Men and Wives (9 page)

“Oh now, come, Harriet whatever is there magnanimous in steeling ourselves against what cannot be helped, against what comes from someone's being too sensitive to face things as tougher people face them?” Godfrey's voice naturally rose upon a successful note.

“You do well to stop, Godfrey. Your meaning is clear.”

“Well, then, everything is all right if my meaning is clear. There is an end of the matter in that case.”

“Then let us turn to something else. You did not speak the word to Matthew I asked you to. It comes through to me that you did not. The burden of father and mother will again fall on me.”

“Don't let it fall on anyone,” said Jermyn. “Burdens make habits of falling.”

“And let something pass that ought to be said, and something lapse that ought to be done,” said his mother.

“That would be lovely,” said Gregory.

“No, my son, it would be wrong,” said Harriet in a voice that made her daughter start. “I had hoped my children had learnt so much from me.”

“The heart grows sick with hope deferred,” muttered Matthew.

“It does, my dear. I am a heartsick woman,” said his mother. “That is a fitter term for me than any that have been used.”

“I suppose I am the spur to your eloquence,” said Matthew, “and a woman whose marriage has been less fortunate than yours. Camilla will only gain from being the helpless victim of your bitter spirit. I wonder if any woman's marriage has been more fortunate than yours. It amazes me that you can demand so much and give so little.”

“Matthew, Matthew, my boy!” said Godfrey, with warning. “Of course I give everything to your mother that is in me. She may demand the whole. You must understand that.”

“I understand it,” said his son. “She understands it too.”

“Matthew,” said Harriet, at once conscious and sincere in a broken cry, “has ever a loving mother heard such words from her son?”

“No, I should think not; there would hardly be need for them,” said Matthew.

“Oh, Matthew, now, now. Harriet, don't bear too hard on the boy; don't lay so much on him. He is a highly strung lad and says things as they come to his mind. He is more your son than mine, as I have always said. I have always said that, Harriet. That is why I find him such a companion; he reminds me of you. Come, don't be so heavy on him. You ought to understand each other better.”

“Has he any duty to me?” said Harriet. “Or is all the duty on my side?”

“Mothers have a good deal of it,” said Jermyn. “That is why it is hard to be a mother.”

“I should not have thought you would see it even in that spirit,” said Harriet. “But, my dear, it is not a joke for me.”

“No, but try to see it as a joke, Harriet,” said her husband imploringly. “Try to take it with a sense of humour, because everything has its funny side, you know.”

“Not so many things should have,” said his wife.

“You complain of my writing poetry, Mother,” said Jermyn. “You ought to be thankful I am not a writer of tragedies, as a son of yours.”

“I should be thankful to see you really write anything, my son.”

“Oh, now, Harriet, that is not a fair thing to say,” said Godfrey, almost laughing. “You must not say things to the children to hit and hurt them. It is not like you, my darling, not like the old self you used to be. No, our children will do their best, the most and the least they can do; and their parents' duty is to cheer and believe in them; that is their mother's part.”

“Well, I don't know what Father expects me to do my best in,” said Griselda to her mother, making an unseen movement with her hand.

“My darling child!” said her father, in simple acknowledgment of the effort.

“I don't know either, my dear,” said Harriet, held by the exclamation from her natural maternal response. “It would be wasting words for me to tell you the turn I should like your life to take.”

“No, no, leave the dear child alone, Harriet. Don't make her all upset and put out the first thing in the day. Let her have her breakfast in peace. Give one of them a chance of it. What if she does see a little of the rector? He isn't a man we need mind her being seen with, surely?”

“That is all you want for your only daughter, Godfrey?”

“No, no, not all I want for her. I don't want anything for her. I want her to stay at home and be with me. But a girl can't only look to her father and her family.”

“Well, Father, Jermyn, Griselda and I have been through the trial by ordeal,” said Matthew. “Is Gregory to escape as usual?”

“Oh, Gregory would rather go and talk to a strange old woman than spend an hour with his mother,” said Harriet in a suddenly wailing tone.

Godfrey met the eyes of his two eldest sons, and Matthew rose to his feet.

“Mother, I don't know if you realise in what an inconceivably senseless way you are behaving. I can only hope you don't, for the sake of your respect for yourself, and our respect for you. Do you think it an advantage to estrange your husband and family, and go your way with nothing in your life but deeper sinking into selfish bitterness? We shall not alter our lives and our aims for the whims of one woman. You may have your opinions. We have ours. We show extreme forbearance to your weakness, as if you look at things straight, you cannot but see. You have an excellent husband, dutiful sons, and a daughter who could only be a pleasure to a woman with the feelings of a mother. We have not spoken before; I am not going to speak any longer now. But if you do not pull yourself up in time, you will find yourself one day a very lonely old woman.”

He sat down, breathing hard, and his mother, who had heard him with her chin resting on her hand, answered in a low tone of easy contempt, her eyes going slowly to him from lowered lids.

“So you have told us you are not going to speak any longer, Matthew. We might have been glad of that information before. As for my finding myself one day a very lonely old woman, I have found myself that for a long time.” Her eyelids fell lower and her lip shook.

Godfrey looked at her with a stricken expression, and made a movement to rise, but checked himself to consider, and the hesitation did its work.

“I have an excellent husband and dutiful sons! A husband who will not abate one jot the things that are my daily torment; sons who pursue their selfish aims without a thought of my bitter suffering; an eldest son who can speak to his mother as Matthew has spoken to me; who can brutally and publicly expose her weaknesses, or what he considers to be such, hers, who has never exposed his, give simple praise to himself for an egotism no one but himself has mistaken for anything better, demand more from her who has taken nothing and given all! That is what I have in my husband and sons.”

There was silence.

“Have you anything more to say, Matthew? Because do not let me force you to stop.”

“No, I have said what I meant, Mother. I stopped of my own accord.”

“Ah, you cannot even grant me that, Matthew?” said Harriet with deliberate sadness. “You must stop of your own accord. Well, have it your own way then. Allow me nothing. You stopped of your own accord. You had done what you set out to do; you had given me the wound that you thought would cow me into submission, through my terror lest the knife be turned in it again. You hoped to add that terror to my burdens. When you had done it, you stopped of your own accord.”

“No, no, Harriet, I can't have it left like that,” said Godfrey in a despairing tone. “I can't have it quite in that way. Because it was not just that, my dear. Your sense of fairness tells you so. Matthew may be young and hotheaded, and I am not defending his words. But he was generous in the main; he was honest in his heart. He was making an effort for others besides himself. He had to call up his courage to do it. He felt like a man, and tried to behave as he felt. He knew it was time you should be
protected from yourself. He saw that you must not smash up our affection and our family life, for imagined reasons that do harm to yourself. No, no, Harriet.” Godfrey put a summons into his voice, as his wife rose and left the table. “There is still a word to be said, still a word. Still a word, Harriet! You must allow me one moment; I don't deny you. I spend my life responding to your demands. You are fair, my dear. I ask you for a moment in return. I don't mean that I don't identify myself with you. You and I are one in every detail of our lives. Matthew was addressing his words to both, and I was taking them to myself.”

Godfrey broke off at the sharp closing of his wife's door, and sat back with an expression strange to his face.

“The End of Breakfast!” said Jermyn.

“And the beginning of what else?” said Matthew.

“It isn't possible that all our lives should take shape from one person's pattern,” said Griselda with tears in her voice.

“Possible. I hope not often actual,” said Jermyn. “The struggle to avoid it shows that it might happen.”

“No, no, it shan't be possible, my Grisel,” said Godfrey. “You shall have your life according to your own pattern. Your life is your own, my sweet. And as for my poor boys, sitting there not knowing what to say or think, I can assure them that things will be as if this had never happened. I can set their hearts at rest. You did well to rise up and endeavour to get things on to a better footing, Matthew. You meant well and did well. You bore yourself like a man. Your speech was masterly! And if it was a little young and emphatic, we can't expect old heads on young shoulders. Mother will realise it when she thinks it over. It comes to me that she will. If she gives her impartial thought to it, she might. Gregory, you might do what you can some time. You could try to find some moment. You know we have sometimes to rely on you.”

“And this is the reassurance you promised us,” said Gregory.

“Oh, well, yes, I did promise you,” said his father. “Well, but I begin to feel a doubtfulness creeping over me. I begin to feel in a proper fright, and I don't disguise it,”

“It was better when you did disguise it,” said Griselda.

“You gave up so soon,” said Gregory.

“You have done well only to begin to feel it this minute,” said Jermyn.

“Will all our life consist of it?” said Griselda.

“It cannot consist of it more than it has for some time,” said Matthew.

“There is Mother coming downstairs!” said Gregory.

Harriet's footfall passed through the hall and out of the house.

“Can she be going to church alone?” said Griselda.

“It is not time,” said Matthew.

“Oh, yes, of course it is Sunday,” said Godfrey.

Buttermere approached to clear the table, seeing the continued presence of the family no challenge to his routine.

“Her ladyship has gone out, has she, Buttermere?”

“Yes, Sir Godfrey.”

“Has she gone out long?”

“As you heard her this minute, Sir Godfrey.”

“Did she say how long she would be away, or leave any message about our waiting for her?”

“I am not aware that she has exchanged words with anyone, since she suddenly left the table, Sir Godfrey.”

The carriage came from the stables and went towards the gate.

“Oh, well, she has deserted us,” said Jermyn.

“On Sunday, too,” said Gregory.

Griselda laughed, and Buttermere's face fell at this proof that the trouble bore easy treatment.

Harriet Drove To the town, and directed the coachman to stop at Dufferin's house. Dufferin heard her voice from an upper floor, and came from his working room to meet her. She looked up at his face, caught sight of another face behind it, and stood with a drooping head and deepened breath, as if taking on her shoulders a further burden.

“I am hardened to being eyed askance because I visit my future husband,” exclaimed Camilla. “But the attitude is to be extended to chance encounters with somebody else's son. A leopard's spots cannot be changed, and in Lady Haslam's eyes they are contagious, and shameless exposure of them increases the danger.”

“Well, as you tell me what I have come for, I will go on from your words,” said Harriet. “You know that Matthew has lived in a world very different from yours, a world narrow and careful in your eyes, perhaps narrow and careful in itself. You understand what I am asking you?”

“To recognise that the narrow sphere has unfitted him for the wider one! His handicap is to command my protective tenderness, tenderness being the last feeling you would wish me to harbour towards him!”

“Yes, in one sense as you put it, my dear,” said Harriet, with the maternal touch she had with young women. “I only mean that you are older than Matthew——”

“Oh, am I? Grey-haired and in the sere and yellow leaf! Well, it can't do Matthew any harm to be exposed to my experience. It is Gregory who has a fancy for the aged of my sex. Tell him there is a winning old lady with a welcome for him, if he should care to enrich his collection.
Matthew will vouch for my being an interesting specimen.”

“You are right that I am in your hands,” said Harriet, accepting this word of her son. “As that is so, I must leave myself in them. Antony, since I have come on purpose, and not knowing she was here, Camilla will allow me to have a word with you alone.”

Dufferin led her upstairs to his working room, his face grave.

Harriet turned to him with as complete a change of bearing as if she were unaware of what had passed, Dufferin looking as if he were prepared.

“Antony, this is my life, what people call by that name. The time when they rest from their life is the culminating part of mine. I live while they sleep, and I sleep for an hour when they are waking, and I hear them wake through my hour. I creep from my room, feeling that a sudden touch or sound would drive me mad, already mad with the terror of what may come. And it always comes. Godfrey or the children say some word, and I am beyond help. Poor Godfrey is the goad. I steel myself to meet him, but it is always the same. And I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt of them to go further, and driven on to the worst. I retrace my way in my mind, trying to grasp at what they remember; I almost overtake it and it goes; and each time I reach it less and less, until I hope to get only to a certain point and then less far; and my brain is numb.”