Mrs. Humphry Ward

“ Meanwhile Doris was occupied partly in soothing the injured feelings of Jane, and partly in smoothing out and inspecting her one evening frock. She decided that it would take her a week to "do it up," and that she would do it herself. "A week wasted!" she thought—"and all for nothing. What do we want with Lady Dunstable! She'll flatter Arthur, and make him lazy. They all do! And I've no use for her at all. Maid indeed! Does she think nobody can exist without that appendage? How I should like to make her live on four hundred a year, with a husband that will spend seven!" ”

“ There was not the slightest visible sign of tremor in the young woman; and Sir Luke's inner mind applauded her.
"No fool!—and a lady," he thought. "Let's see what Rachel will make of her."
"Then you don't help him in the writing?" said Lady Dunstable, still with the same detached air. Doris laughed.
"I don't know what Arthur would say if I proposed it. He never lets anybody go near him when he's writing."
"I see; like all geniuses, he's dangerous on the loose." Was Lady Dunstable's smile just touched with sarcasm? "Well!—has the success of the lectures surprised you?" ”

“ Presently, as she and her two companions wound slowly up the moor, Sir Luke Malford, who had only arrived the night before, inquired gaily of his hostess:
"So she wouldn't come?—the little wife?"
"I gave her every chance. She scorned us."
"You mean—'she funked us.' Have you any idea, I wonder, how alarming you are?"
Lady Dunstable exclaimed impatiently:
"People represent me as a kind of ogre. I am nothing of the kind. I only expect everybody to play up."
"Ah, but you make the rules!" laughed Sir Luke. "I thought that young woman might have been a decided acquisition." ”

“ She was still searching, when Meadows said reproachfully:
"I thought, darling, you might have taken a little more trouble to make friends with Lady Dunstable. However, that'll be all right. I told her, of course, we should be delighted to go to Scotland."
"Arthur!" cried Doris, aghast. "Three weeks! I couldn't, Arthur! Don't ask me!"
"And, pray, why?" he angrily inquired.
"Because—oh, Arthur, don't you understand? She is a man's woman. She took a particular dislike to me, and I just had to be stubborn and thorny to get on at all. ”

“ We are all very hungry, I'm afraid," said Lady Dunstable, with a smile. Meadows was conscious of a rising fury. His quick sense perceived something delicately offensive in every word and look of the great lady. Doris, of course, had done an incredibly foolish thing. What she had come to say to Lady Dunstable he could not conceive; for the first explanation—that of a silly jealousy—had by now entirely failed him. But it was evident to him that Lady Dunstable assumed it—or chose to assume it. ”

“ At the sound of the young and musical voice, the gentleman with the Dundreary whiskers—Sir Luke Malford—who had seemed half asleep, turned sharply to look at the speaker. Doris too was in a white dress, of the simplest stuff and make; but it became her. So did the straw hat, with its wreath of wild roses, which she had trimmed herself that morning. ”

“ And in poor Doris's troubled mind the whole scene—save the two central figures, Lady Dunstable and Arthur—seemed to melt away. She was not the first wife, by a long way, into whose quiet breast Lady Dunstable had dropped these seeds of discord. She knew it well by report; but it was hateful, both to wifely feeling and natural vanity, that she should now be the victim of the moment, and should know no more than her predecessors how to defend herself. "Why can't I be cool and cutting—pay her back when she is rude, and contradict her when she's absurd? She is absurd often. ”

“ On the present occasion her main object clearly was to bring out Arthur Meadows—the new captive of her bow and spear; to find out what was in him; to see if he was worthy of her inner circle. Throwing all compliment aside, she attacked him hotly on certain statements—certain estimates—in his lectures. Her knowledge was personal; the knowledge of one whose father had sat in Dizzy's latest Cabinet, while, through the endless cousinship of the English landed families, she was as much related to the Whig as to the Tory leaders of the past. ”

“ There is nobody in the world less helpless than Lady Dunstable, and nobody who would be less grateful for being helped. I really cannot meddle with it."
She rose as she spoke, and Miss Wigram rose too.
"Couldn't you—couldn't you—" said the girl pleadingly—"just ask Mr. Meadows to warn Lord Dunstable? I'm thinking of the villagers, and the farmers, and the schools—all the people we used to love. Father was there twenty years! To think of the dear place given over—some day—to that creature!"
Her charming eyes actually filled with tears. Doris was touched, but at the same time set on edge. ”

“ What she suffers—poor Rachel! She'd have given everything in the world for a brilliant son. But you can't wonder. She's like some strong plant that takes all the nourishment out of the ground, so that the plants near it starve. She can't help it. She doesn't mean to be a vampire!"
Doris hardly knew what to say. Somehow she wished the vampire were not walking with Arthur! That, however, was not a sentiment easily communicable; and she was just turning it into something else when Miss Field said—abruptly, like someone coming to the real point—
"Does your husband like her?" ”

“ Through some glass doors open to the garden came in little wandering winds which played with some loose papers on the floor, and blew Doris's hair about her eyes as she stooped over her easel, absorbed in her drawing. Apparently absorbed: her subliminal mind, at least, was far away, wandering on a craggy Scotch moor. A lady on a Scotch pony—she understood that Lady Dunstable often rode with the shooters—and a tall man walking beside her, carrying, not a gun, but a walking stick:—that was the vision in the crystal. Arthur was too bad a shot to be tolerated in the Dunstable circle ”

“ Meadows, was soon surrounded by a congenial company—the Home Secretary, one or two other politicians, the old General, a literary Dean, Lord Staines, a great racing man, Arthur Meadows, and one or two more. The talk became almost entirely political—with a dash of literature. Doris saw at once that Lady Dunstable was the centre of it, and she was not long in guessing that it was for this kind of talk that people came to Crosby Ledgers. Lady Dunstable, it seemed, was capable of talking like a man with men, and like a man of affairs with the men of affairs. ”

“ It was positively comic that under such circumstances anybody should expect her—Doris Meadows—to trouble her head about Lady Dunstable's affairs. Of course she would feel it if her son made a ridiculous and degrading marriage. But why not?—why shouldn't he come to grief like anybody else's son? Why should heaven and earth be moved in order to prevent it?—especially by the woman to whose possible jealousy and pain Lady Dunstable had certainly never given the most passing thought. ”

“ That Lady Dunstable should have unkindly slighted this motherless girl, who had evidently plenty of natural capacity under her shyness, was just like her, and Doris's feelings of antagonism to the tyrant were only sharpened by her acquaintance with the victim. Why should Miss Wigram worry her self? Lord Dunstable? Well, but after all, capable men should keep such wives in order. If Lord Dunstable had not been scandalously weak, Lady Dunstable would not have become a terror to her sex. ”

“ Doris turned towards him—demurring—for the sake of conversation. "I never could understand how Cinderella enjoyed the ball."
"For thinking of the clock?" laughed Sir Luke. "No, no!—you can't mean that. It's the expectation of the clock that doubles the pleasure. Of course you agree, Rachel!"—he turned to her—"else why did you read me that very doleful poem yesterday, on this very theme?—that it's only the certainty of death that makes life agreeable? By the way, George Eliot had said it before!"
"The poem was by a friend of mine," said Lady Dunstable, coldly. ”

“ Doris's eyes pursued the two distant figures in the park.
"You'd think, for instance, that Lord Dunstable was just a cipher? Not at all. He's the real authority here, and when he puts his foot down Rachel always gives in. But of course she's stood in the way of his career."
Doris shrank a little from these indiscretions. But she could not keep her curiosity out of her eyes, and Miss Field smilingly answered it.
"She's absorbed him so! You see he watches her all the time. She's like an endless play to him. He really doesn't care for anything else—he doesn't want anything else. ”

“ But when a mother pursues her own selfish ends so as to make her only son dislike and shun her, let her take what comes. It was in the mood of an Erinnys that Doris made her way northwards to Campden Hill, and nobody perceiving the slight erect figure in the corner of the omnibus could possibly have guessed at the storm within.
The August day was hot and lifeless. Heat mist lay over the park, and over the gardens on the slopes of Campden Hill. Doris could hardly drag her weary feet along, as she walked from where the omnibus had set her down to her uncle's studio. ”

“ And it's dreadful to think of a woman like—well, like that!—reigning at Crosby Ledgers. I think of the poor people. Lady Dunstable's good to them; though of course you wouldn't hear anything about it, unless you lived there. She tries to do her duty to them—she really does—in her own way. And, of course, they respect her. No Dunstable has ever done anything disgraceful! Isn't there something in 'Noblesse oblige'? Think of this woman at the head of that estate!"
"Well, upon my word," said Doris, after a pause, "you are feudal.
Don't you feel yourself that you are old-fashioned?" ”

“ She remembered how on their September honeymoon they had wandered in Ross-shire, how the whole land was dyed crimson by the heather, and how impossible it was to persuade Arthur to walk discreetly rather than, like any cockney tripper, with his arm round his sweetheart. Scotland had not been far behind the Garden of Eden under those circumstances. But Arthur was now pursuing the higher, the intellectual joys. ”

“ She took up Lady Dunstable's letter, and read it pensively through again.
"You can accept for yourself, Arthur, of course," she said, looking up.
"But I can't possibly go."
Meadows protested loudly.
"You have no excuse at all!" he declared hotly. "Lady Dunstable has given us a month's notice. You can't get out of it. Do you want me to be known as a man who accepts smart invitations without his wife? There is no more caddish creature in the world."
Doris could not help smiling upon him. But her mouth was none the less determined.
"I haven't got a single frock that's fit for Crosby Ledgers. ”

“ Lady Dunstable is my husband's friend. I don't like her very much. But neither of us knows her well enough to go and tell her tales about her son."
Miss Wigram considered—her gentle, troubled eyes bent upon Doris. "Of course—I know—how many people dislike Lady Dunstable. She did a—rather cruel thing to me once. The thought of it humiliated and discouraged me for a long time. It made me almost glad to leave home. And of course she hasn't won Mr. Herbert's confidence at all. She has always snubbed and disapproved of him. ”

“ The very sound of it was enough to keep people away! "What people expect from you is talk about persons—not ideas. Ideas are not your line!"
Meadows flushed a little. What his "line" might be, he said, he had not yet discovered. But he liked his subject, and meant to stick to it.
Lady Dunstable turned on him a pair of sarcastic eyes.
"That's so like you clever people. You would die rather than take advice." ”

“ If you don't want to play games, don't play them. If you want to go to church to-morrow, go to church. Lady Dunstable of course is a heathen. And now perhaps, you might really rest."
"Such a jolly walk!" said Meadows, entering his wife's room flushed with exercise and pleasure. "The place is divine, and really Lady Dunstable is uncommonly good talk. Hope you haven't been dull, dear?"
Doris replied, laughing, that Miss Field had taken pity on what would otherwise have been solitary confinement, and that now it was time to dress. ”

“ Meadows's blouse.
PART II CHAPTER III During the weeks that followed the Meadowses' first visit to Crosby Ledgers, Doris's conscience was by no means asleep on the subject of Lady Dunstable. She felt that her behaviour in that lady's house, and the sudden growth in her own mind of a quite unmanageable dislike, were not to be defended in one who prided herself on a general temper of coolness and common sense, who despised the rancour and whims of other women, hated scenes, and had always held jealousy to be the smallest and most degrading of passions. ”

“ When I am dull my countenance changes, and you cannot do it justice. He will talk to me—I shall be animated—and you will profit."
"Ah, no doubt!" said Bentley, smiling. "And your friend's name?"
"Herbert Dunstable—Honourable Herbert Dunstable!—Signor Bentley," said Madame Vavasour, advancing with a stately step into the room, and waving peremptorily to the young man to follow.
Doris sat transfixed and staring. Bentley turned to look at his niece, and their eyes met—his full of suppressed mirth. The son!—the unsatisfactory son! Doris remembered that his name was Herbert. ”

“ Haven't these lectures justified the book-bills a dozen times over?"
This time Arthur Meadows surveyed his wife in real irritation and disgust.
"But, Arthur!—you could get them all at the London Library—you know you could!"
"And pray how much time do I waste in going backwards and forwards after books? Any man of letters worth his salt wants a library of his own—within reach of his hand."
"Yes, if he can pay for it!" said Doris, with plaintive emphasis, as she ruefully turned over the costly volumes which the parcel contained. ”

“ Worthing—he's what men ought to be."
"And that is—?" Doris ventured to put in.
"Just—men," said Lady Dunstable, shortly.
Sir Luke laughed over his cigarette.
"That you may fool them? Well, Rachel, all the same, you would die of
Worthing's company in a month."
"I shouldn't die," said Lady Dunstable, quietly. "I should murder."
"Hullo, what's my wife talking about?" said a bluff and friendly voice.
Doris looked up to see a handsome man with grizzled hair approaching.
"Mrs. Meadows? How do you do? What a beautiful evening you've brought! Your husband and I have been having a jolly talk. ”