The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman Part 26

Lady Harman became aware of Snagsby's arm and his steady well-trained breathing beside her as, tenderly almost but with a regretful disapproval, he removed her plate....

--8

If Lady Harman had failed to remark at the time the deep impression her words had made upon her hearers, she would have learnt it later from the extraordinary wrath in which Sir Isaac, as soon as his guests had departed, visited her. He was so angry he broke the seal of silence he had set upon his lips. He came raging into the pink bedroom through the paper-covered door as if they were back upon their old intimate footing.

He brought a flavour of cigars and manly refreshment with him, his shirt front was a little splashed and crumpled and his white face was variegated with flushed patches.

"What ever d'you mean," he cried, "by making a fool of me in front of those fellers?... What's my business got to do with you?"

Lady Harman was too unready for a reply.

"I ask you what's my business got to do with you? It's _my_ affair, _my_ side. You got no more right to go shoving your spoke into that than--anything. See? What do _you_ know of the rights and wrongs of business? How can _you_ tell what's right and what isn't right? And the things you came out with--the things you came out with! Why Charterson--after you'd gone Charterson said, she doesn't know, she can't know what she's talking about! A decent woman! a _lady_! talking of driving girls on the street. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You aren't fit to show your face.... It's these d.a.m.ned papers and pamphlets, all this blear-eyed stuff, these decadent novels and things putting narsty thoughts, _narsty dirty_ thoughts into decent women's heads. It ought to be rammed back down their throats, it ought to be put a stop to!"

Sir Isaac suddenly gave way to woe. "What have I _done_?" he cried, "what have I done? Here's everything going so well! We might be the happiest of couples! We're rich, we got everything we want.... And then you go harbouring these ideas, fooling about with rotten people, taking up with Socialism----Yes, I tell you--Socialism!"

His moment of pathos ended. "NO?" he shouted in an enormous voice.

He became white and grim. He emphasized his next words with a shaken finger.

"It's got to end, my lady. It's going to end sooner than you expect.

That's all!..."

He paused at the papered door. He had a popular craving for a vivid curtain and this he felt was just a little too mild.

"It's going to end," he repeated and then with great violence, with almost alcoholic violence, with the round eyes and shouting voice and shaken fist and blaspheming violence of a sordid, thrifty peasant enraged, "it's going to end a d.a.m.ned Sight sooner than you expect."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

SIR ISAAC AS PETRUCHIO

--1

Twice had Sir Isaac come near to betraying the rapid and extensive preparations for the subjugation of his wife, that he hid behind his silences. He hoped that their estrangement might be healed by a certain display of strength and decision. He still refused to let himself believe that all this trouble that had arisen between them, this sullen insistence upon unbecoming freedoms of intercourse and movement, this questioning spirit and a gaucherie of manner that might almost be mistaken for an aversion from his person, were due to any essential evil in her nature; he clung almost pa.s.sionately to the alternative that she was the victim of those gathering forces of discontent, of that interpretation which can only be described as decadent and that veracity which can only be called immodest, that darken the intellectual skies of our time, a sweet thing he held her still though touched by corruption, a prey to "idees," "idees" imparted from the poisoned mind of her sister, imbibed from the carelessly edited columns of newspapers, from all too laxly censored plays, from "blear-eyed" bookshow he thanked the Archbishop of York for that clever expressive epithet!--from the careless talk of rashly admitted guests, from the very atmosphere of London. And it had grown clearer and clearer to him that his duty to himself and the world and her was to remove her to a purer, simpler air, beyond the range of these infections, to isolate her and tranquillize her and so win her back again to that acquiescence, that entirely hopeless submissiveness that had made her so sweet and dear a companion for him in the earlier years of their married life. Long before Lady Beach-Mandarin's crucial luncheon, his deliberate foreseeing mind had been planning such a retreat. Black Strand even at his first visit had appeared to him in the light of a great opportunity, and the crisis of their quarrel did but release that same torrential energy which had carried him to a position of Napoleonic predominance in the world of baking, light catering and confectionery, into the channels of a scheme already very definitely formed in his mind.

His first proceeding after the long hours of sleepless pa.s.sion that had followed his wife's Hampton Court escapade, had been to place himself in communication with Mr. Brumley. He learnt at Mr. Brumley's club that that gentleman had slept there overnight and had started but a quarter of an hour before, back to Black Strand. Sir Isaac in hot pursuit and gathering force and a.s.sistance in mid flight reached Black Strand by midday.

It was with a certain twinge of the conscience that Mr. Brumley perceived his visitor, but it speedily became clear that Sir Isaac had no knowledge of the guilty circ.u.mstances of the day before. He had come to buy Black Strand--incontinently, that was all. He was going, it became clear at once, to buy it with all its fittings and furnishings as it stood, lock, stock and barrel. Mr. Brumley, concealing that wild elation, that sense of a joyous rebirth, that only the liquidation of nearly all one's possessions can give, was firm but not excessive. Sir Isaac haggled as a wave breaks and then gave in and presently they were making a memorandum upon the pretty writing-desk beneath the traditional rose Euphemia had established there when Mr. Brumley was young and already successful.

This done, and it was done in less than fifteen minutes, Sir Isaac produced a rather crumpled young architect from the motor-car as a conjurer might produce a rabbit from a hat, a builder from Aleham appeared astonishingly in a dog-cart--he had been summoned by telegram--and Sir Isaac began there and then to discuss alterations, enlargements and, more particularly, with a view to his nursery requirements, the conversion of the empty barn into a nursery wing and its connexion with the house by a corridor across the shrubbery.

"It will take you three months," said the builder from Aleham. "And the worst time of the year coming."

"It won't take three weeks--if I have to bring down a young army from London to do it," said Sir Isaac.

"But such a thing as plastering----"

"We won't have plastering."

"There's canvas and paper, of course," said the young architect.

"There's canvas and paper," said Sir Isaac. "And those new patent building units, so far as the corridor goes. I've seen the ads."

"We can whitewash 'em. They won't show much," said the young architect.

"Oh if you do things in _that_ way," said the builder from Aleham with bitter resignation....

--2

The morning dawned at last when the surprise was ripe. It was four days after Susan's visit, and she was due again on the morrow with the money that would enable her employer to go to Lady Viping's now imminent dinner. Lady Harman had had to cut the Social Friends' meeting altogether, but the day before the surprise Agatha Alimony had come to tea in her jobbed car, and they had gone together to the committee meeting of the Shakespear Dinner Society. Sir Isaac had ignored that defiance, and it was an unusually confident and quite unsuspicious woman who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual tweeds and gaiters,--b.u.t.toned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,--unusually a-straddle, on the hearthrug.

"That's enough, Snagsby," said Sir Isaac, at her entrance. "Bring it all."

She met Snagsby's eye, and it was portentous.

Latterly Snagsby's eye had lost the a.s.surance of his former days. She had noted it before, she noted it now more than ever; as though he was losing confidence, as though he was beginning to doubt, as though the world he had once seemed to rule grew insecure beneath his feet. For a moment she met his eye; it might have been a warning he conveyed, it might have been an appeal for sympathy, and then he had gone. She looked at the table. Sir Isaac had breakfasted acutely.

In silence, among the wreckage and with a certain wonder growing, Lady Harman attended to her needs.

Sir Isaac cleared his throat.

She became aware that he had spoken. "What did you say, Isaac?" she asked, looking up. He seemed to have widened his straddle almost dangerously, and he spoke with a certain conscious forcefulness.

"We're going to move out of this house, Elly," he said. "We're going down into the country right away."

She sat back in her chair and regarded his pinched and determined visage.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I've bought that house of Brumley's,--Black Strand. We're going to move down there--_now_. I've told the servants.... When you've done your breakfast, you'd better get Peters to pack your things. The big car's going to be ready at half-past ten."

Lady Harman reflected.

"To-morrow evening," she said, "I was going out to dinner at Lady Viping's."

"Not my affair--seemingly," said Sir Isaac with irony. "Well, the car's going to be ready at half-past ten."

"But that dinner----!"

"We'll think about it when the time comes."

Husband and wife regarded each other.

"I've had about enough of London," said Sir Isaac. "So we're going to shift the scenery. See?"