Eustace Hignett

“ But even those whom Nature has destined to be mates may misunderstand each other, and Jane, who was as modest as she was brave, had come recently to place a different interpretation on his silence. In the last few days of the voyage she had quite made up her mind that Eustace Hignett loved her and would shortly intimate as much in the usual manner; but, since coming to Windles, she had begun to have doubts. She was not blind to the fact that Billie Bennett was distinctly prettier than herself and far more the type to which the ordinary man is attracted. ”

“ Jane Hubbard buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. She might know what to do when alligators started exploring her tent, but she was a woman.
This sudden solution of steely strength into liquid weakness had on Eustace Hignett the stunning effects which the absence of the last stair has on the returning reveller creeping up to bed in the dark. It was as though his spiritual foot had come down hard on empty space and caused him to bite his tongue. Jane Hubbard had always been to him a rock of support. ”

“ She wished she were a German-Swiss porter, a merry chasseur—anything but Mrs. Eustace Greyne. One thing alone supported her in this hour of trial, the thought of her husband’s ecstasy when she appeared upon the dread scene of his awful labours, to tell him that he was released, that he need visit them no more.
The alley of the Dead Dervishes is long and winding. To Mrs. Greyne it seemed endless. As she threaded it with faltering step, gripped by the feverish hand of Abdallah Jack, who now began to display a strange and terrible excitement, she became a centre of curiosity. ”

“ She was holding a council to decide something in reference to him.
The honeymoon weeks had brought her just as far as the question, “Do I know my husband at all, or is he, so far, a total stranger?”
Some people seem to draw near to you as you look at them steadily, others to recede until they reach the verge of invisibility. Which was Eustace doing? Did his outline become clearer or more blurred? Was he daily more definite or more phantasmal? And the members of her council drew near and whispered their opinions in Winifred’s attentive ears. ”

“ The world is evil, and, as you say, I am a—not a word!”
He ventured to press her hand, as an elder brother might have pressed it. For the first time he realised that even to the husband of Mrs. Eustace Greyne the world might attribute—Goodness gracious! What might not the militia think, for instance?
He felt himself, for one moment, potentially a dog.
They parted in a whirl of Arabs on the quay. Mr. Greyne would have stayed to assist Mademoiselle Verbena, but she bade him go.
She whispered that she thought it “better” that they should not seem to—enfin! ”

“ But by degrees she began to feel a certain stiffness in the capers, a self-consciousness in the antics, or fancied she began to feel it, and instead of being always amused she became often thoughtful.
Whimsicality she loved. Buffoonery she possibly, even probably, could learn to hate.
Of Eustace’s love for her she had no doubt. She was certain of his affection. But was it worth having? That depended, surely, on the nature of the man in whom it sprang, from whom it flowed. She wanted to be sure of that nature; but she acknowledged to herself, as she sat by the fire, that she was perplexed. ”

“ Upon the table of Mademoiselle Verbena lay the diary, open at the following entry:—
On Thursday next poor Eustace will be on board the Général Bertrand, sailing for Algiers. I shall be here thinking of myself, and of him in relation to myself. God help us both. Duty is sometimes stern. Mem. The corner house in Park Lane, next the Duke of Ebury’s, has sixty years still to run; the lease, that is. Thursday—poor Eustace!
“What does this portend?” cried Mrs. Greyne.
“My darling, it passes my wit to imagine,” replied her husband. ”

“ You will have two children to laugh at, Winnie. Your husband is one, you know.” He sprang up. “I’ll go into the Strand,” he said. “There’s a man near the Temple who has always got some delightful novelty displaying its paces on the pavement. What fun!”
And off he went, leaving Winifred alone with the mystery of her woman’s world, the mystic mystery of birth that may dawn out of hate as out of love, out of drunken dissipation as out of purity’s sweet climax.
Next day a paragraph in the papers told how Mr. Eustace Lane had bought up all the penny toys of the Strand. ”

“ There are moments when a duet is gaol, a trio comparative liberty. The child, the tiny intruder into youthful married life, may come in the guise of an imp or of a good fairy: one to cloud the perfect and complete joy of two, or one to give sunlight to their nascent weariness and dissatisfaction. Or, again, it may be looked for with longing by one of two lovers, with apprehension by the other. Only when it lay dead did Winifred understand that Eustace was to her a stranger, and that she was lonely alone with him. ”

“ The hoop is their demon enemy, whom they drive before them to destruction. The kite is a great white bird, whom they hold back for a time from heaven. Suddenly Winifred longed to feel the bird’s efforts to be free.
“Let me have it!” she cried to Eustace, holding out her hands eagerly. “Do let me!”
He was glad to pass the cord to her, being utterly tired of a prank which he thought idiotic, and he could not understand the light that sprang into her eyes as she grasped it, and felt the life of the lifeless thing that soared towards the clouds. ”

“ Greyne would have prescribed a dose of Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted strangeness. Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would be inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the vehicle with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet strings floating upon the winsome wind.
“You know my husband?” she asked softly of the guide.
Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.
“How is he looking?” continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice. “My Eustace!” she added to herself, “my devoted one!” ”

“ The proprietor, the maître d’hôtel, the waiters, the porters, the chasseurs, Mrs. Greyne and Mrs. Forbes, all turned about to face the determined speaker.
And there before them, his dark eyes gleaming, his long moustaches bristling fiercely—here stood Abdallah Jack.
VII
Man is a self-deceiver. It must, therefore, ever be a doubtful point whether Mr. Eustace Greyne, during his residence in Africa, absolutely lost sight of his sense of duty ”

“ Eustace Greyne found himself impiously thanking the powers that be for this strange chance of going on the spree with a toque. When Mademoiselle Verbena returned he was looking almost rakish. He eyed her neat black hat and close-fitting black jacket with a glance not wholly unlike that of a militiaman. In her hand she held a vivid scarlet parasol.
“Monsieur,” she said, “it is terrible, this ombrelle, when mamma lies at death’s door. But what can I do? I have no other, and cannot afford to buy one. The sun is fierce. ”

“ He ran a risk, but Winifred saved him, and restored him to his fantasies this evening of the ball in Carlton House Terrace.
It was an ordinary ball, and therefore Eustace appeared to receive his guests in fancy dress, wearing a powdered wig and a George IV. Court costume. This absurdity was a mechanical attempt to retrieve his buffoon’s reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. ”

“ Lane during their passage to Carlton House Terrace in a four-wheeled cab.
“What an extraordinary person Mr. Eustace Lane is!” said Winifred Ames to her particular friend and happy foil, Jane Fraser. “All London is beginning to talk about him. I suppose he must be clever?”
“Oh, of course, darling, very clever; otherwise, how could he possibly gain so much notice? Just think—why, there are millions of people in London, and I’m sure only about a thousand of them, at most, attract any real attention. I think Mr. Eustace Lane is a genius.” ”

“ But in book six of ‘Catherine’ I have to deal with sin, with tumult, with African frailty. It is inevitable.”
She sighed once more. The burden of the new book was very heavy upon her.
“African frailty!” murmured the astonished Eustace Greyne.
“Now, neither you nor I, my husband, know anything about this.”
“Certainly not, my darling. How should we? We have never explored beyond Lucerne.”
“We must, therefore, get to know about it—at least you must. For I cannot leave London. The continuity of the brain’s travelling must not be imperiled by any violent bodily activity. ”

“ But, you know, it is the proper thing, if you wear a mask, to have a sad face behind it. Eustace sometimes felt sad, and sometimes fatigued. He had worked a little to make his reputation, but it was often hard labour to live up to it. His profession of a buffoon sometimes exhausted him, but he could no longer dare to be like others. The self-conscious live to gratify the changing expectations of their world, and Eustace had educated himself into a self-consciousness that was almost a disease.
And, then, there was his place in the pages of Vanity Fair to be won. ”

“ Each twenty-four hours London has its moment of emancipation, its moment in which the wicked begin to breathe and the good to wonder, when “How?” and “Why?” are on the lips of the opposing factions, and only the philosophers who know—or think they know—their human nature hold themselves still, and feel that man is at the least ceaselessly interesting.
Winifred sat by the fire and held a council. She called her thoughts together and gave audience to her suspicions, and her brown eyes were wide and rather mournful as her counsellors uttered each a word of hope or of warning.
Eustace was out. ”

“ Mrs. Eustace Greyne (pronounced Green) wrinkled her forehead—that noble, that startling forehead which had been written about in the newspapers of two hemispheres—laid down her American Squeezer pen, and sighed. It was an autumn day, nipping and melancholy, full of the rustle of dying leaves and the faint sound of muffin bells, and Belgrave Square looked sad even to the great female novelist who had written her way into a mansion there. Fog hung about with the policeman on the pavement. The passing motor cars were like shadows. ”

“ Eustace Greyne was deeply moved. She felt she had been hasty. She knew that to very few women was it given to have a husband so free from all masculine infirmities as Mr. Greyne. At the same time there was “Catherine,” there was the mansion in Park Lane, there was the Venezuelan millionaire. ”

“ She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged with contempt.
And the fantasies of Eustace became more violent and more continuous as he began to note the lassitude which gradually crept into her intercourse with him. London rang with them. ”

“ So many of us manage to live ignorantly all our days and to call ourselves happy. Winifred could never live quite ignorantly again.
To Eustace the interruption meant much less. So long as he had Winifred he could not feel that any of his dreams hung altogether in tatters. Sometimes, it is true, he contemplated the penny toys, and had a moment of quaint, not unpleasant regret, half forming the thought, Why do we ever trouble ourselves to prepare happiness for others, when happiness is a word of a thousand meanings? ”

“ While many women love because they must, whether the thing to be loved or not loved be carrion or crystal, a child of the gods or an imp of the devil, others love decisively because they see—perhaps can even analyze—a beauty that is there in the thing before them. One woman loves a man simply because he kisses her. Another loves him because he has won the Victoria Cross.
Winifred was not of the women who love because they are kissed.
She had accepted Eustace rather impulsively, but she had not married him quite uncritically. ”

“ And you know it! And when I get you in the snake-room of Jake Boore’s saloon in Deer River next spring,” he continued, in righteous anger, “I’ll rub it into you! Understand me, Jones? When I haul you out of the snake-room, and wash you, and get you sobered up, I’ll rub it into you that what you need is the grace of God in your heart to give you the first splinter of a man’s backbone.”
29“I’ll be humble–then,” said Jones.
“You’ll have to be a good deal more than humble, friend,” Higgins retorted, “before there’ll be a man in the skin that you wear.” ”

“ Higgins, you must oblige us by recalling something of your experience."
"Ah!" replied Higgins, "if I could tell in words a small part of what I know of the war, I'm sure I could interest you."
"We are not critical," said old Harmar. "Jackson may think of his bookish notions sometimes; but he knows what kind of old men we are. Narrate anything that comes uppermost."
"Well," commenced Higgins, "I'll tell you about an adventure of a friend of mine, named Humphries, with a half-breed—that's horribly interesting—if I can only recollect it." ”