The Woman Thou Gavest Me; Being the Story of Mary O'Neill

Some further time passed. I sat by the fireless grate with my chin in my hand. If the storm outside was still raging I did not hear it. I was listening to the confused sounds that came from the sitting-room.

My husband was pacing to and fro, muttering oaths, knocking against the furniture, breaking things. At one moment there was a crash of glass, as if he had helped himself to brandy and then in his ungovernable passion flung the decanter into the fire grate.

Somebody knocked at the sitting-room. It must have been a waiter, for through the wall I heard the muffled sound of a voice asking if there had been an accident. My husband swore at the man and sent him off. Hadn't he told him not to come until he was rung for?

At length, after half an hour perhaps, my husband knocked at the door of my little room.

"Are you there?" he asked.

I made no answer.

"Open the door."

I sat motionless.

"You needn't be afraid. I'm not going to do anything. I've something to say."

Still I made no reply. My husband went away for a moment and then came back.

"If you are determined not to open the door I must say what I've got to say from here. Are you listening?"

Sitting painfully rigid I answered that I was.

Then he told me that what I was doing would entitle him to annul our marriage—in the eyes of the Church at all events.

If he thought that threat would intimidate me he was mistaken—a wave of secret joy coursed through me.

"It won't matter much to me—I'll take care it won't—but it will be a degrading business for you—invalidity and all that. Are you prepared for it?"

I continued to sit silent and motionless.

"I daresay we shall both be laughed at, but I cannot help that. We can't possibly live together on terms like these."

Another wave of joy coursed through me.

"Anyhow I intend to know before I leave the island how things are to be. I'm not going to take you away until I get some satisfaction. You understand?"

I listened, almost without breathing, but I did not reply.

"I'm think of writing a letter to your father, and sending Hobson with it in the car immediately. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Well, you know what your father is. Unless I'm much mistaken he's not a man to have much patience with your semi-romantic, semi-religious sentiments. Are you quite satisfied?"

"Quite."

"Very well! That's what I'll do, then."

After this there was a period of quiet in which I assumed that my husband was writing his letter. Then I heard a bell ring somewhere in the corridor, and shortly afterwards there was a second voice in the sitting-room, but I could not hear the words that were spoken. I suppose it was Hobson's low voice, for after another short interval of silence there came the thrum and throb of a motor-car and the rumble of india-rubber wheels on the wet gravel of the courtyard in front of the hotel.

Then my husband knocked at my door again.

"I've written that letter and Hobson is waiting to take it. Your father will probably get it before he goes to bed. It will be a bad break on the festivities he was preparing for the village people. But you are still of the same mind, I suppose?"

I did not speak, but I rose and went over to the window. For some reason difficult to explain, that reference to the festivities had cut me to the quick.

My husband must have been fuming at my apparent indifference, and I felt as if I could see him looking at me, passionate and proud.

"Between the lot of you I think you've done me a great injustice. Have you nothing to say?"

Even then I did not answer.

"All right! As you please."

A few minutes afterwards I heard the motor-car turning and driving away.

The wind had fallen, the waves were rolling into the harbour with that monotonous moan which is the sea's memory of a storm, and a full moon, like a white-robed queen, was riding through a troubled sky.

The moon had died out; a new day had dawned; the sea was lying as quiet as a sleeping child; far out on the level horizon the sky was crimsoning before the rising sun, and clouds of white sea-gulls were swirling and jabbering above the rocks in the harbour below the house before I lay down to sleep.

I was awakened by a hurried knocking at my door, and by an impatient voice crying:

"Mary! Mary! Get up! Let me in!"

It was Aunt Bridget who had arrived in my husband's automobile. When I opened the door to her she came sailing into the room with her new half-moon bonnet a little awry, as if she had put it on hurriedly in the dim light of early morning, and, looking at me with her cold grey eyes behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, she began to bombard me with mingled ridicule and indignant protest.

"Goodness me, girl, what's all this fuss about? You little simpleton, tell me what has happened!"

She was laughing. I had hardly ever heard Aunt Bridget laugh before. But her vexation soon got the better of her merriment.

"His lordship's letter arrived in the middle of the night and nearly frightened us out of our senses. Your father was for coming away straight, and it would have been worse for you if he had. But I said: 'No, this is work for a woman, I'll go,' and here I am. And now tell me, what in the name of goodness does this ridiculous trouble mean?"

It was hard to say anything on such a subject under such circumstances, especially when so challenged, but Aunt Bridget, without waiting for my reply, proceeded to indicate the substance of my husband's letter.

From this I gathered that he had chosen (probably to save his pride) to set down my resistance to ignorance of the first conditions of matrimony, and had charged my father first and Aunt Bridget afterwards with doing him a shocking injustice in permitting me to be married to him without telling me what every girl who becomes a wife ought to know.

"But, good gracious," said my Aunt Bridget, "who would have imagined you didn't know. I thought every girl in the world knew before she put up her hair and came out of short frocks. My Betsy did, I'm sure of that. And to think that you—you whom we thought so cute, so cunning. . . . Mary O'Neill, I'm ashamed of you. I really, really am! Why, you goose" (Aunt Bridget was again trying to laugh), "how did you suppose the world went on?"

The coarse ridicule of what was supposed to be my maidenly modesty cut me like a knife, but I could not permit myself to explain, so my Aunt Bridget ran on talking.

"I see how it has been. It's the fault of that Reverend Mother at the convent. What sort of a woman is she? Is she a woman at all, I wonder, or only a piece of stucco that ought to be put up in a church corner! To think she could have you nine years and never say one word about. . . . Well, well! What has she been doing with you? Talking about the mysteries, I suppose—prayers and retreats and novenas, and the spiritual bridegroom and the rest of it, while all the while. . . . But you must put the convent out of your head, my girl. You are a married woman now. You've got to think of your husband, and a husband isn't a spiritual bridegroom I can tell you. He's flesh and blood, that's what a husband is, and you can't expect him to spend his time talking about eternity and the rosary. Not on his wedding-day, anyway."

I was hot in my absurd embarrassment, and I dare say my face was scarlet, but Aunt Bridget showed me no mercy.

"The way you have behaved is too silly for anything. . . . It really is. A husband's a husband, and a wife's a wife. The wife has to obey her husband. Of course she has. Every wife has to. Some don't like it. I can't say that I liked it very much myself. But to think of anybody objecting. Why, it's shocking! Nobody ever heard of such a thing."

I must have flushed up to my forehead, for I became conscious that in my Aunt Bridget's eyes there had been a kind of indecency in my conduct.

"But, come," she said, "we must be sensible. It's timidity, that's what it is. I was a little timid myself when I was first married, but I soon got over it. Once get over your timidity and you will be all right. Sakes alive, yes, you'll be as happy as the day is long, and before this time to-morrow you'll wonder what on earth you made all this fuss about."

I tried to say that what she predicted could never be, because I did not love my husband, and therefore . . . but my Aunt Bridget broke in on me, saying:

"Mary O'Neill, don't be a fool. Your maiden days are over now, and you ought to know what your husband will do if you persist."

I jumped at the thought that she meant he would annul our marriage, but that was not what she was thinking of.

"He'll find somebody else—that's what he'll do. Serve you right, too. You'll only have yourself to blame for it. Perhaps you think you'll be able to do the same, but you won't. Women can't. He'll be happy enough, and you'll be the only one to suffer, so don't make a fool of yourself. Accept the situation. You may not like your husband too much. I can't say I liked the Colonel particularly. He took snuff, and no woman in the world could keep him in clean pocket handkerchiefs. But when a sensible person has got something at stake, she puts up with things. And that's what you must do. He who wants fresh eggs must raise his own chickens, you know."

Aunt Bridget ran on for some time longer, telling me of my father's anger, which was not a matter for much surprise, seeing how he had built himself upon my marriage, and how he had expected that I should have a child, a son, to carry on the family.

"Do you mean to disappoint him after all he has done for you? It would be too silly, too stupid. You'd be the laughing-stock of the whole island. So get up and get dressed and be ready and willing to go with his lordship when he sails by this afternoon's steamer."

"I can't," I said.

"You can't? You mean you won't?"

"Very well, Auntie, I won't."

At that Aunt Bridget stormed at me for several minutes, telling me that if my stubborn determination not to leave the island with my husband meant that I intended to return home she might inform me at once that I was not wanted there and I need not come.

"I've enough on my hands in that house already, what with Betsy unmarried, and your father doing nothing for her, and that nasty Nessy MacLeod making up to him. You ungrateful minx! You are ruining everything! After all I've done for you too! But no matter! If you will make your bed I shall take care that you lie on it."

With that, and the peak of her half-moon bonnet almost dancing over her angry face, Aunt Bridget flounced out of my room.

Half an hour afterwards, when I went into the sitting-room, I found my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, waiting for me. He looked down at me with an indulgent and significant smile, which brought the colour rushing back to my face, put me to sit by his side, touched my arm with one of his large white clammy hands, stroked his long brown beard with the other, and then in the half-reproving tone which a Sunday-school teacher might have used to a wayward child, he began to tell me what the consequences would be if I persisted in my present conduct.

They would be serious. The law was very clear on marital rights. If a wife refused to live with her husband, except on a plea of cruelty or something equally plausible, he could apply to the court and compel her to do so; and if she declined, if she removed herself from his abode, or having removed, refused to return, the Court might punish her—it might even imprison her.

"So you see, the man is the top dog in a case like this, my dear, and he can compel the woman to obey him."

"Do you mean," I said, "that he can use force to compel her?"

"Reasonable force, yes. I think that's so. And quite right, too, when you come to think of it. The woman has entered into a serious contract, and it is the duty of the law to see that she fulfills the conditions of it."

I remembered how little I had known of the conditions of the contract I had entered into, but I was too heart-sick and ashamed to say anything about that.

"Aw yes, that's so," said the advocate, "force, reasonable force! You may say it puts a woman in a worse position as a wife than she would be if she were a mistress. That's true, but it's the law, and once a woman has married a man, the only escape from this condition of submission is imprisonment."

"Then I would rather that—a thousand times rather," I said, for I was hot with anger and indignation.

Again the advocate smiled indulgently, patted my arm, and answered me as if I were a child.

"Tut, tut, my dear, tut, tut! You've made a marriage that is founded on suitability of position, property and education, and everything will come right by and by. Don't act on a fit of pique or spleen, and so destroy your happiness, and that of everybody about you. Think of your father. Remember what he has done to make this marriage. I may tell you that he has paid forty thousand pounds to discharge your husband's debts and undertaken responsibility for an allowance of six thousand a year beside. Do you want him to lose all that money?"

I was so sick with disgust at hearing this that I could not speak, and the advocate, who, in his different way, was as dead to my real feelings as my husband had been, went on to say:

"Come, be reasonable. You may have suffered some slight, some indignity. No doubt you have. Your husband is proud and he has peculiarities of temper which we have all to make allowances for. But even if you could establish a charge of cruelty against him and so secure a separation—which you can't—what good would that do you? None at all—worse than none! The financial arrangements would remain the same. Your father would be a frightful loser. And what would you be? A married widow! The worst condition in the world for a woman—especially if she is young and attractive, and subject to temptations. Ask anybody who knows—anybody."

I felt as if I would suffocate with shame.

"Come now," said the advocate in his superior way, taking my hand as if he were going to lead me like a child to my husband, "let us put an end to this little trouble. His lordship is downstairs and he has consented—kindly and generously consented—to wait an hour for your answer. But he must leave the island by the afternoon steamer, and if. . . ."

"Then tell him he must leave it without me," I said, as well as I could for the anger that was choking me.

The advocate looked steadily into my face. I think he understood the situation at last.

"You mean that—really and truly mean it?" he asked.

"I do," I answered, and unable to say or hear any more without breaking out on him altogether I left the room.

Down to this moment I had put on a brave front though my very heart had been trembling; but now I felt that all the weight of law, custom, parental authority and even religion was bearing me down, down, down, and unless help came I must submit in the long run.

I was back in the small bedroom, with my hot forehead against the cold glass of the window, looking out yet seeing nothing, when somebody knocked at the door, softly almost timidly. It was Father Dan, and the sight of his dear face, broken up with emotion, was the same to me as the last plank of a foundering ship to a sailor drowning at sea.

My heart was so full that, though I knew I ought not, I threw my arms about his neck and burst into a flood of tears. The good old priest did not put me away. He smoothed my drooping head and patted my shoulders and in his sweet and simple way he tried to comfort me.

"Don't cry! Don't worry! It will be all right in the end, my child."

There was something almost grotesque in his appearance. Under his soft clerical outdoor hat he was wearing his faded old cassock, as if he had come away hurriedly at a sudden call. I could see what had happened—my family had sent him to reprove me and remonstrate with me.

He sat on a chair by my bed and I knelt on the floor at his feet, just as my mother used to do when I was a child and she was making her confession. Perhaps he thought of that at the same moment as myself, for the golden light of my mother's memory lay always about him. For some moments we did not speak. I think we were both weeping.

At length I tried to tell him what had happened—hiding nothing, softening nothing, speaking the simple and naked truth. I found it impossible to do so. My odd-sounding voice was not like my own, and even my words seemed to be somebody else's. But Father Dan understood everything.

"I know! I know!" he said, and then, to my great relief, interrupting my halting explanations, he gave his own interpretation of my husband's letter.

There was a higher love and there was a lower love and both were necessary to God's plans and purposes. But the higher love must come first, or else the lower one would seem to be cruel and gross and against nature.

Nature was kind to a young girl. Left to itself it awakened her sex very gently. First with love, which came to her like a whisper in a dream, like the touch of an angel on her sleeping eyelids, so that when she awoke to the laws of life the mysteries of sex did not startle or appal her.

But sex in me had been awakened rudely and ruthlessly. Married without love I had been suddenly confronted by the lower passion. What wonder that I had found it brutal and barbarous?

"That's it, my child! That's it! I know! I know!"

Then he began to blame himself for everything, saying it was all his fault and that he should have held out longer. When he saw how things stood between me and my husband he should have said to my father, to the Bishop, and to the lawyers, notwithstanding all their bargainings: "This marriage must not go on. It will lead to disaster. It begins to end badly."

"But now it is all over, my child, and there's no help for it."

I think the real strength of my resistance to Aunt Bridget's coarse ridicule and the advocate's callous remonstrance must have been the memory of my husband's threat when he talked about the possible annulment of our marriage. The thought of that came back to me now, and half afraid, half ashamed, with a fluttering of the heart, I tried to mention it.

"Is there no way out?" I asked.

"What way can there be?" said Father Dan. "God knows I know what pressure was put upon you; but you are married, you have made your vows, you have given your promises. That's all the world sees or cares about, and in the eyes of the law and the Church you are responsible for all that has happened."

With my head still buried in Father Dan's cassock I got it out at last.

"But annulment! Isn't that possible—under the circumstances?" I asked.

The good old priest seemed to be too confused to speak for a moment. Then he explained that what I hoped for was quite out of the question.

"I don't say that in the history of the Church marriages have not been annulled on equally uncertain grounds, but in this case the civil law would require proof—something to justify nullity. Failing that there would have to be collusion either on one side or both, and that is not possible—not to you, my child, not to the daughter of your mother, that dear saint who suffered so long and was silent."

More than ever now I felt like a ship-broken man with the last plank sinking under him. The cold mysterious dread of my husband was creeping back, and the future of my life with him stood before me with startling vividness. In spite of all my struggling and fighting of the night before I saw myself that very night, the next night, and the next, and every night and day of my life thereafter, a victim of the same sickening terror.

"Must I submit, then?" I said.

Father Dan smoothed my head and told me in his soft voice that submission was the lot of all women. It always had been so in the history of the world, and perhaps it always would be.

"Remember the Epistle we read in church yesterday morning: 'Wives submit yourselves to your husbands.'"

With a choking sensation in my throat I asked if he thought I ought to go away with my husband when he left the island by the afternoon steamer.

"I see no escape from it, my poor child. They sent me to reprove you. I can't do that, but neither can I encourage you to resist. It would be wrong. It would be cruel. It would only lead you into further trouble."

My mouth felt parched, but I contrived to say:

"Then you can hold out no hope for me?"

"God knows I can't."

"Although I do not love this man I must live with him as his wife?"

"It is hard, very hard, but there seems to be no help for it."

I rose to my feet, and went back to the window. A wild impulse of rebellion was coming over me.

"I shall feel like a bad woman," I said.

"Don't say that," said Father Dan. "You are married to the man anyway."

"All the same I shall feel like my husband's mistress—his married mistress, his harlot."

Father Dan was shocked, and the moment the words were out of my mouth I was more frightened than I had ever been before, for something within seemed to have forced them out of me.

When I recovered possession of my senses Father Dan, nervously fumbling with the silver cross that hung over his cassock, was talking of the supernatural effect of the sacrament of marriage. It was God Who joined people together, and whom God joined together no man might put asunder. No circumstances either, no trial or tribulation. Could it be thought that a bond so sacred, so indissoluble, was ever made without good effect? No, the Almighty had His own ways with His children, and this great mystery of holy wedlock was one of them.

"So don't lose heart, my child. Who knows what may happen yet? God works miracles now just as He did in the old days. You may come . . . yes, you may come to love your husband, and then—then all will be well."

Suddenly out of my despair and my defiance a new thought came to me. It came with the memory of the emotion I had experienced during the marriage service, and it thrilled me through and through.

"Father Dan?" I said, with a nervous cry, for my heart was fluttering again.

"What is it, my child?"

It was hard to say what I was thinking about, but with a great effort I stammered it out at last. I should be willing to leave the island with my husband, and live under the same roof with him, and bear his name, so that there might be no trouble, or scandal, and nobody except ourselves might ever know that there was anything dividing us, any difference of any kind between us, if he, on his part, would promise—firmly and faithfully promise—that unless and until I came to love him he would never claim my submission as a wife.

While I spoke I hardly dared to look at Father Dan, fearing he would shake his head again, perhaps reprove me, perhaps laugh at me. But his eyes which had been moist began to sparkle and smile.

"You mean that?" he asked.

"Yes."

"And you will go away with him on that condition?"

"Yes, yes."

"Then he must agree to it."

The pure-minded old priest saw no difficulties, no dangers, no risks of breakdown in my girlish scheme. Already my husband had got all he had bargained for. He had got my father's money in exchange for his noble name, and if he wanted more, if he wanted the love of his wife, let him earn it, let him win it.

"That's only right, only fair. It will be worth winning, too—better worth winning than all your father's gold and silver ten times over. I can tell him that much anyway."

He had risen to his feet in his excitement, the simple old priest with his pure heart and his beautiful faith in me.

"And you, my child, you'll try to love him in return—promise you will."

A shiver ran through me when Father Dan said that—a sense of the repugnance I felt for my husband almost stifled me.

"Promise me," said Father Dan, and though my face must have been scarlet, I promised him.

"That's right. That alone will make him a better man. He may be all that people say, but who can measure the miraculous influence of a good woman?"

He was making for the door.

"I must go downstairs now and speak to your husband. But he'll agree. Why shouldn't he? I know he's afraid of a public scandal, and if he attempts to refuse I'll tell him that. . . . But no, that will be quite unnecessary. Good-bye, my child! If I don't come back you'll know that everything has been settled satisfactorily. You'll be happy yet. I'm sure you will. Ah, what did I say about the mysterious power of that solemn and sacred sacrament? Good-bye!"

I meant what I had said. I meant to do what I had promised. God knows I did. But does a woman ever know her own heart? Or is heaven alone the judge of it?

At four o'clock that afternoon my husband left Ellan for England. I went with him.

Having made my bargain I set myself to fulfil the conditions of it. I had faithfully promised to try to love my husband and I prepared to do so.

Did not love require that a wife should look up to and respect and even reverence the man she had married? I made up my mind to do that by shutting my eyes to my husband's obvious faults and seeing only his better qualities.

What disappointments were in store for me! What crushing and humiliating disillusionments!

On the night of our arrival in London we put up at a fashionable hotel in a quiet but well-known part of the West-end, which is inhabited chiefly by consulting physicians and celebrated surgeons. Here, to my surprise, we were immediately discovered, and lines of visitors waited upon my husband the following morning.

I thought they were his friends, and a ridiculous little spurt of pride came to me from heaven knows where with the idea that my husband must be a man of some importance in the metropolis.

But I discovered they were his creditors, money-lenders and bookmakers, to whom he owed debts of "honour" which he had been unable or unwilling to disclose to my father and his advocate.

One of my husband's visitors was a pertinacious little man who came early and stayed late. He was a solicitor, and my husband was obviously in some fear of him. The interviews between them, while they were closeted together morning after morning in one of our two sitting-rooms, were long and apparently unpleasant, for more than once I caught the sound of angry words on both sides, with oaths and heavy blows upon the table.

But towards the end of the week, my husband's lawyer arrived in London, and after that the conversations became more pacific.

One morning, as I sat writing a letter in the adjoining room, I heard laughter, the popping of corks, the jingling of glasses, and the drinking of healths, and I judged that the, difficult and disagreeable business had been concluded.

At the close of the interview I heard the door opened and my husband going into the outer corridor to see his visitors to the lift, and then something prompted me—God alone knows what—to step into the room they had just vacated.

It was thick with tobacco smoke. An empty bottle of champagne (with three empty wine glasses) was on the table, and on a desk by the window were various papers, including a sheet of foolscap which bore a seal and several signatures, and a thick packet of old letters bound together with a piece of purple ribbon.

Hardly had I had time to recognise these documents when my husband returned to the room, and by the dark expression of his face I saw instantly that he thought I had looked at them.

"No matter!" he said, without any preamble. "I might as well tell you at once and have done with it."

He told me. The letters were his. They had been written to a woman whom he had promised to marry, and he had had to buy them back from her. Although for three years he had spent a fortune on the creature she had shown him no mercy. Through her solicitor, who was a scoundrel, she had threatened him, saying in plain words that if he married anybody else she would take proceedings against him immediately. That was why, in spite of the storm, we had to come up to London on the day after our wedding.

"Now you know," said my husband. "Look here" (holding out the sheet of foolscap), "five thousand pounds—that's the price I've had to pay for marrying."

I can give no idea of the proud imperiousness and the impression of injury with which my husband told his brutal story. But neither can I convey a sense of the crushing shame with which I listened to it. There was not a hint of any consciousness on his part of my side of the case. Not a suggestion of the clear fact that the woman he had promised to marry had been paid off by money which had come through me. Not a thought of the humiliation he had imposed upon his wife in dragging her up to London at the demand of his cast-off mistress.

When my husband had finished speaking I could not utter a word. I was afraid that my voice would betray the anger that was boiling in me. But I was also degraded to the very dust in my own eyes, and to prevent an outburst of hysterical tears I ran back to my room and hid my face in my pillow.

What was the good of trying to make myself in love with a man who was separated from me by a moral chasm that could never be passed? What was the good? What was the good?

But next morning, having had time to think things out in my simple and ignorant way, I tried to reconcile myself to my position. Remembering what Aunt Bridget had said, both before my marriage and after it, about the different moralities of men and women, I told myself I had placed my standard too high.

Perhaps a husband was not a superior being, to be regarded with respect and reverence, but a sort of grown-up child whom it was the duty of a wife to comfort, coax, submit to and serve.

I determined to do this. Still clinging to the hope of falling in love with my husband, I set myself to please him by every means within my power, even to the length of simulating sentiments which I did not feel.

But what a task I was setting myself! What a steep and stony Calvary I was attempting to climb!

After the degrading business with the other woman had been concluded I thought we should have left England immediately on the honeymoon tour which my husband had mapped out for us, but he told me that would not be convenient and we must remain in London a little longer. We stayed six weeks altogether, and never did a young wife pass a more cheerless and weary time.

I had no friends of my own within reach, and to my deep if secret mortification no woman of my husband's circle called upon me. But a few of his male friends were constantly with us, including Mr. Eastcliff, who had speedily followed us from Ellan, and a Mr. Vivian, who, though the brother of a Cabinet Minister, seemed to me a very vain and vapid person, with the eyes of a mole, a vacant smile, a stupid expression, an abrupt way of speaking through his teeth, and a shrill voice which gave the impression of screeching against the wind.

With these two men, and others of a similar kind, we passed many hours of nearly every day, lunching with them, dining with them, walking with them, driving with them, and above all playing bridge with them in one of our sitting rooms in the hotel.

I knew nothing of the game to begin with, never having touched a card in my life, but in accordance with the theories which I believed to be right and the duties I had imposed upon myself, I took a hand with my husband when he could find nobody better to be his partner.

The results were very disheartening. In spite of my desire to please I was slow to learn, and my husband's impatience with my mistakes, which confused and intimidated me, led to some painful humiliations. First he laughed, next he sneered, then he snapped me up in the midst of my explanations and apologies, and finally, at a moment of loss, he broke out on me with brutal derision, saying he had never had much opinion of my intellect, but was now quite sure that I had no more brains than a rabbit and could not say Boo to a goose.

One day when we were alone, and he was lying on the couch with his vicious little terrier by his side, I offered to sing to him. Remembering how my voice had been praised, I thought it would be pleasant to my husband to see that there was something I really could do. But nine years in a convent had left me with next to no music but memories of the long-breathed harmonies of some of the beautiful masses of our Church, and hardly had I begun on these when my husband cried:

"Oh, stop, stop, for heaven's sake stop, or I shall think we're attending a funeral."

Another day I offered to read to him. The Reverend Mother used to say I was the best reader she had ever heard, but perhaps it was not altogether my husband's fault if he formed a different opinion. And indeed I cannot but think that the holy saints themselves would have laughed if they had heard me reading aloud, in the voice and intonation which I had assumed for the meditations of St. Francis of Assisi, the mystic allusions to "certs," and "bookies," and "punters," and "evens," and "scratchings," which formed the substance of the sporting journals that were my husband's only literature.

"Oh, stop it, stop it," he cried again. "You read the 'Winning Post' as if it were the Book of Revelation."

As time passed the gulf that separated me from my husband became still greater. If I could have entertained him with any kind of gossip we might have got on better. But I had no conversation that interested him, and he had little or none that I could pretend to understand. He loved the town; I loved the country; he loved the night and the blaze of electric lights; I loved the morning and the sweetness of the sun.

At the bottom of my heart I knew that his mind was common, low and narrow, and that his tastes were gross and vulgar, but I was determined to conquer the repulsion I felt for him.

It was impossible. If I could have struck one spark from the flint of his heart the relations between us might have been different. If his look could have met my look in a single glance of understanding I could have borne with his impatience and struggled on.

But nothing of this kind ever happened, and when one dreary night after grumbling at the servants, cursing his fate and abusing everybody and everything, he put on his hat and went out saying he had "better have married Lena [the other woman] after all," for in that case he would have had "some sort of society anyway," the revulsion I had felt on the night of my marriage came sweeping over me like a wave of the sea, and I asked myself again, "What's the good? What's the good?"

Nevertheless next day I found myself taking my husband's side against myself.

If he had sacrificed anything in order to marry me it was my duty to make it up to him.

I resolved that I should make it up to him. I would study my husband's likes and dislikes in every little thing. I would share in his pleasures and enter into his life. I would show him that a wife was something other and better than any hired woman in the world, and that when she cast in her lot with her husband it was for his own sake only and not for any fortune he could spend on her.

"Yes, yes, that's what I'll do," I thought, and I became more solicitous of my husband's happiness than if I had really and truly loved him.

A woman would smile at the efforts which I made in my inexperience to make my husband forget his cast-off mistress, and indeed some of them were very childish.

The first was a ridiculous failure.

My husband's birthday was approaching and I wished to make him a present. It was difficult to know what to select, for I knew little or nothing of his tastes or wants; but walking one day in a street off Oxford Street I saw, in the window of a shop for the sale of objects of ecclesiastical vertu, among crosses and crucifixes and rosaries, a little ivory ink-stand and paper-holder, which was surmounted by a figure of the Virgin.

I cannot for the life of me conceive why I thought this would be a suitable present for my husband, except that the face of Our Lady was so young, so sweet, so beautiful, and so exquisitely feminine that it seemed impossible that any man in the world should not love her. But however that might be I bought her, and carrying her home in a cab, I set her on my husband's desk without a word, and then stood by, like the mother of Moses, to watch the result.

There was no result—at first at all events. My husband was several hours in the room with my treasure without appearing to be aware of its presence. But towards evening his two principal friends came to play bridge with him, and then, from the ambush of my own apartments, I heard the screechy voice of Mr. Vivian saying:

"Dash it all, Jimmy, you don't say you're going to be a Pape?"

"Don't fret yourself, old fellow," replied my husband. "That's my wife's little flutter. Dare say the poor fool has had to promise her priest to make me a 'vert.'"

My next experiment was perhaps equally childish but certainly more successful.

Seeing that my husband was fond of flowers, and was rarely without a rose in his buttonhole, I conceived the idea of filling his room with them in honour of his birthday. With this view I got up very early, before anybody in the hotel was stirring, and hurried off to Covent Garden, through the empty and echoing streets, while the air of London was fresh with the breath of morning and the big city within its high-built walls seemed to dream of the green fields beyond.

I arrived at the busy and noisy square just as the waggons were rolling in from the country with huge crates of red and white roses, bright with the sunshine and sparkling with the dew. Then buying the largest and loveliest and costliest bunch of them (a great armful, as much as I could hold), I hurried back to the hotel and set them in vases and glasses in every part of my husband's room—his desk, his sideboard, his mantelpiece, and above all his table, which a waiter was laying for breakfast—until the whole place was like a bridal bower.

"Ah, this is something like," I heard my husband say as he came out of his bedroom an hour or two afterwards with his vicious terrier at his heels.

I heard no more until he had finished breakfast, and then, while drawing on his gloves for his morning walk, he said to the waiter, who was clearing the table,

"Tell your Manageress I am much obliged to her for the charming flowers with which she has decorated my room this morning."

"But it wasn't the manageress, my lord," said the waiter.

"Then who was it?"

"It was her . . . her ladyship," said the waiter.

"O-oh!" said my husband in a softer, if more insinuating tone, and a few minutes afterwards he went out whistling.

God knows that was small reward for the trouble I had taken, but I was so uplifted by the success of my experiment that I determined to go farther, and when towards evening of the same day a group of my husband's friends came to tell him that they had booked a box at a well-known musical comedy theatre, I begged to be permitted to join them.

"Nonsense, my dear! Brompton Oratory would suit you better," said my husband, chucking me under the chin.

But I persisted in my importunities, and at length Mr. Eastcliff said:

"Let her come. Why shouldn't she?"

"Very well," said my husband, pinching my cheek. "As you please. But if you don't like it don't blame me."

It did not escape me that as a result of my change of front my husband had risen in his own esteem, and that he was behaving towards me as one who thought he had conquered my first repugnance, or perhaps triumphantly ridden over it. But in my simplicity I was so fixed in my determination to make my husband forget the loss of his mistress that I had no fear of his familiarities and no misgivings about his mistakes.

All that was to come later, with a fresh access of revulsion and disgust.

I had seen enough of London by this time to know that the dresses which had been made for me at home were by no means the mode; but after I had put on the best-fitting of my simple quaker-like costumes with a string of the family pearls about my neck and another about my head, not all the teaching of the good women of the convent could prevent me from thinking that my husband and his friends would have no reason to be ashamed of me.

We were a party of six in all, whereof I was the only woman, and we occupied a large box on the first tier near the stage, a position of prominence which caused me a certain embarrassment, when, as happened at one moment of indefinable misery, the opera glasses of the people in the dress-circle and stalls were turned in our direction.

I cannot say that the theatre impressed me. Certainly the building itself did not do so, although it was beautifully decorated in white and gold, for I had seen the churches of Rome, and in my eyes they were much more gorgeous.

Neither did the audience impress me, for though I had never before seen so many well-dressed people in one place, I thought too many of the men, when past middle life, seemed fat and overfed, and too many of the women, with their plump arms and bare shoulders, looked as if they thought of nothing but what to eat and what to put on.

Nor did the performers impress me, for though when the curtain rose, disclosing the stage full of people, chiefly girls, in delicate and beautiful toilettes, I thought I had never before seen so many lovely and happy faces, after a while, when the faces fell into repose, I thought they were not really lovely and not really happy, but hard and strained and painful, as if life had been very cruel.

And, above all, I was not impressed by the play, for I thought, in my ignorance of such productions, that I had never heard anything so frivolous and foolish, and more than once I found myself wondering whether my good nuns, if they could have been present, would not have concluded that the whole company had taken leave of their senses.

There was, however, one thing which did impress me, and that was the leading actor. It was a woman, and when she first came on to the stage I thought I had never in my life seen anybody so beautiful, with her lovely soft round figure, her black eyes, her red lips, her pearly white teeth, and a smile so sunny that it had the effect of making everybody in the audience smile with her.

But the strange thing was—I could not account for it—that after a few minutes I thought her extremely ugly and repellent, for her face seemed to be distorted by malice and envy and hatred and nearly every other bad passion.

Nevertheless she was a general favourite, for not only was she applauded before she did anything, but everything she said, though it was sometimes very silly, was accompanied by a great deal of laughter, and everything she sang, though her voice was no great matter, was followed by a chorus of applause.

Seeing this, and feeling that her appearance had caused a flutter of interest in the box behind me, I laughed and applauded also, in accordance with the plan I had prepared for myself, of sharing my husband's pleasures and entering into his life, although at the bottom of my heart I really thought the joy was not very joyful or the mirth very merry.

This went on for nearly an hour, and then a strange thing happened. I was leaning forward on the velvet barrier of the box in front of me, laughing and clapping my hands with the rest, when all at once I became aware that the lady had wheeled about, and, walking down the stage in the direction of our box, was looking boldly back at me.

I could not at first believe it to be so, and even now I cannot say whether it was something in her face, or something whispered at my back which flashed it upon my mind that this was the woman my husband ought to have married, the woman whose place I had taken, the woman of the foolscap document and the letters in the purple ribbon.

After that I could play my poor little part no longer, and though I continued to lean on the yellow velvet of the barrier in front of me I dropped my eyes as often as that woman was on the stage, and hoped and prayed for the end of the performance.

It came at length with a crash of instruments and voices, and a few minutes afterwards my husband and I were in the cab on our way back to the hotel.

I was choking with mingled anger and shame—anger at my husband for permitting me to come to a place in which I could be exposed to a public affront from his cast-off mistress, shame at the memory of the pitiful scheme for entering into his life which had fallen to such a welter of wreck and ruin.

But my husband himself was only choking with laughter.

"It was as good as a play," he said. "Upon my soul it was! I never saw anything funnier in the whole course of my life."

That served him, repeated again and again, until we reached the hotel, when he ordered a bottle of wine to be sent upstairs, and then shook with suppressed laughter as we went up in the lift.

Coming to our floor I turned towards my bedroom, wishing to be alone with my outraged feelings, but my husband drew me into one of our sitting-rooms, telling me he had something to say.

He put me to sit in an arm-chair, threw off his overcoat, lit a cigarette, as well as he could for the spurts and gusts of his laughter, and then, standing back to the fire-place, with one hand in his pocket and his coat-tail over his arm, he told me the cause of his merriment.

"I don't mind telling you that was Lena," he said. "The good-looking girl in the scarlet dress and the big diamonds. She spotted me the moment she stepped on to the stage. Must have guessed who you were, too. Did you see how she looked at you? Thought I had brought you there to walk over her. I'm sure she did!"

There was another gust of laughter and then—

"She'd been going about saying I had married an old frump for the sake of her fortune, and when she saw that you could wipe her off the face of the earth without a gown that was worth wearing, she was ready to die with fury."

There was another gust of laughter through the smoke that was spurting from his mouth and then—

"And you, too, my dear! Laughing and applauding! She thought you were trying to crow over her! On her own particular barn-door, too! Upon my soul, it was too amusing. I wonder she didn't throw something at you. She's like that when she's in her tantrums."

The waiter came in with the wine and my husband poured out a glass for me.

"Have a drink. No? Well, here's to your health, my dear. I can't get over it. I really can't. Lena's too funny for anything. Why, what else do you think she's been saying? She's been saying I'll come back to her yet. Yes, 'I'll give him six months to come crawling back to me,' she said to Eastcliff and Vivian and some of the other fellows at the Club. Wonder if she thinks so now? . . . I wonder?"

He threw away his cigarette, drank another glass of the wine, came close up to me and said in a lower tone, which made my skin creep as with cold.

"Whether she's right or wrong depends on you, though."

"On me?"

"Why, yes, of course. That's only natural. One may have all the goodwill in the world, but a man's a man, you know."

I felt my lips quivering with anger, and in an effort to control myself I rose to go, but my husband drew me back into my chair and sat on the arm of it.

"Don't go yet. By the way, dear, I've never thanked you for the beautiful flowers with which you decorated my room this morning. Charming! But I always knew you would soon come round to it."

"Come round to what?" I said, but it was just as if somebody else were speaking.

"You know. Of course you know. When that simple old priest proposed that ridiculous compact I agreed, but I knew quite well that it would soon break down. Not on my side, though. Why should it? A man can afford to wait. But I felt sure you would soon tire of your resistance. And you have, haven't you? Oh, I'm not blind. I've seen what's been going on, though I've said nothing about it."

Again I tried to rise, and again my husband held me to my seat, saying:

"Don't be ashamed. There's no reason for that. You were rather hard on me, you know, but I'm going to forget all about it. Why shouldn't I? I've got the loveliest little woman in the world, so I mean to meet her half way, and she's going to get over her convent-bred ideas and be my dear little darling wife. Now isn't she?"

I could have died of confusion and the utter degradation of shame. To think that my poor efforts to please him, my vain attempts to look up to him and reverence him, my bankrupt appeals to the spiritual woman in me that I might bring myself to love him, as I thought it was my duty to do, should have been perverted by his gross and vulgar mind into overtures to the animal man in him—this was more than I could bear. I felt the tears gushing to my eyes, but I kept them back, for my self-pity was not so strong as my wrath.

I rose this time without being aware of his resistance.

"Let me go to bed," I said.

"Certainly! Most certainly, my dear, but. . . ."

"Let me go to bed," I said again, and at the next moment I stepped into my room.

He did not attempt to follow me. I saw in a mirror in front what was taking place behind me.

My husband was standing where I had left him with a look first of amazement and then of rage.

"I can't understand you," he said. "Upon my soul I can't! There isn't a man in the world who could." After that he strode into his own bedroom and clashed the door after him.

"Oh, what's the good?" I thought again.

It was impossible to make myself in love with my husband. It was no use trying.

I must leave it to those who know better than I do the way to read the deep mysteries of a woman's heart, to explain how it came to pass that the only result of this incident was to make me sure that if we remained in London much longer my husband would go back to the other woman, and to say why (seeing that I did not love him) I should have become feverishly anxious to remove him from the range of this temptation.

Yet so it was, for the very next morning, I wrote to my father saying I had been unwell and begging him to use his influence with my husband to set out on the Egyptian trip without further delay.

My father's answer was prompt. What he had read between the lines of my letter I do not know; what he said was this—