lord, and this trial was the hardest and most wearing of all. Still she struggled, and struggled bravely, and only at times, when the moon alone saw her, her tears would well over and drop from her eyes, sparkling for a moment in the pure light.

Julia, who was frequently with her, tempted her often to write to Clement.

‘Why on earth shouldn’t you, Edith, dear?’ she said. ‘You never meant to let him drop altogether when you married this old — well, gentleman (to please you), and you might just as well. It would do no harm in the world, and you could explain to him how it really was that you married this Mr Ryves — as it is he might, with every excuse, forget all about you, and when the old gentleman dies you will be alone in the world.’

And so Edith let herself be over-persuaded, and one night she began a piteous letter of appeal to him, but before she had ended it her conscience upbraided her and she left it unfinished — only, since she could not bear to tear up anything that was in any way connected with Clement, she locked the letter up carefully in the box in which she kept all the treasures that she had collected of his. The box she kept at the bottom of a great clothes-press, and this was the first time she had opened it since her marriage, and she could not resist lingering over its contents once again. There was the necklace he had given her, and the bracelets, and the gold ring — she could not help kissing it.
(Mr Ryves was very restless that night, and he wanted his wife to get up and read to him. His step was very noiseless when he wished
,
and he had a knack of opening a door without making the least noise in the world.)
Edith was kneeling on the floor, with her back to the door, leaning over the box. There was one thing Clement had given her that she valued more highly than any other thing in this world — a little bottle with a great poison label — this she seized and kissed a hundred times.
(Mr Ryves had another knack
,
that of closing a door very
,
very gently
,
almost inaudibly.)
A very slight noise came from behind Edith’s back, almost as if somebody had shut the door — that, of course, was impossible, it must have been imagination; but the shock had caused her to feel guilty, and she realised for the first time that she was committing a deadly sin in lapsing thus into sweet dreams, and then a cloud of hopelessness fell on her, and a feeling of dread, of punishment therefor.

‘Oh, if I only thought that my present misery was the punishment for my sin, that I am always lapsing into, I should be happy, and certainly my husband never was cruel to me until I began to let myself think of Clement, so perhaps this wretchedness is the atonement. I wish I wasn’t an atheist, then I could at least pray that the sin I have committed just now might be pardoned — only, as Clement says he is an atheist, I must — but, oh dear, I am thinking of Clement again — I
must
not do it,’ and she gathered the things into the box again, and putting in her own unfinished letter to him, she shut the box and consigned it to its hiding-place again. Of course she ought to have destroyed the box and everything it contained, but her strength of mind could not carry her as far as that; she was, after all, only a girl, and she went to bed and battled manfully against her desire.

Meanwhile a change had come over Mr Kasker-Ryves. He was pacing his bedroom angrily, and swearing at himself for an old fool.

‘Every day brings me a new proof that my dotage is approaching,’ he was saying. ‘I might have known that she had a secret place in which she kept her love-tokens — and it has never entered my head to take impressions of her keys, and yet at one time I had them of even the servants’. I must do it at once — tonight. Aha! my dear child, now I have you in my clutches.’ For Mr Kasker-Ryves could be quite melodramatic when he chose. ‘I feel ten years younger, at least. Now I shall kill her — if I only have time. Oh for time to accomplish my task in — only a little, a very little. I will torture her to death. I wouldn’t mind staking with Fate, my life for hers, that I kill her within the period of my life — suicide and murder excepted. But I won’t let her commit suicide — and no one is likely to murder her — suicide and murder are always excepted in bets between gentlemen, and Fate
is
a gentleman, or rather a lady. Yes, I’ll do it. My life against hers that I kill her (by mental torture) before I die, and that is against Fate. I wish I knew who her lover was. However, I must be calm — I am quite agitated at this moment — and every moment of agitation shortens my life by God only knows how many hours.’

And this extraordinary old gentleman seated himself in an arm-chair and took up
Holy Living and Dying
, which Edith had been reading to him nearly all the day, during which he had been querulous and nervously trying; but now his time of trouble was past, and he felt it was plain sailing to the end, and the end was to be her death — not his own. He waited tranquilly, therefore, for some hours, in order to give her time to fall asleep, after which he walked noiselessly into the room where she slept. It was a matter of some difficulty, for during his illness she had trained herself to wake at his least movement, in order to be always ready to nurse him. Nevertheless, by giving serious trouble to himself, he succeeded in getting possession of the keys, albeit he must needs do so in the dark, for fear of awakening her with a light, and, as all the world knows, it is a serious matter to find a lady’s pocket even in the full light of heaven. But by the time he had finished with them and returned them to their places the grey dawn already lent some aid to him. Once in possession of the impressions on wax, Mr Kasker-Ryves’s troubles were over, and he only needed to send them by post to a locksmith who had done many such jobs for him before. Luck was all on Mr Ryves’s side that day, for the locksmith had only just returned from a sojourn in gaol — on account of a job not unconnected with locks — and being nearly penniless, was anxious to finish Mr Kasker-Ryves’s keys at once and get the money as soon as possible, for he knew by experience that Mr Ryves paid well. Therefore Mr Ryves received his keys a very few days after. By this time the improvement in his health had become so very marked that one morning he said to his wife, —