She pressed her hands to her bosom. She remembered that Jordan had gone to the New House to see Tom and Mary Nando.
Douce drew back into the room. Her face looked sharp and hard.
To her came one of her wenches, flustered and eager.
"Ma'am, here's a great lady asking for you."
"Why—show her in, Mary. Put your cap straight. What need is there for all this fluster?"
She sat down with her back to the light and waited, angry with herself because her knees had trembled under her.
But she showed no sign of flinching when Mrs. Merris entered the room. She rose, gave her the slightest of curtsies, pointed her to a chair, and seated herself, remained motionless and silent. She was on the defensive, yet her silence challenged and attacked. She made no attempt to begin any conversation. Her little figure was judicial and severe.
"I hope you will forgive me for wishing to come and see you."
Mrs. Merris's voice was gentle. She saw and felt Douce's fierce antagonism, and she forgave it, because in coming to see Douce she had won a victory over herself. To do the mean thing may be both easy and impossible, and to Mariana Merris it was impossible; for a woman who has suffered, and has learnt what much suffering may mean to another woman, cannot be content with herself unless she sees in her own heart compassion and generosity.
"Mr. March is out, madam."
It was an insult, deliberate and childish, but Mariana let it pass.
"I did not come to see your husband—Mrs. March."
"Indeed!"
"I came to see you."
She watched the dark eyes in the austere, cream-coloured face. She understood Douce so well, and all that Douce was feeling, and foresaw the pain and trouble she was laying up for herself by giving way to fierce jealousy. A young girl is not so easily handled. Unless she can be touched and won by gentleness she cannot be helped to help herself.
"I see that you do not believe me!"
She smiled.
"Come, can you not trust me?"
Douce's mouth quivered.
"Madam, I do not see the necessity."
They looked at each other steadily for a moment.
"No; of course, there is no necessity. I have no authority for being here—but then—I came."
"Yes, madam."
"Are we to call it a visit of courtesy or of friendship?"
"It may be neither, madam."
"My dear, you mean to be unapproachable!"
Douce sat stiff in her chair.
"Madam, how can there be friendship between you and me? I am the wife of a fencing-master, and you——"
"Yes; but you are a woman, and so am I."
"Exactly, madam. My husband is a fencing-master. The patronage of gentlemen is necessary to him, but I fail to see why a gentlewoman should wish——"
She smiled a wry, fierce little smile, and Mrs. Merris rose. She turned to the window and stood looking out, hiding the things that might have betrayed themselves in her eyes. For Douce had managed to say to her what no other woman had ever said.
"My dear, you wrong me."
She turned, and her eyes had regained their kindness.
"Well—the visit of courtesy is over. I promise you that it shall not be repeated. Good-bye, Mrs. March. Give my remembrances to your husband."
She smiled, but the light of it broke on Douce's hard, white face.
"Your humble servant, madam."
Her curtsy was subtly ironical. She moved to the door and opened it, and curtsied again as Mrs. Merris passed out. Then she went to the window and watched the lady into her coach.
"Liar!" she said to herself, "you thought to come here and fascinate me as a cat fascinates a mouse. All this splendour! Good day, madam. Your insulting kindness was not so clever as it seemed."
When Jordan came home she did not tell him of Mrs. Merris's visit, but the very sight of her husband in the flesh inflamed her the more against Mrs. Mariana. She did not pause to think. She let herself be carried away by instinct, and all her secret dread of other women gathered about the Lady of the Gallery in a storm of sex jealousy. She whipped her anger. She even suggested to herself wild and hateful things. If Mrs. Merris had had her man she should be cheated of him in the future. And yet she hid all her passionate imaginings, her doubts, distrusts, her self-created anguish. She appeared calm. She smiled at Jordan, and, perhaps, she felt a little afraid of him.
"How is dear Mr. Thomas?"
"None too well, sweetheart."
"O, Jordan—I am sorry."
She was very sweet to him, and she exulted in the privilege of her own kindness, but all the while her heart was crying out, "I'll have from him what she cannot have! Yes, a child." Her emotion became a radiance about the figure of her imagined child, her child and his. Would he not love her the more for being the mother of his child? It would be a new bond between them, a sacred nexus, her child, born of her body. No other woman could give him that. And in imagination she was the eternal wife and mother, exulting, boasting herself before other women because of her babe! She knew that she would like to hold the child up in the face of that other woman, and exult before her with eyes that said, "See what he has given me, and what I have given him! He is mine—here is the proof of it."
And that night she was very tender to him.
He lay very still, with his head on her shoulder. Somehow Douce felt sure of him, sure as she had never been before. Her heart had cried out in triumph. She grew audaciously confident vainglorious, afraid of no other woman.
"Jordan, I forgot to tell you."
"What—child?"
His head remained heavy on her shoulder, and she loved its heaviness.
"Mrs. Merris came to-day. I do not think she will come again."
She was aware of a movement.
"Not come again! But—you——"
"She pretended that it was me she came to see."
"O!"
"But it was you. I made her see that I understood. I am your wife—Jordan, and I'm proud."
He had raised his head slightly.
"Douce, you wronged her. My dear——"
"No, no. A woman has eyes and feelings. Why should she come in her coach and be gracious? I'll have no great lady coming to patronize my man."
She drew his head down upon her shoulder and held it there. She was trembling, fearful, clinging to all that was hers. It—was—hers. He would understand that. He must understand it.
And he did not move. He did not say anything. He was going to sleep now; he was hers; she had not angered him; his head remained on her shoulder.
Yet some time that night Douce woke and became aware of an emptiness beside her. The first greyness of the dawn was showing at the window, and as she rose on one elbow and looked about her she saw Jordan's head and shoulders outlined against the greyness. He was standing at the open lattice, with his crossed arms resting on the high window-sill.
"Jordan."
He turned slowly.
"Hallo! Are you awake, poppet?"
"Jordan, are you not well?"
He stretched himself and came towards the bed.
"I woke up with something running in my head. A breath of fresh air soothes one."
He lay down beside her.
"It has been raining," he said, as though just for something to say; "Tom Nando wanted rain. He will be happy to-morrow. I'm sorry I woke you, child."
"I like to be awake when you are awake, Dan."
Yet had Douce been wise she would have aped sleep, and so kept Jordan from knowing that she had discovered him standing at the window in the grey of the dawn. A woman may see too little or too much. That which concerns her most is the art of seeming wisely blind.
Douce never knew of Jordan's visit to Garter Street. It was the first secret that he kept from her, and the fault was hers, for her own jealousy was the cause of it. Her ungraciousness had ruffled him, and had put him in one of those humiliating corners out of which it is very difficult f
or a man to escape without being bold to one woman or disloyal to the other. He went to Garter Street, knowing what he wished to say, but quite at a loss how to say it. "My little wife was rude to you. Try to forgive her. I am sorry." How could he expose Douce even to Mrs. Merris? Also, there was a part of him that recognized the fact that Douce might have very good reasons for keeping her house as her castle.
But was that the way to hold a man?
Embarrassed, he found himself in that pleasant, restful room. Mrs. Mariana had a book in her lap, and she had closed it and left it lying there. She understood why Jordan had come, and she saw his difficulty in his eyes. They could not discuss the happenings of yesterday. Dignity and reticence distinguish the gentlewoman from the fishwife.
They talked of other things. In fact, Douce and her prejudices were never mentioned, and Mrs. Merris took his visit as a silent apology, while he was able to feel that the ungraciousness had been forgiven. His face had cleared by the time he left her. He was grateful and full of homage. Her window was higher than it had ever been, and he looked up to her as to a woman whom no other woman could match.
"Madam, believe me, I am your most grateful servant."
She smiled as he bent over her hand.
"And you may call me your friend."
He turned quickly to the door, and as he opened it she said a thing which he never forgot:
"One cannot be happy and hurt other people. Good-bye, Mr. March. Come to me if ever you wish to come."
He went down her stairs, loving her as he had never loved her before. He admitted it to himself, and without shame, for what shame could there be in loving such a woman?
So the days passed quietly, and to Jordan more and more quietly, and had he been ripe for quietude this marriage of his might have been more happy. That was the tragedy of it, Douce's tragedy, in that she had married a man who was too big for her in his nascent strivings and ambitions, and not understanding him she mishandled him and her own happiness. She was too exacting, too possessive. Being content to sit alone with him, she could not appreciate his restlessness, his yearning for action, for the large rough movement of the world of men. He had his work, and when he was not teaching gentlemen to fence she counted his hours as hers. Nor was Jordan blameless. He began to be given to long silences. He did not talk to her as a man talks to a trusted mate. She did not understand men's talk, and he left it at that. His kindness was the half-playful kindness a man gives to a child.
And Douce did not make friends. Maurice dined with them now and then, and old Sylvester came over once a week; but his attitude to Jordan was one of thin reserve, for Jordan had taken away a devoted handmaid, and a hired wench was a poor substitute. St. Croix's eyes seemed to squint whenever he looked at his son-in-law. Somehow the child of sin had got the better of him. He had proved a stouter man than his own son; and though Mr. Sylvester might preach of coals of fire, like most of the righteous, he had felt outraged when they were poured upon his own head.
Douce's most signal failure was with Jordan's male friends. She did not understand them. She was a little afraid of them, and especially of Roland Bliss, the actor, who said the wildest things without a smile. She discovered—or thought that she had discovered—that Bliss was an atheist, and she was shocked.
Surely such a man was bad for Jordan, and she was very austere with Bliss. She discouraged him.
Mr. James Cartwright shocked her in a different way. He was one of the best-hearted creatures living, and his weakness was strong drink. He made playful love to Douce and teased her, which should have been good for her, but it offended her little dignity. One of her troubles was that she had no sense of humour, and no knowledge of men as human beings.
Mr. Cartwright was doomed when Douce met him in a merry moment and finding the piazza of Covent Garden none too spacious for the spacious temper he was in.
"Why—Mrs. March, proud to meet y-you, my dear lady. And how is that big villain of a Jordan? And when—dear l-lady, are you going to pr-present us with a little villain?"
Never had he been so snubbed, so effaced, so splashed with cold water. Douce walked home like a little Queen Elizabeth, and that evening Jordan was hauled before the domestic footstool.
"Mr. Cartwright must never enter my house again. I met him in a horrible state. He is no proper friend for you, Jordan."
"He is a friend to every man but himself, dear."
"A horrible man. I cannot have him in my house, Jordan. And Mr. Bliss, too, makes me shudder."
"Why, what has Bliss done?"
"He talks blasphemy."
"He talks nonsense."
"It is very godless nonsense."
Jordan looked at her helplessly.
"Sweetheart, does it ever strike you that men are not angels? And I am a man."
She reproved him.
"You can never be like those other men. Do not pretend to me, dear Jordan, that such a thing could be possible."
She was so superlatively good and so tender and clinging a wife that she had her man swaddled up in goodness. There was much in him that rebelled, but how could a big fellow be rough or impatient with such a little thing who loved him so dearly? If she would love him a little more wisely, with more understanding of him as a man! But, then, marriage was discipline, a gradual growing into each other, and the partner who failed in the first twelve months deserved to be condemned as a poor creature.
But there was a part of Jordan that longed to break out, to fight, to use its muscles, to leap into some uproarious street scuffle, to strike other men and be struck by them. He felt like a shorn Samson tied to a chair with pink and white ribbons. There were times in the fencing-school when he was short of temper, and in a mood to tell men exactly what he thought of them.
"Sir, go home and ask your lady to teach you to darn stockings, for you will never make a swordsman."
A day came when he was tempted. Some of his old mug-house cronies called upon him and appealed to their Achilles to emerge from his tent. A street battle was brewing around the figure of a certain Miss Molly Manners, who had been singing an anti-Jacobite song in one of the theatres. The Tories had threatened that she should walk in a sheet up Drury Lane. The loyal Whigs were trying to prevent it.
So it came about that Jordan took a leading part in what was called the "Moll Manners Riot." The Tory mob attempted to storm the lady's coach as she was leaving the theatre, and the Whigs fought to defend her. There was a battle royal in Drury Lane, and Jordan, in his famous white fencing-coat and swinging his big stick, relieved himself of months of tame goodness. He was the man of the evening. The Tories were thrashed. Miss Manners was conducted triumphantly to her lodgings with the Whigs surrounding her coach. She made a speech to them from her doorstep. She was happy to bestow two hearty kisses on Mr. Jordan March.
Jordan returned home about midnight, and saw that a light was still burning in the parlour. Had he thought to look into a mirror he might have never gone in to his wife with all the glory of a street fight upon him. Douce did not see all that Jordan had accomplished, the charge he had led, the blows he had given, the rough, laughing heroics of such an adventure. She would have understood nothing of it had he told her. But what she did see was a husband with torn coat, smudges of blood on his forehead, and his cravat lost in the tussle.
"Jordan! What have you been doing?"
He was still full of laughter and outrageous elation.
"O, nothing, sweetheart. There was a bit of a scuffle and I joined in it."
She was shocked and angry; also she was frightened. Here was her man reverting to his old, wild ways.
"Jordan, how could you?"
"Well, a man must fight sometimes."
"Horrible! And to come back here to terrify me with blood all over your face. Surely—you remember?"
She was reproachful and severe, and he looked contrite, ashamed.
"Dear, I'm sorry. But I am not hurt."
"How was I to judge? You frightened me. Remember, de
ar Jordan, that soon you will be a father, the father of our child. You must be very gentle with me, and when a man is a father everything should be different."
He bent over her and kissed her hair.
"You are right, Douce. It shall not happen again while you are like this. Come to bed, dear."
But as he carried her up the stairs the thought came to him that in a little while there might be two tyrannies in that home, that of the wife and that of the child.
XXXIX
Mrs. Mariana Merris heard an account of the "Moll Manners Riot" and of the part that Jordan had played in it, and she drew her own conclusions.
"He has broken out," she thought, and she was left wondering what his little wife had made of it, though it was possible that Douce did not know.
Jordan's manhood was being repressed by his marriage at that very critical time in a man's life when the greater ambitions come to him, and he realizes that the things that he loved yesterday have become the illusions of a boy. The moment of discontent was upon him. In his maturity he was beginning to reach out towards his inevitable heritage, and he found himself tied to a little woman's chair. Yet the fault was not hers. They were two human creatures whom fate had clasped together in the spasm of a generous impulse.
"She is my wife and she loves me. Her life is tied up with mine."
This was a sacred fact and Jordan acknowledged it, but the acknowledgment did not make him happy. He saw Douce at his table, a little woman who was with child, and to whom a time of suffering had come, and his tenderness went out to her. She wanted his strength and his love, and he gave her more than these. He was patient, and he hid his restlessness. It was like smothering the voice of the other man in him, the man whose eyes were opened to new worlds and new creations. He sailed the seas and cut his way into virgin forests. He rode from dawn to sunset with no man to say him nay. And he had his comrade, his dear lady with the wise and subtle eyes, whose heart was full of understanding, and whose slow, soft voice was like rain upon thirsty forest trees. It was all a dream, but he dreamed it day by day.
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