_ THIRD PART. MY HONEYMOON
FORTIETH CHAPTER
Having made my bargain I set myself to fulfil the conditions of it. I had faithfully promised to try to love my husband and I prepared to do so.
Did not love require that a wife should look up to and respect and even reverence the man she had married? I made up my mind to do that by shutting my eyes to my husband's obvious faults and seeing only his better qualities.
What disappointments were in store for me! What crushing and humiliating disillusionments!
On the night of our arrival in London we put up at a fashionable hotel in a quiet but well-known part of the West-end, which is inhabited chiefly by consulting physicians and celebrated surgeons. Here, to my surprise, we were immediately discovered, and lines of visitors waited upon my husband the following morning.
I thought they were his friends, and a ridiculous little spurt of pride came to me from heaven knows where with the idea that my husband must be a man of some importance in the metropolis.
But I discovered they were his creditors, money-lenders and bookmakers, to whom he owed debts of "honour" which he had been unable or unwilling to disclose to my father and his advocate.
One of my husband's visitors was a pertinacious little man who came early and stayed late. He was a solicitor, and my husband was obviously in some fear of him. The interviews between them, while they were closeted together morning after morning in one of our two sitting-rooms, were long and apparently unpleasant, for more than once I caught the sound of angry words on both sides, with oaths and heavy blows upon the table.
But towards the end of the week, my husband's lawyer arrived in London, and after that the conversations became more pacific.
One morning, as I sat writing a letter in the adjoining room, I heard laughter, the popping of corks, the jingling of glasses, and the drinking of healths, and I judged that the, difficult and disagreeable business had been concluded.
At the close of the interview I heard the door opened and my husband going into the outer corridor to see his visitors to the lift, and then something prompted me--God alone knows what--to step into the room they had just vacated.
It was thick with tobacco smoke. An empty bottle of champagne (with three empty wine glasses) was on the table, and on a desk by the window were various papers, including a sheet of foolscap which bore a seal and several signatures, and a thick packet of old letters bound together with a piece of purple ribbon.
Hardly had I had time to recognise these documents when my husband returned to the room, and by the dark expression of his face I saw instantly that he thought I had looked at them.
"No matter!" he said, without any preamble. "I might as well tell you at once and have done with it."
He told me. The letters were his. They had been written to a woman whom he had promised to marry, and he had had to buy them back from her. Although for three years he had spent a fortune on the creature she had shown him no mercy. Through her solicitor, who was a scoundrel, she had threatened him, saying in plain words that if he married anybody else she would take proceedings against him immediately. That was why, in spite of the storm, we had to come up to London on the day after our wedding.
"Now you know," said my husband. "Look here" (holding out the sheet of foolscap), "five thousand pounds--that's the price I've had to pay for marrying."
I can give no idea of the proud imperiousness and the impression of injury with which my husband told his brutal story. But neither can I convey a sense of the crushing shame with which I listened to it. There was not a hint of any consciousness on his part of my side of the case. Not a suggestion of the clear fact that the woman he had promised to marry had been paid off by money which had come through me. Not a thought of the humiliation he had imposed upon his wife in dragging her up to London at the demand of his cast-off mistress.
When my husband had finished speaking I could not utter a word. I was afraid that my voice would betray the anger that was boiling in me. But I was also degraded to the very dust in my own eyes, and to prevent an outburst of hysterical tears I ran back to my room and hid my face in my pillow.
What was the good of trying to make myself in love with a man who was separated from me by a moral chasm that could never be passed? What was the good? What was the good? _