Chapter II: Conjugality

Mr. Tremenheere came home that evening at seven o’clock. It was not his custom to be quite so early. He went late in the morning, and was not unwilling to stay late, and to get all the evening’s news before he went home, so that the dinners generally were very late in Hyde Park Square. Mrs. Tremenheere, who was a busy woman with many occupations of her own, did not object to this--indeed she was (as he remembered on his way home) on the whole a very easy woman to live with, and disposed to use mutual toleration in respect to a great many things which women in general are inclined to make unnecessary fusses about. Oddly enough, when he came to think of it, there were a great many things in respect to which she was very easy. It was ideas that she fought about, but of all things that make a woman disagreeable, ideas, it must be allowed, are among the worst.

However, he dressed and made himself particularly pleasant at dinner. They were people who took pleasure in the table after a more refined fashion than that generally understood by these words. Mr. Tremenheere indeed liked a good dinner with that _naive_ devotion which is common among men of his age, but Mrs. Tremenheere considered cookery one of the fine arts, and studied it in an elevated and elevating way. Mr. Tremenheere had made up his mind when he married, with a certain rueful submission, that it would be madness to expect in an imperfect and newly-constituted establishment under the charge of a lady whom he knew to be much too enlightened on other subjects, and consequently expected little from on this, the carefully-regulated cuisine, the excellent cookery which to a man of many clubs, with a tolerable income, had become second nature. He had even had jokes made upon him on the subject, and had made jokes of a melancholy nature in return. But to his great and delightful surprise he had been able to turn the tables upon his sympathizers by giving them dinners which the best _chef_ could not have surpassed. “I don’t suppose you want banquets,” Mrs. Tremenheere had said, “but I think we are capable of dinners of eight--or even of ten, if you please;” and she had kept her word in the most noble way. To such a philosophical artist as she had proved herself, it need not be said that a dinner for two--a delicate composition which answers to a copy of verses from a poet, or a short story from a novelist--was a special triumph of art; but on this particular evening, when Mr. Tremenheere came home, trembling with suppressed anxiety, from his office, and not very sure as to whether Fate and his offended wife would allow him any dinner at all, the _ménu_ of the little repast was unusually exquisite. He took this, deluded man, for a good sign. He thought if she had been going to take those idle words of his at their full value and act upon them, that it was not female nature (of which, like many men, he thought he knew much) to have taken so much trouble about what he ate. He believed that she would have been spiteful, and refused him such a meal as he could sit down to with any pleasure. But on the contrary--! Mr. Tremenheere’s courage rose. It is impossible to describe how genial he was. He praised every dish; the fish was a wonder of freshness--the _entrêes_ were perfect--the birds were cooked as one scarcely ever saw them out of Scotland. He glowed and beamed over the well-spread table. Was it not a promise, a foretaste of years of good dinners and friendly conjugalities--all the better, perhaps, for this sudden and alarming cloud--to come?

And he was equally genial to the children, whose introduction at dessert did not always please him. To-night he was the politest and most amiable of fathers. Vera, taking advantage of the opportunity, though most inopportunely, so far as his feelings were concerned, plunged immediately into comment upon the transactions of the morning.

“We have never been out all day, not one little bit,” she said. “Why mustn’t we go out when its a fog? We have been ever so often before, and no one found fault. Papa, you know it was because you were cross you turned us back; and we were going to the Bazaar to see all the things for Christmas. Naughty papa!”

“Vera, I must send you to bed,” said Mrs. Tremenheere.

“Let her talk--let her talk,” said the conciliating father. “Going to the Bazaar, were you! I will take you myself when it is a fine day and buy you something.”

“You!” Vera’s delight was great. “Do you hear, Eddy? Papa himself! But you never did it before.”

“I am always so busy, my dear.”

“Are you busy? I should like to go with you; shouldn’t you, Eddy? better than with nurse--better than with mamma.”

“Vera, that is very ungrateful,” said Mr. Tremenheere, secretly flattered by the preference, “and, besides, I don’t believe it. You would rather go with mamma.”

“No; she would come any time. I should like you because you never, never did it before. I like everything that is new,” cried Vera, clapping her hands; “and then you would be stupid--you would not know where to go, or anything. You would not know which was the place for the dolls, nor where those funny Japan things are. Will you come to-morrow, papa?”

“That is abrupt,” he said. “Yes, perhaps, Vera, if nothing happens to interfere I will go to-morrow. Will that please you? and then I shall be made, I suppose, to buy half the dolls in the Bazaar.”

“Vera, it is your hour for bed,” said her mother; and the remonstrances which were on the child’s lips were hushed by the fact that just then nurse came in solemnly and took her place at the door. As is usual in well-regulated families, mothers and fathers may yield, but nurse is inexorable. The children did not even attempt by any unnecessary blandishments to work upon the feelings of that Rhadamantha. They yielded at once. Eddy rose from his oranges without much reluctance, and Vera slid down unwillingly from her father’s knee. At the same moment Mrs. Tremenheere rose. “You will find me in the drawing-room if you want me, Charles,” she said quietly. Alas, he felt there was more in these words than met the ear.

And then an interval ensued which was not delightful for either of them. Mr. Tremenheere was long of making his appearance that night--which was not even to be explained by the fact that he took a glass of wine more than usual to strengthen him for the evening trial--not even that; he did it on purpose, poor man, thinking that her courage would ooze out at her fingers’ end, when she saw how late it was and how little time there was for talk. He strolled in at length in a careless way.

“Give me a cup of tea, my dear,” he said, with ostentatious friendliness. “I have brought some work home with me from the office, and I want to have all my wits about me. In such cases there is nothing so good as a cup of your tea----”

“I am sorry, Charles, that you have work to-night.”

“Yes?--well, so am I. I don’t like it much, I assure you--but the country’s business must be attended to,” he said, rubbing his hands with premature delight over the success of his scheme.

“I don’t doubt it; still our own life is sometimes more important to us than even the country’s business--though I have never, that I know of, interfered with that.”

“Never, Ada, never,” he answered, briskly, “--of course, you are a sensible woman and know the importance of it as well as I do.”

“And I have never wasted your time or kept you from your work for my own pleasure----”

“Never, my dear, never!” He interrupted her more nervously this time, feeling that so strenuous a self-defence must mean something more.

“Then I need the less excuse for now occupying your time, Charles. I must speak to you. Things are involved of more consequence to us than there can be in your office papers for the country. The country is not in mortal peril, that I know of, but our house is----”

“My dear, you astonish me----”

“No indeed, I don’t astonish you. You know very well what I mean. You cannot have passed the day without thinking of it. I do not think it is worthy of you to suppose that we can get over this by simply ignoring the whole matter. Something was said this morning----”

“Yes, yes! I knew you would come back to that,” he said, pettishly. “Well, it was a foolish speech on my part. I said it in the heat of discussion, not meaning it. Will that satisfy you? When a man is very much provoked he is not always master of what he says. There, Ada! I did think that to ignore the whole business was the best--but since you insist upon it, I apologize, and I hope now you are content.”

“The view you take of this is not the same as mine,” said Mrs. Tremenheere. “You laugh: you are accustomed to hear such words from me. But don’t laugh, I beg of you, for this is far more serious than any disagreement we have ever had. Charles, you said it would be best for us to separate. I have thought of little else since.”

“Nor I, for that matter,--if that will be any consolation to you,” he muttered between his teeth.

“Why should it be a consolation to me? It is not that I want to get the better of you, to be apologized to, or think myself the wiser. Again,” cried Mrs. Tremenheere, “it is the old difficulty. You will not go to the heart of the matter. You will think only of the outside.”

“It has no heart that I know of,” he said, with a sullen acceptance of the new controversy, placing himself once more in that citadel of argument, the front of the fire. “The whole affair lies in a nutshell. In one of our continual and apparently inevitable quarrels, I said some inadvertent words which I am sorry for. They were struck out of me in the heat of quarrel, and I tell you I am sorry for them; what more is to be done? I have said all a man can say.”

“But yet you have not touched the heart of the subject. If, indeed, our quarrels are continual and apparently inevitable, that gives double force to your words. Charles, I have been thinking it over all day, and I think perhaps you are right. It will make a wonderful change in our lives, and it is not a thing to be done lightly--but yet I think you are right. We do quarrel a great deal. I don’t know whose fault it is, but it is very undignified and unseemly. We will do our duty better and fill our place in the world better--apart.”

“Apart?”

She said the last word so low that he stooped to hear what it was.

“Yes--apart!” Mrs. Tremenheere spoke tremulously, but firmly. Never was woman stronger in her own opinion, and, perhaps, in all her life she had never formed a more decided opinion than now.

“You speak like a fool, Ada,” he said, with a rudeness quite unusual to him. “This is carrying matters ridiculously far. And yet you are not a silly woman to leap to conclusions. You know, as well as I do, that there is a great deal more involved than mere agreement or disagreement. We can always wash our dirty linen at home, at all events. If we quarrel, there is no occasion to publish it to all the world. And this must be done if we separate; nonsense; separate! for one ill-advised and hasty word! Expose ourselves, break up our house, put a stigma on our children! You cannot think of such a thing. One can surely trust to your good sense to see that.”

“I have thought of it all,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, “and painfully enough. That is the outside view of the question--but the other aspect of it is this. Which is best? To undergo what you have described once for all: or to go on quarrelling, never taking the same view of anything, bringing up our children without any feeling of household sanctity, to see their father and mother in a perpetual struggle, to take sides, perhaps, and fight too, after our fashion, and think of us as of antagonistic powers? Apparently, so far as I can make out, one or the other of these must be.”

“Folly! utterly far-fetched, and unlike your good sense. Why should either of them be?”

“Do not you see why? Charles, Vera came to me this morning, quite ready to enter on the fray. You had turned them back when they were ready to go out, unreasonably. Yes, I cannot deny it was unreasonably. You were angry, and you made them turn back, saying it was the fog, and they came to me to complain. Of course, I had to maintain your authority; but I did so simply as a matter of duty. And children are very quick to notice this, Mr. Tremenheere.”

“Oh! confound the children!” he cried. “This question surely may be allowed to be between us; it does not affect the children. Why should they be brought into it? Surely nothing can be more distinctly between you and me.”

“It was you who brought in the children first, not I,” she said.

“So! so!” cried Mr. Tremenheere, rubbing his hands together with growing rage, “and thus the whole old business commences again. It was not I but you--it is not one incidental question or another, but the entire matter between us, how we are to get on at all, what is to become of the family! I take heaven to witness it is not my fault. I said a few hasty unintentional words. I have withdrawn them--I have begged you pardon, which is a great deal for a man in my circumstances to do. If you are determined to go on, well! do it on your own responsibility. It is true,” he continued, growing in excitement as he went on, “that this house is a perfect hell upon earth, that one is never safe from argument even at the moment one is least inclined for it. That is what comes of your educated women,” cried the unlucky man. “This is the Attic salt they season their husband’s daily fare with! Give me the old domestic drudge, the one that suckled fools, and gave her family a little peace.--This new edition of a wife is not the thing for me.”

Mrs. Tremenheere grew red and then pale, but with that ridge of color on her nose of which she was always so unpleasantly conscious. She could bear (she thought) a great deal of individual abuse, but general abuse addressed to her as a woman cut her to the heart. But she did not show anger as he did. She waited until he came to a pause, and then said, deliberately:

“It is unnecessary, Mr. Tremenheere, to assail all women on my account. There are women enough in the world of the kind you like, who might have married you perhaps had you asked them, so in that matter at least you have only yourself to blame. The question is strictly between individuals, not between the sexes--and I must remind you that you yourself said it lay in a nutshell. We cannot agree. Therefore you think it is best we should separate--and so do I.”

“That is putting it in a nutshell, indeed,” he cried. “I never made any such cut-and-dry statement. I spoke inadvertently in a moment of excitement.--No doubt it was true enough, if you come to that--but I have withdrawn it. I do withdraw it----”

“How can you withdraw it,” she said, quietly, “if still it is true?”

“Ada, you will drive me mad!” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead violently. She looked at him with a slight shrug of her shoulders, and no visible sign of her corresponding excitement except that red line down the high ridge of her handsome nose.

“Mr. Tremenheere,” she said, “you withdraw everything and then you repeat it. Be logical. If I drive you mad--if our house is hell upon earth--why then it is unquestionable that to separate is the only possible thing for us to do----”