In the Year of Jubilee Part 79

'You must have more variety,' he added. 'Next year you shall come into town much oftener--'

'I'm not thinking of that. I always like going anywhere with you; but I have plenty of occupations and pleasures at home.--I think we ought to be under the same roof.'

'Ought? Because Mrs. Tomkins would cry _haro_! if her husband the greengrocer wasn't at her elbow day and night?'

'Have more patience with me. I didn't mean _ought_ in the vulgar sense--I have as little respect for Mrs. Tomkins as you have. I don't want to interfere with your liberty for a moment; indeed it would be very foolish, for I know that it would make you detest me. But I so often want to speak to you--and--and then, I can't quite feel that you acknowledge me as your wife so long as I am away.'

Tarrant nodded.

'I quite understand. The social difficulty. Well, there's no doubt it is a difficulty; I feel it on your account. I wish it were possible for you to be invited wherever I am. Some day it will be, if I don't get run over in the Strand; but--'

'I should like the invitations,' Nancy broke in, 'but you still don't understand me.'

'Yes, I think I do. You are a woman, and it's quite impossible for a woman to see this matter as a man does. Nancy, there is not one wife in fifty thousand who retains her husband's love after the first year of marriage. Put aside the fools and the worthless; think only of women with whom you might be compared--brave, sensible, pure-hearted; they can win love, but don't know how to keep it.'

'Why not put it the other way about, and say that men can love to begin with, but so soon grow careless?'

'Because I am myself an instance to the contrary.'

Nancy smiled, but was not satisfied.

'The only married people,' Tarrant pursued, 'who can live together with impunity, are those who are rich enough, and sensible enough, to have two distinct establishments under the same roof. The ordinary eight or ten-roomed house, inhabited by decent middle-cla.s.s folk, is a gruesome sight. What a huddlement of male and female! They are factories of quarrel and hate--those respectable, bra.s.s-curtain-rodded sties--they are full of things that won't bear mentioning. If our income never rises above that, we shall live to the end of our days as we do now.'

Nancy looked appalled.

'But how can you hope to make thousands a year?'

'I have no such hope; hundreds would be sufficient. I don't aim at a house in London; everything there is intolerable, except the fine old houses which have a history, and which I could never afford. For my home, I want to find some rambling old place among hills and woods,--some house where generations have lived and died,--where my boy, as he grows up, may learn to love the old and beautiful things about him. I myself never had a home; most London children don't know what is meant by home; their houses are only more or less comfortable lodgings, perpetual change within and without.'

'Your thoughts are wonderfully like my father's, sometimes,' said Nancy.

'From what you have told me of him, I think we should have agreed in a good many things.'

'And how unfortunate we were! If he had recovered from that illness,--if he had lived only a few months,--everything would have been made easy.'

'For me altogether too easy,' Tarrant observed.

'It has been a good thing for you to have to work,' Nancy a.s.sented. 'I understand the change for the better in you. But'--she smiled--'you have more self-will than you used to have.'

'That's just where I have gained.--But don't think that I find it easy or pleasant to resist your wish. I couldn't do it if I were not so sure that I am acting for your advantage as well as my own. A man who finds himself married to a fool, is a fool himself if he doesn't take his own course regardless of his wife. But I am in a very different position; I love you more and more, Nancy, because I am learning more and more to respect you; I think of your happiness most a.s.suredly as much as I think of my own. But even if my own good weighed as nothing against yours, I should be wise to resist you just as I do now. Hugger-mugger marriage is a defilement and a curse. We know it from the experience of the world at large,--which is perhaps more brutalised by marriage than by anything else.--No need to test the thing once more, to our own disaster.'

'What I think is, that, though you pay me compliments, you really have a very poor opinion of me. You think I should burden and worry you in endless silly ways. I am not such a simpleton. In however small a house, there could be your rooms and mine. Do you suppose I should interfere with your freedom in coming and going?'

'Whether you meant to or not, you would--so long as we are struggling with poverty. However self-willed I am, I am not selfish; and to see you living a monotonous, imprisoned life would be a serious hindrance to me in my own living and working. Of course the fact is so at present, and I often enough think in a troubled way about you; but you are out of my sight, and that enables me to keep you out of mind. If I am away from home till one or two in the morning, there is no lonely wife fretting and wondering about me. For work such as mine, I must live as though I were not married at all.'

'But suppose we got out of our poverty,' urged Nancy, 'you would be living the same life, I suppose; and how would it be any better for you or me that we had a large house instead of a small one?'

'Your position will be totally changed. When money comes, friends come.

You are not hiding away from Society because you are unfit for it, only because you can't live as your social equals do. When you have friends of your own, social engagements, interests on every hand, I shall be able to go my own way without a pang of conscience. When we come together, it will be to talk of your affairs as well as of mine. Living as you do now, you have nothing on earth but the baby to think about--a miserable state of things for a woman with a mind. I know it is miserable, and I'm struggling tooth and nail to help you out of it.'

Nancy sighed.

'Then there are years of it still before me.'

'Heaven forbid! Some years, no doubt, before we shall have a home; but not before I can bring you in contact with the kind of people you ought to know. You shall have a decent house--socially possible--somewhere out west; and I, of course, shall still go on in lodgings.'

He waited for Nancy's reply, but she kept silence.

'You are still dissatisfied?'

She looked up, and commanded her features to the expression which makes whatever woman lovely--that of rational acquiescence. On the faces of most women such look is never seen.

'No, I am content. You are working hard, and I won't make it harder for you.'

'Speak always like that!' Tarrant's face was radiant. 'That's the kind of thing that binds man to woman, body and soul. With the memory of that look and speech, would it be possible for me to slight you in my life apart? It makes you my friend; and the word friend is better to my ear than wife. A man's wife is more often than not his enemy. Harvey Munden was telling me of a poor devil of an author who daren't be out after ten at night because of the fool-fury waiting for him at home.'

Nancy laughed.

'I suppose she can't trust him.'

'And suppose she can't? What is the value of nominal fidelity, secured by mutual degradation such as that? A rational woman would infinitely rather have a husband who was often unfaithful to her than keep him faithful by such means. Husband and wife should interfere with each other not a jot more than two friends of the same s.e.x living together.

If a man, under such circ.u.mstances, worried his friend's life out by petty prying, he would get his head punched. A wife has no more justification in worrying her husband with jealousies.'

'How if it were the wife that excited suspicion?' asked Nancy.

'Infidelity in a woman is much worse than in a man. If a man really suspects his wife, he must leave her, that's all; then let her justify herself if she can.'

Nancy cared little to discuss this point. In argument with any one else, she would doubtless have maintained the equality of man and woman before the moral law; but that would only have been in order to prove herself modern-spirited. Tarrant's dictum did not revolt her.

'Friends are equals,' she said, after a little thought. 'But you don't think me your equal, and you won't be satisfied with me unless I follow your guidance.'

Tarrant laughed kindly.

'True, I am your superior in force of mind and force of body. Don't you like to hear that? Doesn't it do you good--when you think of the maudlin humbug generally talked by men to women? We can't afford to disguise that truth. All the same, we are friends, because each has the other's interest at heart, and each would be ashamed to doubt the other's loyalty.'

The latter part of the evening they spent with Mary, in whom Tarrant always found something new to admire. He regarded her as the most wonderful phenomenon in nature--an uneducated woman who was neither vulgar nor foolish.

Baby slept in a cot beside Nancy's bed. For fear of waking him, the wedded lovers entered their room very softly, with a shaded candle.

Tarrant looked at the curly little head, the little clenched hand, and gave a silent laugh of pleasure.

On the breakfast-table next morning lay a letter from Horace. As soon as she had opened it, Nancy uttered an exclamation which prepared her companion for ill news.

'Just what I expected--though I tried not to think so. "I write aline only to tell you that my marriage is broken off. You will know the explanation before long. Don't trouble yourself about it. I should never have been happy with Winifred, nor she with me. We may not see each other for some time, but I will write again soon." He doesn't say whether he or she broke it off. I hope it was Winifred.'

'I'm afraid not,' said Tarrant, 'from the tone of that letter.'

'I'm afraid not, too. It means something wretched. He writes from his London lodgings. Lionel, let me go back with you, and see him.'

'By all means.'