Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  In the afternoon they would go for long drives, or else they would take the boat and row to some shady place, where Lewis would sketch, while she talked or read.

  Lewis had a knack of rendering himself so wonderfully intimate that she soon had no secrets from him, and was less reserved with him than with her mother or aunt. These intimacies fascinated her. Quite naturally, he would take up the dress she had taken off, turn it inside out, and hang it up; he could lace the body of her dress far better than her maid, and, as if by instinct, his fingers divined the use of the pins and the hooks and eyes.

  As the days went by, Lady Helen grew to love him more and more; hourly his companionship grew more necessary to her. She felt that to lose him would be like losing part of herself, so completely in unison were their tastes and sentiments. Yet, notwithstanding, Fate managed to extend her crooked hand, and tear away some of their illusions before the end of the honeymoon.

  One evening it was a little chilly, and for sociability they had ordered a fire in the drawing-room. Lady Helen was glad of this, for she had often thought how delicious it would be to sit dreamily looking into the embers, with Lewis’s head resting against her knees, and she had almost hated the fine days for what they deprived her of.

  The lovers were sitting in this much-longed-for position when the dressing-bell rang for dinner. They had just come in from a long drive, and to sit in a cold dining-room, just as they were beginning to feel comfortable, and exchange their sweet words of endearment for a lot of conventionalities would be detestable. Lady Helen felt her heart sink at the thought. Guessing what was passing in her mind, Lewis proposed that they should have dinner brought up to the drawing-room. The tea table would be quite big enough for their two plates. It was just what Lady Helen felt she would like, and she kissed him for the idea; she wondered how he always thought of things so utterly fascinating.

  The dinner passed off delightfully. They waited on each other, and they had exchanged glasses a dozen times.

  The sole au gratin Lady Helen declared was the most delicious she had ever tasted; the cutlets were perfect; and not to be bothered by servants, they had had the dinner brought up at once. There was a riz de veau inside the fender, and behind Lewis’s arm-chair a bottle of champagne stood in its silver bucket of ice. The windows were shut, and the roar of the river was only heard vaguely.

  Lady Helen slowly picked the bone of the lamb cutlet with her white teeth; and her yellow hair, which had fallen down her back, glittered in the light of the reading lamp like corn under a setting sun. Both their faces were flushed with the glare of the fire.

  “Well, Helen, what do you think of being married. ’Tis nicer dining like this than with my mother-in-law, isn’t it?”

  Lady Helen replied with a superb gesture of disgust, and Lewis helped her to some strawberries and some more champagne. They had finished a bottle between them.

  “Oh, Lewis, you don’t know how my mother annoyed me at times; it was quite impossible to live with her.”

  “I hope it wasn’t for that only that you married me; you are not complimentary,” he said, laughing.

  She squeezed his foot in reply. The table being small, they could not move without kicking each other, and to prevent any more accidents, Lady Helen held Lewis’s foot between hers. Then for a few moments the lovers ate their strawberries in silence, until Lewis, amused at the idea of a tete-a-tete dinner with Lady Granderville, burst out laughing, and said he would make a sketch, but Lady Helen held his foot, declaring that he should not spoil their tete-a-tete with his tiresome sketching: she complained that she could not say a word but that he wanted to illustrate it. At last, on his promising not to fetch a pencil, she allowed him to get up and get the coffee. They had no cups, and hating to ring, they chose a couple from the Venetian mirror, and after rinsing them in the champagne bucket, they resumed their seats.

  Their little dinner had been a complete success; it had had a quaint charm of its own, and was a refinement of pleasure as subtle as it had been unexpected.

  Helen looked at her husband, her eyes were luminous with love; and, as her thoughts detached themselves, she remembered the time when she did not possess him: she wondered how she had lived through those bleak years full of febrile aspirations and irritating deceptions. She recalled everything, from the first waltz to the time when they knelt at the altar together.

  “You don’t know how hard I fought for you, how difficult my position was with my mother.”

  “Well, I hope you are not dissatisfied with your bargain,” he replied, laughing.

  It irritated her to hear him laugh; he constantly did so at the wrong times; but she pretended not to hear him, and continued to sip her coffee; her white cheeks blazing with two red spots. Then, after a pause, she continued:

  “You don’t know how afraid I was of losing you; I thought the days would never go by; even in church I thought something might happen to take you from me.”

  “Not half so much afraid as I was,” thought Lewis, and he chuckled inwardly.

  “But, suppose anything had happened, and we had been for ever separated,” she murmured, looking at him intently; “what should we have done? Do you know it frightens me?”

  “What a foolish baby you are to think of such disagreeable things.”

  Lady Helen had finished her coffee, and, absently, they listened to the weir, which enveloped the windows with a murmur of vague sound. The light of the lamp fell on the long grey peignoir and Lewis’s upturned face, whilst out of the large deep of purple shadow which filled both sides of the room there seemed to rise a dreamy languor, a desire for infinite rest. They remained silent until, at last, Lady Helen said, speaking very slowly:

  “You know, Lewis, I have never seen such beautiful hands as yours; I can scarcely look at them without trembling.” Lewis laughed softly, and blew his cigarette smoke into wreaths. Neither of them spoke again for some moments, and Lady Helen continued to caress Lewis’s hand which she held between hers. At last the glitter of a diamond awoke her from her reveries, and she examined a ring he wore. Then, seeing it was a lady’s, she drew it off his finger before he was aware.

  “Why, Lewis!” she said, in a tone of voice indicative at once of surprise and suspicion.

  Lewis looked up puzzled. It was a ring that Mrs. Liston had sent him, and having found it that morning in one of his pockets, he had slipped it, without thinking, on his finger. Lady Helen’s eyes were beginning to flash with anger, and fearing a scene, he told her that he had bought it for her, and had forgotten to give it to her. The lie was not ingenious, but he had no time to think of a better one. Anyhow, it seemed to answer as well as the best, for Lady Helen, remembering how he had bought her a hat in a similar way, brightened up, and the look of distrust faded from her face. Seeing that the story succeeded, he resolved to brave it out; so, putting his arm round her waist, he said, in his most coaxing voice:

  “I thought it would please you, baby, and that it would be sweet on those white, oh, the very whitest of fingers in the world.” There were some words engraved on the inside, but he trusted that Lady Helen would not think of examining the ring that night, and that he would be able before long to find an opportunity of stealing it. Lady Helen smiled with pleasure, and she leant over the table, holding the ring under the lamplight. He kissed her, and whispered in her ear softly, trying to attract her attention. But suddenly, as she turned the ring over, she noticed there was something written inside. Lewis saw the movement, and turned pale. It was all up with him; the truth must come out.

  Thinking it was one of the little surprises he was so fond of playing upon her, Lady Helen eagerly held it closer to the light, and read:

  “From Lily to Lewis.”

  In the silence of the room her astonished voice sounded like a bell. She did not understand, and she looked to her husband for an explanation, but seeing his embarrassed look, the truth began to strike her.

  “So, then, this is some woman’s present to you; and you
are wearing it even now,” she said, through her teeth.

  “My dear Helen, just listen, and I’ll explain.”

  The scene was very short. Her white skin grew ghastly white with rage; she stammered for lack of passionate words to express her disgust; he pleaded to be heard, but, unable to contain herself, she threw the ring in his face, and walked upstairs.

  So taken aback was he, that he did not at first attempt to follow, but stood looking into space; then, suddenly darting forward, he hurried after her: he was too late, she had locked herself in her room. He knocked at the door, but receiving no answer, went down to the drawing-room and walked up and down excitedly.

  “What cursed luck!” he thought. “Just because I took it off her finger once, and said it was a pretty one. I never made love to her!” And with a grave look he concluded with this phrase, full of unconscious cynicism:

  “That’s just the way people get into rows, not for what they do, but for what they don’t do.”

  He looked round vacantly, and his eyes fell upon the ring; it lay in the fender amid the fire-irons. He picked it up, and not knowing what to do with it, put it in his pocket. Then, after cursing Mrs. Liston and her presents, he got up, drank some wine, pushed the débris of the dinner out of the way, lit a cigar, and waited for his wife. The hours went by slowly; he sat smoking, inventing excuse after excuse, trying to think of the best way out of the difficulty.

  At last the clock struck eleven, and the servant came to take away the lights. Lewis dismissed him, saying that he was going to sit up a little longer, but that he had no further need of him, that he would turn the lights out himself before going to bed. The man offered to remove the plates and dishes, but Lewis, who was irritated to the last degree, told him he could not be bothered by the clattering, that it could be done in the morning. The butler went out wondering. Lewis smoked on. The lamp burned out, and in the gathering gloom the crimson ash of his cigar made one fiery point, which at every respiration illumined the thinking face. He still expected his wife to come downstairs, and he waited listening nervously to the footsteps that approached, and then died away at the end of the passages, to the locking of doors, the shutting of shutters, and the different noises attendant on the fastening up of a house for the night.

  At last the servants ceased to go to and fro, and he ventured to creep up the dark stairs and knock again at his wife’s door. Once, twice, he knocked, but got no answer; he pleaded and grew seriously alarmed, and wondered what Helen intended to do. Then he went down to the drawing-room, lit some candles, and thought the matter over, after which he unbarred the window and took a turn in the garden. He watched his wife’s window, and called her by name, and wondered if he could climb to her window by the ivy that glistened in the moonlight; then he went back, piled some more coal on the fire, smoked a cigarette, abused Mrs. Liston for having dared to send him the confounded ring, and finally went upstairs and pleaded piteously again for admittance. But his prayers were unheeded, and seeing at last that there was no chance of obtaining even an answer, he got a rug out of the hall and went to sleep on the sofa in the drawing-room.

  When he was awakened by the arrival of the housemaid with the dustpan, he mumbled something about having overslept himself, fetched his hat and went down to the river. The time went dreadfully slowly; everything was unpleasant. The grass was dripping wet, the willows were weeping in every sense of the word, and he wandered about feeling most wretchedly miserable. He considered the desirability of packing up his easel, and going off to paint. It would be, he thought, an excellent way of paying his wife out; but his courage failed him at the last, and he loitered about waiting for the time when Lady Helen would ring for her maid.

  At last his patience was rewarded, and, seizing the opportunity when Gwynnie was going down for some hot water, he pushed passed her, rushed into his wife’s room and locked the door after him, determined that she should at least hear him.

  Lady Helen had just taken her hands out of the basin and was drying them slowly with a towel. Lewis saw that she had been crying.

  “Oh, Helen,” he said, “you must listen; I can explain everything if you will only hear me.”

  She said nothing, but stood waiting. This somewhat disconcerted him; he had expected her to assail him with indignant words, and to push him, with her long white hands out of the room. He hesitated a moment, then volubly explained the story of the ring, adhering strictly to the truth, which for once in a way he was unable to amend.

  Lady Helen looked at him fixedly, and the tears glistened in her eyes.

  “Is this really true?” she murmured.

  He advanced towards her, and strove to take her in his arms. She resisted a moment, and then suddenly he felt warm tears on his cheek, and moist hands clasped round his neck. The lovers kissed, vowed, pleaded, and were reconciled. She loved him again, and more passionately than ever, not because she either believed him or disbelieved him, but because she had been miserable, and felt that she could not live without his love.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  PASSING A PAGE.

  AFTER THIS, THEIR first and last lovers’ quarrel, Lewis and Helen again took up the course of their honeymoon, and the days passed like long, sweet dreams in the peace of the fair river-side villa, in the midst of the odorous deaths of flowers, whose soft leaves falling on the marble tables scanned the almost imperceptible passing of the hours. There they sat side by side, their hands’ flesh melted together, and their thoughts lost in a far niente of happiness; words often seemed an effort, and they could but exchange soft pressures of fingers, and smiles of languid adoration.

  Then, again, they would awake from their reveries, and go for excursions into the country. The soft days of June were delicious, and they grew, as it were, spiritually drunk with the delicate air. But it was the garden they loved best. There was not a tree they did not know, not a corner that had not its own particular memory. Under the great shady trees on the right they used to sit when the moonlight was warm. In the summer-house they took tea in the afternoon. There was a rose tree there, and they used to bet kisses about the buds that would blossom during the night, and in the morning they ran across the wet grass to see who had won. Then, after breakfast, they went to lie in a large, dreamy place under the laurels, where they could see nothing of the outer world, and hear nothing but the silence humming above them in the trees. They went with books that they did not read, but which suggested long and delightful conversations; and when tired of talking, or teasing some crawling insect with a cane or a parasol, their souls filled with summer-sleepy idleness, Lewis would ask her to sit: he made sketches of her while she wreathed her hair with flowers, or read poetry, lying full length on a garden bench. They were never at a loss for occupation; for being both artists, a ray of light, a bit of perspective, a passing figure, were to them subjects of endless interest.

  Lady Helen had her poetry to write; they worked in collaboration; she planned a volume of verse to be entitled “Flowers of Love and Sadness,” and, as they talked, Lewis composed a frontispiece.

  But at last came the final week of the honeymoon, when their thoughts had begun to drift away from the garden, when the present could no longer hide the future from their eyes; and these last days were full of infantile sadness. It grieved them to leave the garden where they had been so happy; they visited each nook; and even when the carriage came to take them away, Lady Helen ran back to pluck a rose from the kissing-tree. She gathered two, a bud and a blown flower; and quarrelling as to who should wear the former, the lovers drove to London.

  They went straight to Lady Marion’s, where they were to stay until the house she had chosen was ready to receive them.

  There was little time to lose, for, as said the whole family, “He is married to her now, and the best thing to do is to put him into a house and get him as many orders as possible.” Lord and Lady Granderville, who had just come back from Paris, where they had been staying with some friends before returning to America, be
gged of him to work hard, for they could do nothing more for Lady Helen than they had already done.

  It was Lady Granderville who had insisted on this explanation. She foresaw all kinds of money difficulties in the future, and she declared that the young man should be properly warned, and if after that he chose to run into debt, why, nobody could help him.

  Then came a large dinner-party at Lord Worthing’s, to which the leaders of the Conservative party had been asked, so that they might bid good-bye to Lord Granderville, who was to start on the following day. It was a very formal affair. Lewis and Helen peeped at each other between groups of grave men over the large shoulders of dowagers, and she took that evening her first lessons in the art of touting for orders.

  The next day Lord and Lady Granderville bade their children good-bye. Lewis was pensive, Lady Helen careless, Lady Granderville hysterical, and Lord Granderville sincerely affectionate. He shook his son-in-law’s hand and wished him success, kissed his beautiful daughter, and begged of her not to be extravagant.

  But as she was now the wife of an artist, and was received in artistic as well as fashionable society, she had determined, at all costs, to live up to the latter. This she found somewhat difficult. Her life had been spent abroad in the society of diplomatists, and beyond the construction of a sonnet she knew nothing. However, remembering that in St. Petersburg she had heard a great deal of French taste and fashion, she resolved, after some hesitation, to make her drawing-room an exact copy of a French salon. She thought it would be a novelty, and, without confiding her project to anyone, spent her mornings, not only in looking at French poufs and long sofas in the style of the Empire, but, what was worse, in buying them.

  The house Lady Marion and Mrs. Bentham had chosen suited them admirably. It was in Kensington, towards Fulham, and Lady Helen learned with satisfaction that that was as artistic a neighbourhood as any in London. The rent, with the studio, was only three hundred a year, which was not much, considering the difficulty of getting both together, and Lady Helen would not for worlds have her husband paint anywhere but in her house.