“You are not doing your best to prevent it,” answered Mrs. Darche.
“Oh! — what are my sins? Are you jealous? This begins to interest me.”
“No, I am not jealous, you have never given me any cause to be.”
“You think that incompatibility of temper would be sufficient ground, then?”
“For a temporary separation — yes.”
“Ah — it is to be only temporary? How good you are!”
“It can be permanent, if you like.”
“I have already told you that I have no idea of separating. I cannot imagine why you go back to it as you do.”
“You drive me back to it.”
“You are suddenly developing a temper. This is delightful.”
Mrs. Darche made no answer, but occupied herself with her papers in silence. She could hardly account for the humour in which she was answering her husband, seeing that for years she had listened to his disagreeable and brutal sayings without retort. It is impossible to foresee the precise moment at which the worm will turn, the beast refuse its load, and the human heart revolt. Sometimes it never comes at all, and then we call the sufferer a coward. After a pause which lasted several minutes, John renewed the attack.
“I am sorry you will not quarrel any more, it was so refreshing,” he said.
“I do not like quarrelling,” answered Marion, without looking up. “What good can it do?”
“You are always wanting to do good! Life without contrasts is very insipid.”
Mrs. Darche rose from her seat and came and stood by the fireplace.
“John,” she said, “something has happened. You are not like yourself. If I can be of any use to you, tell me the truth and I will do all I can. If not, go and ride as you said you would. The fresh air will rest you.”
“You are a good creature, my dear,” said Darche looking at her curiously.
“I do not know whether you mean to be flattering, or whether you wish to go on with this idle bickering over words — you know that I do not like to be called a good creature, like the washerwoman or the cook. Yes — I know — I am angry just now. Never mind, my advice is good. Either go out at once, or tell me just what is the matter and let me do the best I can to help you.”
“There is nothing to tell, my dear.”
“Then go out, or go and talk to your father — or stay here, and I will go away.”
“Anything rather than stay together,” suggested Darche.
“Yes — anything rather than that. I daresay it is my fault, and I am quite willing to bear all the blame, but if we are together in the same room much longer we shall do something which we shall regret — at least I shall. I am sure of it.”
“That would be very unfortunate,” said Darche, rising, with a short laugh. “Our life has been so exceptionally peaceful since we were married!”
“I think it has,” answered Marion, calmly, “considering your character and mine. On the whole we have kept the peace very well. It has certainly not been what I expected and hoped that it might be, but it has not been so unhappy as that of many people I know. We both made a mistake, perhaps, but others have made worse ones. You ask why I married you. I believe that I loved you. But I might ask you the same question.”
“You would get very much the same answer.”
“Oh no — you never loved me. I cannot even say that you have changed much in five years, since our honeymoon. You did not encourage my illusions very long.”
“No. Why should I?”
“I daresay you were right. I daresay that it has been best so. The longer one has loved a thing, the harder it is to part from it. I loved my illusions. As for you—”
“As for me, I loved you, as I understand love,” said Darche walking up and down the room with his hands in his pockets. “And, what is more, as I understand love, I love you still.”
“Love cannot be a very serious matter with you, then,” answered Marion, turning from him to the fire and pushing back a great log with her foot.
“You are mistaken,” returned Darche. “Love is a serious matter, but not half so serious as young girls are inclined to believe. Is it not a matter of prime importance to select carefully the woman who is to sit opposite to one at table for a lifetime, and whose voice one must hear every day for forty years or so? Of course it is serious. It is like selecting the president of a company — only that you cannot turn him out and choose another when you are not pleased with him. Love is not a wild, insane longing to be impossibly dramatic at every hour of the day. Love is natural selection. Darwin says so. Now a sensible man of business like me, naturally selects a sensible woman like you to be the mistress of his household. That is all it comes to, in the end. There is no essential difference between a man’s feeling for the woman he loves and his feeling for anything else he wants.”
“And I fill the situation admirably. Is that what you mean?” inquired Marion with some scorn.
“If you choose to put it in that way.”
“And that is what you call being loved?”
“Yes — being wanted. It comes to that. All the rest is illusion — dream-stuff, humbug, ‘fake’ if you do not object to Bowery slang.”
“Are you going out?” asked Mrs. Darche, losing patience altogether.
“No. But I am going upstairs to see the old gentleman. It is almost the same.”
He went towards the door and his hand was on the handle of the lock when she called him back.
“John—” there was hesitation in her voice.
“Well? What is the matter?” He came back a few steps and stood near her.
“John, did you never care for me in any other way — in any better way — from the heart? You used to say that you did.”
“Did I? I have forgotten. One always supposes that young girls naturally expect one to talk a lot of nonsense, and that one has no choice unless one does — so one makes the best of it. I remember that it was a bore to make phrases so I probably made them. Anything else you would like to ask?”
“No — thanks. I would rather be alone.”
John Darche left the room and Marion returned to her writing-table as though nothing had been said, intending to write her notes as usual. And indeed, she began, and the pen ran easily across the paper for a few moments.
Then on a sudden, her lip quivered, she wrote one more word, the pen fell from her fingers, and bowing her head upon the edge of the table she let the short, sharp sobs break out as they would.
She was a very lonely woman on that winter’s afternoon, and the tension she had kept on herself had been too great to bear any longer.
CHAPTER IV.
IN SPITE OF her husband’s denial, Marion Darche was convinced that he was in difficulties, though she could not understand how such a point could have been reached in the affairs of the Company, which had always been considered so solid, and which had the reputation of being managed so well. It was natural, when matters reached a crisis, that none of her acquaintances should speak to her of her husband’s troubles, and many said that Mrs. Darche was a brave woman to face the world as she did when her husband was in all likelihood already ruined and was openly accused on all sides of something very like swindling. But as a matter of fact she was in complete ignorance of all this. John Darche laughed scornfully when she repeated her question, and she had never even thought of asking the old gentleman any questions. She was too proud to speak of her troubles to Vanbrugh or Brett; and Dolly, foreseeing real trouble, thought it best to hide from her friend the fears she entertained. As sometimes happens in such cases, matters had gone very far without Mrs. Darche’s knowledge. The Company was in hands of a receiver and an inquiry into the conduct of Simon and John Darche was being pushed forward with the utmost energy by the frightened holders of the bonds and shares, while Marion was dining and dancing through the winter season as usual. The Darches were accused of having issued an enormous amount of stock without proper authority; but there were many who said that Si
mon Darche was innocent of the trick, and that John had manufactured bogus certificates. Others again maintained that Simon Darche was in his dotage and signed whatever was put before him by his son, without attempting to understand the obligations to which he committed himself.
Meanwhile John’s position became desperate, though he himself did not believe it to be so utterly hopeless as it really was. Since this is the story of Marion Darche and not of her husband, it is unnecessary to enter into the financial details of the latter’s ruin. It is enough to say that for personal ends he had made use of the Company’s funds in order to get into his own control a line of railroad by which a large part of the Company’s produce was transported, with the intention of subsequently forcing the Company to buy the road of him on his own terms, as soon as he should have disposed by stealth of his interest in the manufacture. Had the scheme succeeded he should have realised a great fortune by the transaction, and it is doubtful whether anything could have been proved against him after the event. Unfortunately for him, he had come into collision with a powerful syndicate of which he had not suspected the existence until he had gone so far that either to go on or to retire must be almost certain ruin and exposure. The existence of this syndicate had dawned upon him on the day described in the preceding chapters, and the state of mind in which he found himself was amply accounted for by the discovery he had made.
As time went on during the following weeks, and he became more and more hopelessly involved, his appearance and his manner changed for the worse. He grew haggard and thin, and his short speeches to his wife lacked even that poor element of wit which is brutality’s last hold upon good manners. With his father, however, he maintained his usual behaviour, by a desperate effort. He could not afford to allow the whole fabric of the old gentleman’s illusions about him to perish, so long as Simon Darche’s hand and name could still be useful. It is but just to admit, too, that he felt a sort of cynical, pitying attachment to his father — the affection which a spoiled child bestows upon an over-indulgent parent, which is strongly tinged with the vanity excited by a long course of unstinted and indiscriminating praise.
If Marion Darche’s own fortune had been invested in the Company of which her husband was treasurer, she must have been made aware of the condition of things long before the final day of reckoning came. But her property had been left her in the form of real estate, and the surplus had been invested in such bonds and mortgages as had been considered absolutely safe by Harry Brett’s father, who had originally been her guardian, and, after his death, by Harry Brett himself, who was now her legal adviser, and managed her business for her. The house in Lexington Avenue was her property. After her marriage she had persuaded her husband to live in it rather than in the somewhat pretentious and highly inconvenient mansion erected on Fifth Avenue by Simon Darche in the early days of his great success, which was decorated within, and to some extent without, according to the doubtful taste of the late Mrs. Simon Darche. Vanbrugh compared it to an “inflamed Pullman car.”
Enough has been said to show how at the time, the Darches were on the verge of utter ruin, and how Marion Darche was financially independent. Meanwhile the old gentleman’s mind was failing fast, a fact which was so apparent that Marion was not at all surprised when her husband told her that there was to be a consultation of doctors to inquire into the condition of Simon Darche, with a view to deciding whether he was fit to remain, even nominally, at the head of the Company or not. As a matter of fact, the consultation had become a legal necessity, enforced by the committee that was examining the Company’s affairs.
John Darche was making a desperate fight of it, sacrificing everything upon which he could lay his hands in order to buy in the fraudulent certificates of stock. He was constantly in want of money, and seized every opportunity of realising a few thousands which presented itself, even descending to gambling in the stock market in the hope of picking up more cash. He was unlucky, of course, and margin after margin disappeared and was swallowed up. From time to time he made something by his speculations — just enough to revive his shrinking hopes, and to whet his eagerness, already sharpened by extremest anxiety. He did not think of escaping from the country, however. In the first place, if he disappeared at this juncture, he must be a beggar or dependent on his wife’s charity. Secondly, he could not realise that the end was so near and that the game was played out to the last card. Still he struggled on frantically, hoping for a turn of the market, for a windfall out of the unknown, for a wave of luck, whereby a great sum being suddenly thrown into his hands he should be able to cover up the traces of his misdeeds and begin life afresh.
Marion was as brave as ever, but she got even more credit for her courage than she really deserved. She knew at this time that the trouble was great, but she had no idea that it was altogether past mending, and she had not renewed the offer of help she had made to her husband when she had first noticed his distress. In the meantime, she devoted herself to the care of old Simon Darche. She read aloud to him in the morning, though she was quite sure that he rarely followed a single sentence to the end. She drove with him in the afternoon and listened patiently to his rambling comments on men and things. His inability to recognise many of the persons who had been most familiar to him in the earlier part of his life was becoming very apparent, and the constant mistakes he made rendered it advisable to keep him out of intercourse with any but the members of his own family. As has been said, Mrs. Darche had not as yet made any change in her social existence, but Dolly Maylands, who knew more of the true state of affairs than her friend, came to see her every day and grew anxious in the anticipation of the inevitable disaster. Her fresh face grew a little paler and showed traces of nervousness. She felt perhaps as men do who lead a life of constant danger. She slept as well and became almost abnormally active, seizing feverishly upon everything and every subject which could help to occupy her time.
“You work too hard, Dolly,” said Mrs. Darche one morning as they were seated together in the library. “You will wear yourself out. You have danced all night, and now you mean to spend your day in slaving at your charities.”
Dolly laughed a little as she went on cutting the pages of the magazine she held. This was a thing Mrs. Darche especially disliked doing, and Dolly had long ago taken upon herself the responsibility of cutting all new books and reviews which entered the house.
“Oh I love to burn the candle at both ends,” she answered.
“No doubt you do, my dear. We have all liked to do that at one time or another. But at this rate you will light your candle in the middle, too.”
“You cannot light a candle in the middle,” said Dolly with great decision.
“If anybody could, you could,” said Marion, watching her as she had often done of late and wondering if any change had come into the young girl’s life. “Seriously, my dear, I am anxious about you. I wish you would take care of yourself, or get married, or something.”
“If you will tell me what that ‘something’ is I will get it at once,” said Dolly, with a smile that had a tinge of sadness in it. “I ask nothing better.”
“Oh anything!” exclaimed Mrs. Darche. “Get nervous prostration or anything that is thoroughly fashionable and gives no trouble, and then go somewhere and rest for a month.”
“My dear child,” cried Dolly with a laugh, “I cannot think of being so old-fashioned as to have nervous prostration. Let me see. I might be astigmatic. That seems to be the proper thing nowadays. Then I could wear glasses and look the character of the school-ma’am. Then I could say I could not dance because I could not see, because of course I could not dance in spectacles. But for the matter of that, my dear, you need not lecture me. You are as bad as I am, and much worse — yours is a much harder life than mine.”
Just as Dolly was about to draw a comparison between her own existence and her friend’s, the door opened and Stubbs entered the room bearing a dozen enormous roses, of the kind known as American beauties. Dolly, who
had a passion for flowers, sprang up, and seized upon them with an exclamation of delight.
“What beauties! What perfect beauties!” she said. “You lucky creature! Who in the world sends you such things?”
Mrs. Darche had risen from her seat and had buried her face in the thick blossoms while Dolly held them.
“I am sure I do not know,” she said.
“Oh Marion!” answered Dolly, smiling. “Innocence always was your strong point, and what a strong point it is. I wish people would send me flowers like these.”
“I have no doubt they do, my dear. Do not pretend they do not. Come and help me arrange them instead of talking nonsense. Even if it were true that my life is harder than yours — I do not know why — you see there are alleviations.”
Dolly did not answer at once. She was wondering just how much her friend knew of the actual state of things, and she was surprised to feel a little touch of pain when she contrasted the truth, so far as she knew it, with the negatively blissful ignorance in which Mrs. Darche’s nearest and best friends were doing their best to keep her.
“Of course there are alleviations in your life, just as there are in mine,” she said at last, “changes, contrasts and all that sort of thing. My kindergarten alleviates my dancing and my cotillons vary the dulness of my school teaching.”
She paused and continued to arrange the flowers in silence, looking back now and then and glancing at them. Mrs. Darche did not speak, but watched her idly, taking a certain artistic pleasure in the fitness of the details which made up the little picture before her.
“But I would not lead your life for anything in the world,” added Dolly at last with great decision.
“Oh, nonsense, Dolly!”
“Are you happy, Marion?” asked Dolly, suddenly growing very grave.
“Happy?” repeated Mrs. Darche, a little surprised by the sudden question. “Yes, why not? What do you mean by happy?”
“What everybody means, I suppose.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 642
