by D. J. Taylor
“As to having nobility in the house, I am sure I should make some dreadful blunder,” she once exclaimed to Mrs. Desmond de Lacey, “serve up peas out of season or forget which was a Liberal and which was a Conservative.” Mrs. Desmond de Lacey, whose husband was the younger son of a cousin of the Marquis of Lothian, laughed, but I do not think she liked it. Happily, there were enough people who did like it to make an invitation to Mrs. Ireland’s drawing room worth the having for a while, and Mr. Ireland, as I have said, watching his wife among the teacups, or telling Lord Fawkes that he was the wickedest old man alive, thought that he was happy. There was a child, and the child died, but though Mr. Ireland mourned sincerely he did not allow this mischance to prey upon his mind. There would be other children, nurseries full of them, the gardens of Eccleston Square would ring with their voices. And yet it seemed to him in the months after the infant’s death that a change had come over his wife. She grew melancholy, no longer smiled at her dinner guests or told Lord Fawkes, to his lordship’s great delight, that he was the naughtiest old sinner in Christendom. Her sharp words grew sharper, her gaze less placid. A judge’s wife went away in tears from the house in Eccleston Square and her friends said that Mrs. Ireland was deranged with grief.
All this Mr. Ireland observed with the most painful unease. It seemed to him that it behoved him to speak to his wife, without having the least idea of what he ought to say, that soft words were needed, but of a subtlety that was altogether beyond his power to frame. Finally, one afternoon in February when the square lay invisible in the fog, having spent the morning brooding over his dilemma, he approached a drawing room on an upper floor of the house in which it was his wife’s custom to spend her leisure hours. She was seated in a small armchair with her hands clasped in her lap, and though her eyes were open it seemed to him that she scarcely saw him and that his very presence in the room was painful to her. But he was a courageous man in his fashion and he determined to speak the sentences he had come to say.
“My dear,” he said, “it seems to me that you are very unhappy.”
“You are right,” she said, not looking up from her chair. “I am very unhappy. And yet if I am it is my responsibility, and mine to bear.”
There was something so dreadful in these words that he was quite nonplussed. It seemed to him that, in these circumstances, nothing he could say would have any effect. And yet, however savage might be his reception, he knew that he had a tougher skin than the judge’s lady and that to say nothing were simple cowardice.
“My dear,” he began again. “Isabel. You are labouring under a great grief.”
Again she did not look up but continued to stare fixedly at her lap. “That is so. It is a great grief. I had hoped it was a shared one. If that were so, it would be easier to bear.”
He understood that this was a reproach, and the words were torture to him. But he could think of nothing to say, was merely conscious of a faint terror of things unseen, things altogether beyond him but capable of reaching out to strike him a mortal blow. Standing thus in this irresolute state, not knowing whether to stay or go, he found his attention drawn to his wife’s hands, which were turning ceaselessly, as it seemed to him, over a twist of some pale material held in her lap. This motion of her fingers, though disagreeable to him, was somehow fascinating, and he studied it for a full half minute before enquiring, “Isabel. What is it that you have there?”
She looked up at him, but blindly, so that even now he fancied that she did not see him. “It is a lock of the child’s hair, cut from his head on the morning that he died. Surely you must remember that?”
He did remember it—remembered it as if it had happened but a moment ago—but there was something in her attitude, some secret steeliness, that he feared to provoke. Her face, seen in the shadow of the room, seemed very white. Outside the lamps were being lit, one by one, in the square.
At length he said, “I would not give you further pain for all the world. There are people coming tonight. It cannot be helped. Shall I have them turned away? You have only to speak, and it shall be done.”
“No, do not send them away.” She rose suddenly to her feet, and the twist of hair fell fluttering to the Turkey carpet. “I have been weak. But I shall be strong. You had better go now, Henry, if you would be so kind.”
That evening she dashed a wineglass over the tablecloth, shrieked that her husband meant to murder her and was led away in hysterics. After this people ceased to say that Mrs. Ireland was a woman of spirit and she retired altogether from polite society.
What was to be done? Mr. Ireland, in his distracted state, was of the opinion that doctors were needed. Let doctors be summoned! Let the house in Eccleston Square be turned into a sanatorium if it would stop his wife from swearing that he meant to kill her and crooning over a twist of a child’s hair in her lap! The doctors who examined her were cautious. There was no sign of organic disease, they assured Mr. Ireland, but perhaps his wife might benefit from a change of air. A sea voyage, a tour around the Swiss lakes, a month or two at the continental spas sampling the waters—all these were proposed by the deferential gentlemen who stood in Mr. Ireland’s drawing room as a cure for his wife’s lowness of spirits. And meanwhile perhaps it might be best to keep Mrs. Ireland from company, late nights and associations that might be distressing to her.
Mr. Ireland received this advice with the gravest misgivings. And yet, he assured himself, all was not lost. His wife was estranged from him, but it might be possible, if care were exercised, to win her back. To this end, and mindful of certain ancient connections of his family, he arranged a journey to the country with which he shared his name. Even in the pit of his anxieties, the thought was pleasant to him. An inn or a castle or hilltop where he and his wife could be to each other as they had been in the early days of their marriage—all this, surely, would supply a balm beyond the realm of medicine. And so a passage was booked on the Bristol to Cork ferry for the last day of April, and, in a closed carriage, accompanied by a single servant, the Irelands set off. It was a fortnight since Easter, and the flowers were out in the Wiltshire lanes as they rolled by. What occurred during the three weeks they were away I am not at liberty to say—Mr. Ireland would not speak of it even to his closest friends—but there were no inns, or castles, or hilltops. And from the day of their return there was no more talk of lowness of spirits. The deferential gentlemen who had advised sea voyages and Swiss lakes and the pump room at Baden-Baden were all thrown over, and the celebrated Dr. John Conolly, of whom the world knows, was summoned to give an opinion. Like those he had supplanted, Dr. Conolly was a prudent man. He would not say that his patient was…mad. But perhaps it might be better if Mrs. Ireland were to be removed from Eccleston Square and to a place where care might be taken that she should not injure herself. Throughout these proceedings Mrs. Ireland was confined to her room, and the door of the room was locked with an iron bolt.
Not the least of our misfortunes is their mockery of bygone hopes. A month after his return to England, Mr. Ireland discovered a parcel thrown amongst the discarded trifles of his dressing room. It contained a copy of Mr. Thackeray’s Irish Sketchbook, which Mr. Ireland had thought it well to carry with him while he surveyed the castles and the hilltops, and a nosegay of flowers presented to his wife on a bright morning in Cork before certain dreadful events of which he could not bring himself to speak. And it seemed to Mr. Ireland, examining these items as he stood in his dressing room with the sun streaming in through the casement window, that his life was ruined and that the book and the flowers were far more a testimony to his wretchedness than the woman in the next room. Failure lay all around him. He had inherited a property, and the property had crumbled to ashes in his hands. He had married a wife, and Dr. Conolly would say only that extreme caution and tender ministrations might yet produce a favourable result. At any rate, Mr. Ireland assured himself, there should be no more pretence, whether as regarded himself or the world at large. The house in Eccleston Squa
re was shut and the servants were paid off, the gardens where he had been wont to walk on summer afternoons given up to nursemaids and their charges, and Mr. and Mrs. Ireland departed to Suffolk and fell altogether out of the life they had known.
It may be wondered whether there is anything more instructive than the person who disappears in this way. A man pursues his professional calling in a certain street, let us say, for twenty years, eats his dinner in a certain chophouse, talks with certain cronies and then, mysteriously, is gone. Who notices his passing or remembers him? The agent’s board is up above his chambers for a fortnight until a new tenant engages them, the waiter at the chophouse regrets his patron for a day or so—that is all. So it was with the Irelands. Such of their friends as wrote letters received courteous but unforthcoming replies. A pertinacious gentleman who proposed a visit was told roundly that the state of Mrs. Ireland’s health would not permit it. And thus the Irelands slipped altogether out of view, so that they might have died or followed the emigrant trail to Oregon for all that anyone knew. For there are some mysteries that are always hidden, and some secrets that are forever kept.
FROM GEORGE ELIOT’S JOURNAL
22 March 1862
A bright day of radiant sunshine, not the least inclemency. George engrossed in literary tasks, articles for the Cornhill, writing to Mr. Martin anent his translations &c. I, having no other occupation, spent the afternoon in reverie, reading Mr. Hutton in the Spectator—at least I supposed it were Mr. Hutton—on Arnold’s last words on translating Homer. Thence to dine with the Irelands at their house in Eccleston Square. This I was interested to see: a pleasant, commodious residence, the rooms all crammed with dull, old furniture, scarlet draperies. A profusion of mirrors, many portraits of old gentlemen in periwigs. A dozen of us sat down: a sucking barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, Mr. Masson who writes for the magazines and a silent wife, a literary man whom George recalled from some endeavour lost in time. With Mr. Ireland I was, of course, familiar. A conventional kind of a man, I should suppose: tall, ruddy-faced, soft-spoken, talking a little of his property in Suffolk (it is embarrassed, George says, and a source of shame to him) and equestrian pleasures, solicitous of his wife. I acknowledge freely that it was she to whom my eye turned the more often: a slight, sorrowful woman with exquisite (there is no other word) red hair—I would have run my hands through it, negotiated to buy it at six shillings the yard like some Russian huckster—in whom deep reservoirs of feeling contended with the topics of the day. In short, a decidedly unusual representative of the female species, and yet some deep unhappiness so manifest in her that it pained the heart to see. Thus, on my asking would she and her husband go away this season, she replied with great emphasis, Go away? Why, I have been drifting rudderless for too long. This seemed such a singular expression that I enquired, what did she mean by it? She replied with perfect politeness and yet, it seemed to me, great private misgivings that there were times when she felt like a boat rowing on the ebb tide and could not for the life of her steer herself to safety. Mr. Ireland, I saw, was watching her closely and here interjected, “My wife has peculiar fancies, Miss Evans.” Although there was suavity in the words, I fancy they were troublesome to pronounce.
Meanwhile the dinner was proceeding around us—soup, cutlets, a beefsteak, none of which was sufficient to distract the eye from the curious intelligence at my side. As the meal continued, Mrs. Ireland’s behaviour became more singular still. While the servants were clearing the savoury from the table I observed her carefully decant the contents of a saltcellar upon the tablecloth. This task accomplished, she availed herself of a half-empty glass that lay nearby and, with infinite care and solicitude, began to drip claret wine upon the salt. All this with a look of such stealth—cunning, rapt introspection—as to suggest an animal bent on evading capture. Fascinated, and somehow liking her for this absorption, I enquired again, what was she doing? To be sure, she replied, was it not well known that salt was a sovereign remedy for spilled wine? And would not the servants thank her for it in the morning?
I had hoped for further converse but, on retiring with the other ladies, I noticed that she was gone. Indeed we had not been a moment over our negus before Mr. Ireland appeared to announce that his wife was indisposed and had been conducted to bed by her maid &c. I will confess that I missed her presence in that little room—talk all of the Queen, the Duchess of A——’s ball—would have liked her there, if only to drip claret onto the tablecloth, and that the rest of the evening had no pleasure for me. Reflecting on these incidents, I felt that I had observed a rare and generous spirit, yet struggling to convey some great distress of which it was perhaps only partly aware: the effect disturbing to the mind, a life wreathed in shadow breaking out now and again in hard, bitter laughter. George, to whom I explained something of this, unhappy, said that Mrs. Ireland’s afflictions were well known, her husband near beside himself with anxiety. All this, I found, worked on me very curiously—the silent woman in her house of dull old furniture and serried mirrors—to the point where, the following day, I determined to call, neglected an article I had promised to Mr. Chapman and took an omnibus to the further end of the Buckingham Palace Road. Alas, it was a fool’s errand. The house seemed quiet, the blinds drawn down, with only a little servant girl in a creased mob cap to tell me that “Master and Missus” had gone away that morning to the country, although the number of coats, hats, etc., upon the hallway hooks suggested that, if this were the case, they had taken very little of their clothing with them. And so I took my leave and walked for a while in the Square’s gardens, past the nursery maids and their carriages and the small boys with their hoops, musing on the peculiar circumstances to which I had been witness, casting an occasional glance at the house, from whose upper window, I am tolerably certain at one point, a woman’s face stared balefully down.
JAS. DIXEY, ESQ.
Easton Hall
Near Watton
Norfolk
My dear Dixey,
Although our acquaintance is not so very intimate, yet you are the man that my father always said that he respected most and have ever been a friend to me. Be assured, then, that I should not have cared to burden you with this letter were it not for the extremity in which I have been plunged. In truth I have been so sorely tested this last month and more that I have not known which way to turn. You will perhaps more fully comprehend the pain of these afflictions if I say at the outset that not one particle of what follows is exaggerated, coloured or in any way distorted in the telling.
You will have heard—who has not?—of our troubles. It was ever the case that when a man stands well before the world, the world is silent, yet, should adversity strike, the air is filled with clamorous voices. Thinking that sea and country air might be beneficial, I proposed a tour of the southern counties of Ireland. (We had property there once, in Roscommon, though, alas, the estate is fallen into ruin.) To this, in a lucid moment, Isabel heartily assented. Indeed, prior to our departure she seemed better, almost—less languid, more sensible of her condition, sorrowful even, that her state was so.
Alas, that the hopes I had entertained of her recovery should be so cruelly dashed! We had set out on our journey by carriage, stopping at London and Devizes, were a day out from Bristol in the packet, seated on deck in the morning sun, when Brodie our servant came to me from below in a state of much anxiety to say that her mistress could not be found. Needless to relate, I straightaway instituted a thorough search of the ship but could discover nothing. Our cabin was empty, the keepsake at which I had left her reading discarded on the bed. Near out of my mind at what this might portend, I rushed hither and thither about the deck peering beneath the canvases of the rowboats, even turning up the very coils of rope in an effort to find some clue. On the instant a gentleman who had been amusing himself by looking out across the stern of the vessel came rushing up to declare that he had seen a large object floating in the waves, resembling, as he put it, a giant water beetle resting on its back
. At my urgent solicitation the ship’s boat put out and in half an hour retrieved my darling from the sea. It appears now that she concealed herself in a water closet to the rear of the ship and by this means flung herself from its window, would have drowned had not the air become trapped in her skirts. When found, she was paddling in a feeble way and was pulled out quite demented…
Of the hours that followed—we were then two days’ journey from Cork—I can scarcely bring myself to speak. So fearful was I that she would once more seek to destroy herself that in the night I lay beside her chained at the waist by a piece of ribbon, so that I should know if she stirred. Happily, the ship’s cabinet contained a supply of laudanum and this, freely administered, was sufficient to pacify her until such time as we put into harbour. What was to be done? Knowing too well what would be the likely outcome, I could not immediately propose that we return to England. There was no one to whom I might apply. In the end I secured rooms for us in the city, representing my wife as excessively fatigued by the voyage, &c….
We were a fortnight at Cork. You cannot conceive the horror of it. The dull, hopeless look on her face, as if she knew full well the secret of her malady but could not bring herself to gainsay it. Of Irish doctors I think nothing. One prescribed brandy and milk, another walks by the shore—this when the poor creature could scarcely stir from her bed!—a third hot baths and chafing. Finally there came a little man—a Mr. Fitzpatrick—who did, I think, do her some good: ordered that she should not be disturbed, but her mind kept occupied, &c. She remarked once that her head “ran away with her like a carriage that would not stop,” which both he and I thought significant. And yet even here, when given rest and occupation, it was clear that her intellect was forcing her back upon a particular course, viz., when read to out of one of Mr. Smith’s novels, in fact a humorous piece about a tipsy labourer and his family, she burst out in a passion, talking of the poor children, and how should they have clean shirts, and what could be done, as if these were real infants living in some shanty a furlong distant.