The Beth Book Part 95

"Speak for yourself," said Dan complacently. "Personally, I feel good enough and happy enough. We have our differences, like other people, I suppose; but whose fault is that, I should like to know?"

"Partly mine," Beth acknowledged. "I don't think I should have been so defiant. But if you had been different, I should have been different."

"If _I_ had been different!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, knocking the ash from the end of his cigar. "Well, I'd like to know what fault you have to find with me? Different indeed!"

"That is the princ.i.p.al one," Beth answered, smiling. "Your great fault is that you don't believe you have any faults."

"Oh, well," he conceded, "of course I know I've my faults. Who hasn't?

But I'll undertake to say that they're a _man's_ faults. Now, come!"

This reflection seemed to deepen his self-satisfaction, as if it must be allowed that he was all the better for the faults to which he alluded. As he spoke, Beth seemed to see him at her wardrobe with his hand in the pocket of one of her dresses, hunting for treasonable matter to satisfy his evil suspicions, and she sighed. She would not acknowledge to herself that she was fighting for the impossible, yet even at the outset she half despaired of ever making him understand.

It is pitiful to think of her, with her tender human nature, seeking a true mate where human law required that she should find one, only to be repulsed and baffled and bedraggled herself in the end if she persevered. A good man might have failed to comprehend Beth, but a good man would have felt the force of goodness in her, and would have reverenced her. Maclure recognised no force in her and felt no reverence; all that was not animal in her was as obscure to him as to the horse in his stable that whinnied a welcome to her when she came because he expected sugar. It is pleasant to give pleasure; but there must be more in marriage for it to be satisfactory than free scope to exercise the power to please.

"Well, look here, Dan," Beth pursued. "I'll make a bargain with you.

If you will do your best to correct your faults--what _I_ think your faults--I'll do my best to correct all you find in me. Only let us discuss them temperately, and try conscientiously to live up to some ideals of thought and conduct."

Dan smoked on silently for a little, then he said, with some show of irritation tempering his self-satisfaction, "Well, all I can say is, I cannot for the life of me see what you have to complain of."

"I have to complain of your conduct with Bertha Petterick, for one thing," Beth answered desperately. "Let us be frank with each other. I know that you have not been loyal to me. I saw you together here on this seat the day you gave her the bracelet. I saw you put it on her arm and kiss her; and that decided me to go to Ilverthorpe."

Dan looked round about him with an altered countenance, but nothing that he knew to be a window overlooked the spot, neither was it possible to see through the thickness of the privet hedge, nor from any other point, without being seen.

"You must have imagined it!" he exclaimed.

"I did not imagine that bracelet," Beth replied.

"Well, even if I did give her the bracelet," he said, "you're not going to be nasty-minded enough to insinuate that there was anything in that!"

"There was deceit in it," Beth answered, "and in your whole att.i.tude towards that girl while she was under this roof. If we act so that we cannot be open and honest about our dealings with people, then there must be something wrong. Life would be intolerable if it had to be lived among people any one of whom, while professing friendship for us, was deceiving us in some vital particular. From the moment that we act on our own inclinations rather than up to what the n.o.blest of our friends expect of us, we have gone wrong. But you and I are both young enough, Dan, to put the past behind us, and forget it. Let us start together afresh in another place, where there will be no evil a.s.sociations, nothing to vex us by reminding us of unhappy days; and let us be loyal to each other, and honest and open in every act, making due allowance for each other, and doing our best to help and please each other. We shall be happy, I am sure. You will see we shall be very happy."

Dan took his cigar out of his mouth, and flicked the ash from the end of it with his little finger: "You'd have me give up my appointment here, I suppose, and the half of my income with it?"

"Most of all I would have you give up your appointment here," she answered earnestly. "No honest woman can endure to have her husband pandering to vice. It would not be so much of a sacrifice either," she added, "for the next session will end this iniquity."

"Thanks to the influence of you cursed women," he exclaimed.

"Thanks to our influence, yes," she answered dispa.s.sionately, "and to some sense of justice in men."

"If you knew how men talk about women who meddle in these matters," he said, "you would keep out of them, I think."

"Oh, I know the kind of thing they say," she answered, smiling; "but the people you mean have no influence nowadays. The blatant protest of the debauched against our demand for a higher standard of life is not the voice of the community. It is the cry of those who feel their existence threatened, who only live upon lies, and must be extinguished when the inevitable day of reckoning comes which shall expose them. Even now the kind of man who catches at every straw of opinion which shall secure to him his sacred carnal rights, at no matter what cost of degradation and disease to women, is out of date, and we pay no attention to him."

"Oh, women!" Dan jeered. "That is all very fine! But who the devil cares what women think?"

"Now don't be old-fashioned, Dan," Beth answered, laughing. "When women only did what they were told, men used to vow at their feet that there was nothing they couldn't accomplish, their influence was so great. But now that women have proved that what they choose to do they can do, men sneer at their pretensions to power, and try to depreciate them by comparing the average woman with men in the front rank of their professions. Really, men are disheartening."

The evening calm had deepened about them, a big bright star was shining above the belt of trees, and waves of perfume from the flowers made the air a delight to inhale.

"What a heavenly night!" Beth pursued. "Who would live in London when they might be here?"

"Well, that's consistent!" he exclaimed, "after entreating me to leave the place!"

"This is not the only peaceful spot in the world," she said with a little sigh; "and I would rather live in London even than have you here in an invidious position. Dan, give it up, there's a good fellow!

and learn to look on life from this newer, wider point of view. You will find interests and pleasures in it you have never even suspected, I a.s.sure you, and you will never regret it."

"For the life of me," he said again, throwing the end of his cigar into the bushes with an irritated jerk of his arm,--"for the life of me, I cannot see what you have to complain of; and I shall certainly not give up any bird in the hand for two such birds in the bush as you promise me." He rose as he spoke, and shook out first one leg and then the other to straighten his trousers. "I'm going out," he added.

"I've a patient to see. Ta! ta! Take care of yourself."

Some little time after Beth's return, they were sitting at lunch together, and Maclure was reading a daily paper.

"Matters look bad for that fellow, Cayley Pounce," he observed.

"Why, what has he been doing?" Beth asked.

"Poking a fellow's eye out with his umbrella," Dan answered. "He was talking to a girl in the street one night, and got into a row with some roughs, and jabbed one in the eye with his umbrella, and the fellow died. The inquiry is now going on, and it's likely the coroner's jury will bring in a verdict of manslaughter against Mr.

Cayley Pounce. His defence is that he wasn't anywhere near that part of London on that particular night, and it's a case of mistaken ident.i.ty; but as he refuses to say where he was, and produces no evidence by way of an alibi, that story won't avail him much."

"What night was it?" said Beth.

"On the 30th, just after midnight," Dan read out of the paper.

"Why, that was the night he insisted on escorting me home from the theatre," Beth exclaimed. "He did not leave the Kilroys' until four o'clock in the morning."

"Then why on earth doesn't he say so?" Dan asked.

"I can't imagine," Beth said. "I let him out myself; everybody else had gone to bed. And I'm sure of the time, because I thought he was never going away, and I was tired; and I looked at the clock and said, 'It's four o'clock, and I must go to bed.'"

Dan's face had darkened. "Do you mean to say you were sitting up with him alone?" he demanded.

"Yes, for my sins!" Beth answered in a tone of disgust. "The Kilroys were out when I returned from the theatre, and did not come in till very late; and they went straight upstairs, supposing I had gone to bed. As a rule they come into the library first. So Mr. Cayley Pounce was left on my hands."

"Then," said Dan, pushing his plate away from him with a clatter, "it is obvious why he is holding his tongue. He is determined not to compromise you."

"Thank you!" said Beth, bridling. "I should think I am not so easily compromised."

"Gad!" Dan e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "I don't know what you call easily compromised!

A man takes you home from a theatre, and stays with you alone till four o'clock in the morning; if that isn't compromising I don't know what is. No jury in the world would acquit you, and the fellow knows that perfectly well, and is holding his tongue to screen you."

"I should think it's a great deal more likely he's holding his tongue in order to get the credit of it," Beth observed drily. "It is a mere pose. He knows I shall have to come forward to clear him if he doesn't explain himself. I suppose I must go at once and stop the case; but if it were not for his wife I declare I should hesitate. What is the form of procedure? You will come with me, of course?"

"_I_ go with you!" Dan exclaimed brutally, "and see you make a public exhibition of yourself, and bring disgrace on my name in a court of justice! I'm d.a.m.ned if I do! And what's more, if you go, you don't return to this house. I've too much self-respect for that. You hadn't much of a reputation when I married you, and if you lose the little you've got, you can go and I shall divorce you. My wife must be above suspicion."

Beth folded her serviette slowly while he was speaking, and, when he stopped, she rose from the table.

"It is unfortunate for me," she said, "that the Kilroys have gone abroad. They know the man and the facts of the case, and would have advised me. In their absence I must do what seems right without advice. I cannot see that I have any choice in the matter. You could make it perfectly easy for me by supporting me; if you do not support me I must go alone. I shall pack up and go to town at once in order to appear in court to-morrow morning, and I shall telegraph to Roberts, the Kilroys' butler, to meet me there, and confirm my story. There are the coachman and footman too, and the police constable--witnesses enough, in all conscience."