Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

Nor did the performers impress me, for though when the curtain rose, disclosing the stage full of people, chiefly girls, in delicate and beautiful toilettes, I thought I had never before seen so many lovely and happy faces, after a while, when the faces fell into repose, I thought they were not really lovely and not really happy, but hard and strained and painful, as if life had been very cruel.

And, above all, I was not impressed by the play, for I thought, in my ignorance of such productions, that I had never heard anything so frivolous and foolish, and more than once I found myself wondering whether my good nuns, if they could have been present, would not have concluded that the whole company had taken leave of their senses.

There was, however, one thing which did impress me, and that was the leading actor. It was a woman, and when she first came on to the stage I thought I had never in my life seen anybody so beautiful, with her lovely soft round figure, her black eyes, her red lips, her pearly white teeth, and a smile so sunny that it had the effect of making everybody in the audience smile with her.

But the strange thing was--I could not account for it--that after a few minutes I thought her extremely ugly and repellent, for her face seemed to be distorted by malice and envy and hatred and nearly every other bad passion.

Nevertheless she was a general favourite, for not only was she applauded before she did anything, but everything she said, though it was sometimes very silly, was accompanied by a great deal of laughter, and everything she sang, though her voice was no great matter, was followed by a chorus of applause.

Seeing this, and feeling that her appearance had caused a flutter of interest in the box behind me, I laughed and applauded also, in accordance with the plan I had prepared for myself, of sharing my husband's pleasures and entering into his life, although at the bottom of my heart I really thought the joy was not very joyful or the mirth very merry.

This went on for nearly an hour, and then a strange thing happened. I was leaning forward on the velvet barrier of the box in front of me, laughing and clapping my hands with the rest, when all at once I became aware that the lady had wheeled about, and, walking down the stage in the direction of our box, was looking boldly back at me.

I could not at first believe it to be so, and even now I cannot say whether it was something in her face, or something whispered at my back which flashed it upon my mind that this was the woman my husband ought to have married, the woman whose place I had taken, the woman of the foolscap document and the letters in the purple ribbon.

After that I could play my poor little part no longer, and though I continued to lean on the yellow velvet of the barrier in front of me I dropped my eyes as often as that woman was on the stage, and hoped and prayed for the end of the performance.

It came at length with a crash of instruments and voices, and a few minutes afterwards my husband and I were in the cab on our way back to the hotel.

I was choking with mingled anger and shame--anger at my husband for permitting me to come to a place in which I could be exposed to a public affront from his cast-off mistress, shame at the memory of the pitiful scheme for entering into his life which had fallen to such a welter of wreck and ruin.

But my husband himself was only choking with laughter.

"It was as good as a play," he said. "Upon my soul it was! I never saw anything funnier in the whole course of my life."

That served him, repeated again and again, until we reached the hotel, when he ordered a bottle of wine to be sent upstairs, and then shook with suppressed laughter as we went up in the lift.

Coming to our floor I turned towards my bedroom, wishing to be alone with my outraged feelings, but my husband drew me into one of our sitting-rooms, telling me he had something to say.

He put me to sit in an arm-chair, threw off his overcoat, lit a cigarette, as well as he could for the spurts and gusts of his laughter, and then, standing back to the fire-place, with one hand in his pocket and his coat-tail over his arm, he told me the cause of his merriment.

"I don't mind telling you that was Lena," he said. "The good-looking girl in the scarlet dress and the big diamonds. She spotted me the moment she stepped on to the stage. Must have guessed who you were, too. Did you see how she looked at you? Thought I had brought you there to walk over her. I'm sure she did!"

There was another gust of laughter and then--

"She'd been going about saying I had married an old frump for the sake of her fortune, and when she saw that you could wipe her off the face of the earth without a gown that was worth wearing, she was ready to die with fury."

There was another gust of laughter through the smoke that was spurting from his mouth and then--

"And you, too, my dear! Laughing and applauding! She thought you were trying to crow over her! On her own particular barn-door, too! Upon my soul, it was too amusing. I wonder she didn't throw something at you. She's like that when she's in her tantrums."

The waiter came in with the wine and my husband poured out a glass for me.

"Have a drink. No? Well, here's to your health, my dear. I can't get over it. I really can't. Lena's too funny for anything. Why, what else do you think she's been saying? She's been saying I'll come back to her yet. Yes, 'I'll give him six months to come crawling back to me,' she said to Eastcliff and Vivian and some of the other fellows at the Club. Wonder if she thinks so now? . . . I wonder?"

He threw away his cigarette, drank another glass of the wine, came close up to me and said in a lower tone, which made my skin creep as with cold.

"Whether she's right or wrong depends on you, though."

"On me?"

"Why, yes, of course. That's only natural. One may have all the goodwill in the world, but a man's a man, you know."

I felt my lips quivering with anger, and in an effort to control myself I rose to go, but my husband drew me back into my chair and sat on the arm of it.

"Don't go yet. By the way, dear, I've never thanked you for the beautiful flowers with which you decorated my room this morning. Charming! But I always knew you would soon come round to it."

"Come round to what?" I said, but it was just as if somebody else were speaking.

"_You_ know. Of course you know. When that simple old priest proposed that ridiculous compact I agreed, but I knew quite well that it would soon break down. Not on my side, though. Why should it? A man can afford to wait. But I felt sure you would soon tire of your resistance. And you have, haven't you? Oh, I'm not blind. I've seen what's been going on, though I've said nothing about it."

Again I tried to rise, and again my husband held me to my seat, saying:

"Don't be ashamed. There's no reason for that. You were rather hard on me, you know, but I'm going to forget all about it. Why shouldn't I? I've got the loveliest little woman in the world, so I mean to meet her half way, and she's going to get over her convent-bred ideas and be my dear little darling wife. Now isn't she?"

I could have died of confusion and the utter degradation of shame. To think that my poor efforts to please him, my vain attempts to look up to him and reverence him, my bankrupt appeals to the spiritual woman in me that I might bring myself to love him, as I thought it was my duty to do, should have been perverted by his gross and vulgar mind into overtures to the animal man in him--this was more than I could bear. I felt the tears gushing to my eyes, but I kept them back, for my self-pity was not so strong as my wrath.

I rose this time without being aware of his resistance.

"Let me go to bed," I said.

"Certainly! Most certainly, my dear, but. . . ."

"Let me go to bed," I said again, and at the next moment I stepped into my room.

He did not attempt to follow me. I saw in a mirror in front what was taking place behind me.

My husband was standing where I had left him with a look first of amazement and then of rage.

"I can't understand you," he said. "Upon my soul I can't! There isn't a man in the world who could." After that he strode into his own bedroom and clashed the door after him.

"Oh, what's the good?" I thought again.

It was impossible to make myself in love with my husband. It was no use trying.

FORTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

I must leave it to those who know better than I do the way to read the deep mysteries of a woman's heart, to explain how it came to pass that the only result of this incident was to make me sure that if we remained in London much longer my husband would go back to the other woman, and to say why (seeing that I did not love him) I should have become feverishly anxious to remove him from the range of this temptation.

Yet so it was, for the very next morning, I wrote to my father saying I had been unwell and begging him to use his influence with my husband to set out on the Egyptian trip without further delay.

My father's answer was prompt. What he had read between the lines of my letter I do not know; what he said was this--

"Daughter--Certainly! I am writing to son-in-law telling him to
quit London quick. I guess you've been too long there already. And
while you are away you can draw on me yourself for as much as you
please, for where it is a matter of money you must never let nobody
walk over you.

Yours--&c."

The letter to my husband produced an immediate result. Within twenty-four hours, the telephone was at work with inquiries about trains and berths on steamers; and within a week we were on our way to Marseilles to join the ship that was to take us to Port Said.

Our state-rooms were on the promenade deck of the steamer with a passage-way between them. This admitted of entirely separate existences, which was well, for knowing or guessing my share in our altered arrangements, my husband had become even more morose than before, and no conversation could be sustained between us.

He spent the greater part of his time in his state-room, grumbling at the steward, abusing his valet, beating his bad-tempered terrier and cursing the luck that had brought him on this senseless voyage.

More than ever now I felt the gulf that divided us. I could not pass one single hour with him in comfort. My life was becoming as cold as an empty house, and I was beginning to regret the eagerness with which I had removed my husband from a scene in which he had at least lived the life of a rational creature, when an unexpected event brought me a thrill of passing pleasure.

Our seats in the saloon were at the top of the doctor's table, and the doctor himself was a young Irishman of three or four-and-twenty, as bright and breezy as a March morning and as racy of the soil as new-cut peat.

Hearing that I was from Ellan he started me by asking if by chance I knew Martin Conrad.

"Martin Conrad?" I repeated, feeling (I hardly knew why) as if a rosy veil were falling over my face and neck.

"Yes, Mart Conrad, as we call him. The young man who has gone out as doctor with Lieutenant ----'s expedition to the South Pole?"

A wave of tender feeling from my childhood came surging up to my throat and I said:

"He was the first of my boy friends--in fact the only one."

The young doctor's eyes sparkled and he looked as if he wanted to throw down his soup-spoon, jump up, and grasp me by both hands.

"God bless me, is that so?" he said.

It turned out that Martin and he had been friends at Dublin University. They had worked together, "roomed" together, and taken their degrees at the same time.

"So you know Mart? Lord alive, the way things come out!"

It was easy to see that Martin was not only his friend but his hero. He talked of him with a passionate love and admiration with which men, whatever they feel, rarely speak of each other.

Martin was the salt of the earth. He was the finest fellow and the staunchest friend and the bravest-hearted chap that walked under the stars of God.

"The greatest chum I have in the world, too, and by the holy Immaculate Mother I'm destroyed at being away from him."

It was like music to hear him speak. A flood of joy went sweeping through me at every word of praise he gave to Martin. And yet--I cannot explain why, unless it was the woman in me, the Irish-woman, or something like it--but I began to depreciate Martin, in order to "hoosh" him on, so that he might say more on the same subject.

"Then he _did_ take his degree," I said. "He was never very clever at his lessons, I remember, and I heard that he was only just able to scrape through his examinations."

The young doctor fell to my bait like a darling. With a flaming face and a nervous rush of racy words which made me think that if I closed my eyes I should be back on the steps of the church in Rome talking to Martin himself, he told me I was mistaken if I thought his friend was a numskull, for he had had "the biggest brain-pan in College Green," and the way he could learn things when he wanted to was wonderful.

He might be a bit shaky in his spelling, and perhaps he couldn't lick the world in Latin, but his heart was always in exploring, and the way he knew geography, especially the part of it they call the "Unknown," the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and what Charcot had done there, and Biscoe and Bellamy and D'Urville and Greely and Nansen and Shackleton and Peary, was enough to make the provost and professors look like fools of the earth by the side of him.

"Why, what do you think?" said the doctor. "When he went to London to apply for his billet, the Lieutenant said to him: 'You must have been down there before, young man.' 'No such luck,' said Martin. 'But you know as much about the Antarctic already as the whole boiling of us put together,' said the Lieutenant. Yes, by St. Patrick and St. Thomas, he's a geographer any way."

I admitted that much, and to encourage the doctor to go on I told him where I had seen Martin last, and what he had said of his expedition.

"In Rome you say?" said the doctor, with a note of jealousy. "You beat me there then. I saw him off from London, though. A few of us Dublin boys, being in town at the time, went down to Tilbury to see him sail, and when they were lifting anchor and the tug was hitching on, we stood on the pier--sixteen strong--and set up some of our college songs. 'Stop your noising, boys,' said he, 'the Lieutenant will be hearing you.' But not a bit of it. We sang away as long as we could see him going out with the tide, and then we went back in the train, smoking our pipes like so many Vauxhall chimneys, and narra a word out of the one of us. . . . Yes, yes, there are some men like that. They come like the stars of night and go like the light of heaven. Same as there are some women who walk the world like the sun, and leave the grass growing green wherever their feet have trod."

It was very ridiculous, I did not then understand why it should be so, but the tears came gushing into my eyes while the doctor spoke, and it was as much as I could do to preserve my composure.

What interpretation my husband put upon my emotion I do not know, but I saw that his face darkened, and when the doctor turned to him to ask if he also knew Martin he answered curtly and brusquely,

"Not I. No loss either, I should say."

"No loss?" said the doctor. "Show me the man under the stars of God that's fit to hold a candle to Martin Conrad, and by the angel Gabriel I'll go fifty miles out of my way to put a sight on him."

More than ever after this talk about Martin Conrad I was feeling defenceless, and at the mercy of my husband's wishes and whims, when something happened which seemed to change his character altogether.

The third day out, on a bright and quiet morning, we called at Malta, and while my husband went ashore to visit some friends in the garrison, I sat on deck watching the life of the little port and looking at the big warships anchored in the bay.

A Maltese woman came on board to sell souvenirs of the island, and picking out of her tray a tiny twisted thing in coral, I asked what it was.

"That's a charm, my lady," said the woman.

"A charm for what?"

"To make my lady's husband love her."

I felt my face becoming crimson, but my heart was sore, so in my simplicity I bought the charm and was smuggling it into my bag when I became aware that one of my fellow-passengers, a lady, was looking down at me.

She was a tall, singularly handsome woman, fashionably and (although on shipboard) almost sumptuously dressed. A look in her face was haunting me with a memory I could not fix when she stooped and said:

"Aren't you Mary O'Neill?"

The voice completed the identification, and I knew who it was. It was Alma Lier.

She was now about seven-and-twenty and in the prime of her young womanhood. Her beautiful auburn hair lay low over her broad forehead, almost descending to her long sable-coloured eyebrows. Her cheeks were very white, (rather beyond the whiteness of nature, I thought), and her lips were more than commonly red, with the upper one a little thin and the lower slightly set forward. But her eyes were still her distinguishing feature, being larger and blacker than before and having that vivid gaze that looked through and through you and made you feel that few women and no man in the world would have the power to resist her.

Her movements were almost noiseless, and as she sank into the chair by my side there was a certain over-sweetness in the soft succulent tones of the voice with which she began to tell me what had happened to her since I had seen her last.

It was a rather painful story. After two or three years in a girls' college in her own country she had set out with her mother for a long tour of the European capitals. In Berlin, at what was falsely called a Charity Ball, she had met a young Russian Count who was understood to be rich and related to one of the Grand Ducal families. Against the protests of her father (a shrewd American banker), she had married the Count, and they had returned to New York, where her mother had social ambitions.

There they had suffered a serious shock. It turned out that her husband had deceived them, and that he was really a poor and quite nameless person, only remotely related to the family he claimed to belong to.

Nevertheless Alma had "won out" at last. By digging deep into her father's treasury she got rid of her treacherous husband, and going "way out west," she had been able, in due time, to divorce him.

Since then she had resumed her family name, being known as Madame Lier, and now she was on her way to Egypt to spend the season at Cairo.

"And you?" she said. "You stayed long at the convent--yes?"

I answered that I had, and then in my fluttering voice (for some of the old spell of her presence had come sweeping back upon me) I replied one by one to the questions she asked about the Reverend Mother, the "Reverend Mother Mildred," Sister Angela and Father Giovanni, not to speak of myself, whom she had always thought of as "Margaret Mary" because I had looked so innocent and nun-like.

"And now you are married!" she said. "Married so splendidly, too! We heard all about it. Mother was so interested. What a lucky girl you are! Everybody says your husband is so handsome and charming. He is, isn't he?"

I was doing my utmost to put the best face upon my condition without betraying the facts or simulating sentiments which I could not feel, when a boat from the shore pulled up at the ship's side, and my husband stepped on to the deck.

In his usual morose manner he was about to pass without speaking on his way to his state-room, when his eyes fell on Alma sitting beside me. Then he stopped and looked at us, and, stepping up, he said, in a tone I had never heard from him before:

"Mary, my dear, will you not present me to your friend?"

I hesitated, and then with a quivering of the lips I did so. But something told me as I introduced my husband to Alma, and Alma to my husband, and they stood looking into each other's eyes and holding each other's hands (for Alma had risen and I was sitting between them), that this was the most momentous incident of my life thus far--that for good or ill my hour had struck and I could almost hear the bell.

FORTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

From that hour forward my husband was a changed man. His manner to me, so brusque before, became courteous, kind, almost affectionate. Every morning he would knock at the door of my state-room to ask if I had slept well, or if the movement of the steamer had disturbed me.

His manner to Alma was charming. He was up before breakfast every day, promenading the deck with her in the fresh salt air. I would slide back my window and hear their laughter as they passed, above the throb of the engines and the wash of the sea. Sometimes they would look in upon me and joke, and Alma would say:

"And how's Margaret Mary this morning?"

Our seats in the saloon had been changed. Now we sat with Alma at the Captain's table, and though I sorely missed the doctor's racy talk about Martin Conrad I was charmed by Alma's bright wit and the fund of her personal anecdotes. She seemed to know nearly everybody. My husband knew everybody also, and their conversation never flagged.

Something of the wonderful and worshipful feeling I had had for Alma at the Sacred Heart came back to me, and as for my husband it seemed to me that I was seeing him for the first time.

He persuaded the Captain to give a dance on our last night at sea, so the awnings were spread, the electric lights were turned on, and the deck of the ship became a scene of enchantment.

My husband and Alma led off. He danced beautifully and she was dressed to perfection. Not being a dancer myself I stood with the Captain in the darkness outside, looking in on them in the bright and dazzling circle, while the moon-rays were sweeping the waters like a silver fan and the little waves were beating the ship's side with friendly pats.

I was almost happy. In my simplicity I was feeling grateful to Alma for having wrought this extraordinary change, so that when, on our arrival at Port Said, my husband said,

"Your friend Madame Lier has made no arrangements for her rooms at Cairo--hadn't I better telegraph to our hotel, dear?" I answered, "Yes," and wondered why he had asked me.

Our hotel was an oriental building, situated on an island at the further side of the Nile. Formerly the palace of a dead Khedive, who had built it in honour of the visit of an Empress, it had a vast reception hall with a great staircase.

There, with separated rooms, as in London, we remained for three months. I was enthralled. Too young and inexperienced to be conscious of the darker side of the picture before me, I found everything beautiful. I was seeing fashionable life for the first time, and it was entrancing.

Lovely and richly-dressed ladies in silk, velvet, lace, and no limit of jewellery--the dark French women, the blonde German women, the stately English women, and the American women with their flexuous grace. And then the British soldiers in their various uniforms, the semi-Turks in their red tarbooshes, and the diplomats of all nationalities, Italian, Austrian, French, German--what a cosmopolitan world it was, what a meeting-place of all nations!

Every hour had its interest, but I liked best the hour of tea on the terrace, for that was the glorious hour of woman, when every condition invested her dress with added beauty and her smile with greater charm.

Such a blaze of colour in the sunshine! Such a sea of muslin, flowers, and feathers! Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the rainbow! They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless forms of swarthy Bednouins and Nubians moving to and fro.

Although I had been brought up in such a different world altogether I could not help being carried away by all this beauty. My senses burgeoned out and my heart seemed to expand.

As for Alma and my husband, they seemed to belong to the scene of themselves. She would sit at one of the tea-tables, swishing away the buzzing flies with a little whip of cord and cowries, and making comments on the crowd in soft undertones which he alone seemed to catch. Her vivid and searching eyes, with their constant suggestion of laughter, seemed to be picking out absurdities on every side and finding nearly everybody funny.

She found me funny also. My innocence and my convent-bred ideas were a constant subject of jest with her.

"What does our dear little Margaret Mary think of that?" she would say with a significant smile, at sights that seemed to me quite harmless.

After a while I began to have a feeling of indefinable uneasiness about Alma. She was daily redoubling her cordiality, always calling me her "dearest sweetest girl," and "the oldest friend she had in the world." But little by little I became conscious of a certain commerce between her and my husband in which I had no part. Sometimes I saw her eyes seeking his, and occasionally I heard them exchange a few words about me in French, which (because I did not speak it, being uncertain of my accent) they thought I did not understand.

Perhaps this helped to sharpen my wits, for I began to see that I had gone the wrong way to work with my husband. Instead of trying to make myself fall in love with my husband, I should have tried to make my husband fall in love with me.

When I asked myself how this was to be done I found one obvious answer--I must become the sort of woman my husband admired and liked; in short I must imitate Alma.

I resolved to do this, and after all that has happened since I feel a little ashamed to tell of the efforts I made to play a part for which I was so ill-fitted by nature and education.

Some of them were silly enough perhaps, but some were almost pathetic, and I am not afraid that any good woman will laugh at the futile shifts I was put to, in my girlish ignorance, to make my husband love me.

"I must do it," I thought. "I must, I must!"

FORTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

Hitherto I had attended to myself, but now I determined to have a maid. I found one without much difficulty. Her name was Price. She was a very plain woman of thirty, with piercing black eyes; and when I engaged her she seemed anxious above all else to make me understand that she "never saw anything."

I soon discovered that she saw everything, especially the relations between myself and my husband, and that she put her own interpretation (not a very flattering one) on our separated apartments. She also saw the position of Alma, and putting her own interpretation upon that also, she tortured me with many pin-pricks.

Under the guidance of my maid I began to haunt the shops of the dressmakers, the milliners and the jewellers. It did not require the memory of my father's letter to make me spend his money--I spent it like water. Feeling ashamed of my quaker-cut costumes (Alma had a costume for every day of the week, and wore a large gold snake on her arm), I bought the most costly toilettes, and loaded myself with bracelets, rings and necklaces.

I was dressing for my husband, and for him I did many things I had never dreamt of doing before. For him I filed my nails, put cream on my skin, perfume on my handkerchief, and even rouge on my lips. Although I did not allow myself to think of it so, I was running a race with Alma.

My maid knew that before I did, and the first night she put me into one of my uncomfortable new gowns she stood off from me and said:

"His lordship must be a strange gentleman if he can resist you _now_."

I felt ashamed, yet pleased too, and went downstairs with a certain confidence.

The result was disappointing. My husband smiled rather condescendingly, and though Alma praised me beyond measure I saw that she was secretly laughing as she said:

"Our Margaret Mary is coming out, isn't she?"

Nevertheless I persevered. Without too much preparation for so perilous an enterprise, I threw myself into the gaieties of Cairo, attending polo matches, race-meetings, picnics at the Pyramids, dances at the different hotels, and on the island of Roda, where according to tradition, Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes.

I think I may say that I drew the eyes of other men upon me, particularly those of the colonel commanding on the Citadel, a fine type of Scotsman, who paid me the most worshipful attention. But I thought of nobody but my husband, being determined to make him forget Alma and fall in love with me.

It was a hopeless task, and I had some heart-breaking hours. One day, calling at a jeweller's to see a diamond necklace which I greatly coveted, I was told in confidence that my husband had been pricing it, but had had to give it up because it was a thousand francs too dear for him. I was foolish enough to pay the thousand francs myself, under a pledge of secrecy, and to tell the jeweller to send the necklace to my husband, feeling sure in my simplicity that it had been meant for me.

Next night I saw it on Alma's neck, and could have died of mortification and shame.

I daresay it was all very weak and very childish, but I really think my last attempt, if rather ridiculous, was also very pitiful.

Towards the end of our stay the proprietors of the hotel gave a Cotillon. As this was the event of the season, and nearly every woman was giving a dinner in honour of it, I resolved that I too would give one, inviting the gayest of the gay acquaintances I had made in Cairo.

Feeling that it would be my last battle, and that so much depended upon it, I dressed myself with feverish care, in a soft white satin gown, which was cut lower than I had ever worn before, with slippers to match, a tight band of pearls about my throat and another about my head.

When Price had finished dressing me she said:

"Well, if his lordship prefers anybody else in the world to-night I shan't know where he puts his eyes."

The compliment was a crude one, but I had no time to think of that, for my heart was fluttering with hopes and fears, and I think any woman would forgive me under the circumstances if I told myself, as I passed the tall mirrors on the stairs, that I too was beautiful.

The dining-room was crowded when I entered it with my guests, and seeing that we were much observed it flashed upon me that my husband and I had become a subject of gossip. Partly for that reason I strangled the ugly thing that was writhing in my bosom, and put Alma (who had flown to me with affectionate rapture) next to my husband, and the colonel commanding on the Citadel in the seat beside me.

Throughout the dinner, which was very long, I was very nervous, and though I did my best to keep up conversation with the colonel, I knew quite well that I was listening to what was being said at the other side of my big round table, and as often as any mention was made of "Margaret Mary" I heard it.

More than once Alma lifted her glass with a gracious nod and smile, crying, "Mary dearest!" and then in another moment gave my husband one of her knowing glances which seemed to me to say, "Look at that foolish little wife of yours!"

By the time we returned to the hall for coffee we were rather a noisy party, and even the eyes of the ladies betrayed the fact that they had dined. The talk, which had grown louder, was also a little more free, and God forgive me, I joined in it, being feverishly anxious to outdo Alma, and be looked upon as a woman of the world.

Towards eleven o'clock, the red-coated orchestra began to play a waltz, and then the whole variegated company of ladies, soldiers, and diplomats stood up to dance, and the colonel asked me to join him.

I was ashamed to tell him that I had never danced except with a schoolgirl, so I took his hand and started. But hardly had we begun, when I made mistakes, which I thought everybody saw (I am sure Alma saw them), and before we had taken many turns my partner had to stop, whereupon I retired to my seat with a forced laugh and a sense of confusion.

It was nearly twelve when they began the Cotillon, which Alma and my husband led with supreme self-possession. As one of the hostesses I sat in the front row of the square, and when I was taken out I made further mistakes, which also Alma saw and communicated by smiles to my husband.

Before the Cotillon came to an end the night was far spent and then the company, which had become very boisterous, began to look for some new excitement, no matter how foolish. One or other started "turkey trot" and "grizzly bear" and finally Alma, with memories of the winter sports at St. Moritz, proposed that they should toboggan down the great staircase.

The suggestion was welcomed with a shout, and a broad board was immediately laid on the first long flight of stairs for people to slide on.

Soldiers went first, and then there were calls for the ladies, when Alma took her turn, tucking her dress under her at the top and alighting safely on her feet at the bottom. Other ladies followed her example, with similar good fortune, and then Alma, who had been saying "Such fun! Such lots of fun!" set up a cry of "Margaret Mary."

I refused at first, feeling ashamed of even looking at such unwomanly folly, but something Alma said to my husband and something that was conveyed by my husband's glance at me set my heart afire and, poor feverish and entangled fool that I was, I determined to defy them.

So running up to the top and seating myself on the toboggan I set it in motion. But hardly had I done so when it swayed, reeled, twisted and threw me off, with the result that I rolled downstairs to the bottom.

Of course there were shrieks of laughter, and if I had been in the spirit of the time and place I suppose I should have laughed too, and there would have been an end of the matter. But I had been playing a part, a tragic part, and feeling that I had failed and covered myself with ridicule, I was overwhelmed with confusion.

I thought my husband would be angry with me, and feel compromised by my foolishness, but he was not; he was amused, and when at last I saw his face it was running in rivulets from the laughter he could not restrain.

That was the end of all things, and when Alma came up to me, saying everything that was affectionate and insincere, about her "poor dear unfortunate Margaret Mary" (only women know how to wound each other so), I brushed her aside, went off to my bedroom, and lay face down on the sofa, feeling that I was utterly beaten and could fight no more.

Half an hour afterwards my husband came in, and though I did not look up I heard him say, in a tone of indulgent sympathy that cut me to the quick:

"You've been playing the wrong part, my child. A Madonna, yes, but a Venus, no! It's not your _métier_."

"What's the good? What's the good? What's the good?" I asked myself.

I thought my heart was broken.

FORTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

With inexpressible relief I heard the following day that we were to leave for Rome immediately.

Alma was to go with us, but that did not matter to me in the least. Outside the atmosphere of this place, so artificial, so unrelated to nature, her power over my husband would be gone. Once in the Holy City everything would be different. Alma would be different, I should be different, above all my husband would be different. I should take him to the churches and basilicas; I should show him the shrines and papal processions, and he would see me in my true "part" at last!

But what a deep disappointment awaited me!

On reaching Rome we put up at a fashionable hotel in the new quarter of the Ludovisi, and although that was only a few hundred yards from the spot on which I had spent nine happy years it seemed to belong to another world altogether. Instead of the church domes and the monastery bells, there were the harsh clang of electric trams, the thrum and throb of automobiles, the rattle of cars and the tramp of soldiers.

Then I realised that there were two Romes--an old Rome and a new one, and that the Rome we had come to hardly differed from the Cairo we had left behind.

There was the same varied company of people of all nations, English, Americans, French, German; the same nomad tribes of the rich and dissolute, pitching their tents season by season in the sunny resorts of Europe; the same aimless society, the same debauch of fashion, the same callous and wicked luxury, the same thirst for selfish pleasures, the same busy idleness, the same corruption of character and sex.

This made me very unhappy, but from first to last Alma was in the highest spirits. Everybody seemed to be in Rome that spring, and everybody seemed to be known either to her or to my husband. For Alma's sake we were invited everywhere, and thus we saw not only the life of the foreign people of the hotels but that of a part (not the better part) of the Roman aristocracy.

Alma was a great success. She had the homage of all the men, and being understood to be rich, and having the gift of making every man believe he was her special favourite, she was rarely without a group of Italian noblemen about her chair.

With sharper eyes the Italian women saw that her real reckoning lay with my husband, but they seemed to think no worse of her for that. They seemed to think no worse of him either. It was nothing against him that, having married me (as everybody appeared to know) for the settlement of his financial difficulties, he had transferred his attentions, even on his honeymoon, to this brilliant and alluring creature.

As for me, I was made to realise that I was a person of a different class altogether. When people wished to be kind they called me _spirituelle_, and when they were tempted to be the reverse they voted me insipid.

As a result I became very miserable in this company, and I can well believe that I may have seemed awkward and shy and stupid when I was in some of their grey old palaces full of tapestry and bronze, for I sometimes found the talk there so free (especially among the women) that the poisoned jokes went quivering through me.

Things I had been taught to think sacred were so often derided that I had to ask myself if it could be Rome, my holy and beloved Rome--this city of license and unbelief.

But Alma was entirely happy, especially when the talk turned on conjugal fidelity, and the faithful husband was held up to ridicule. This happened very often in one house we used to go to--that of a Countess of ancient family who was said to have her husband and her lover at either side of her when she sat down to dinner.

She was a large and handsome person of middle age, with a great mass of fair hair, and she gave me the feeling that in her case the body of a woman was inhabited by the soul of a man.

She christened me her little Irish _bambino_, meaning her child; and one night in her drawing-room, after dinner, before the men had joined us, she called me to her side on the couch, lit a cigarette, crossed her legs, and gave us with startling candour her views of the marriage bond.

"What can you expect, you women?" she said. "You run after the men for their titles--they've very little else, except debts, poor things--and what is the result? The first result is that though you have bought them you belong to them. Yes, your husband owns his beautiful woman, just as he owns his beautiful horse or his beautiful dog."

This was so pointed that I felt my face growing crimson, but Alma and the other women only laughed, so the Countess went on:

"What then? Once in a blue moon each goes his and her own way without sin. You agree to a sort of partnership for mutual advantage in which you live together in chastity under the same roof. What a life! What an ice-house!"

Again the other women laughed, but I felt myself blushing deeply.

"But in the majority of cases it is quite otherwise. The business purpose served, each is open to other emotions. The man becomes unfaithful, and the woman, if she has any spirit, pays him out tit for tat--and why shouldn't she?"

After that I could bear no more, and before I knew what I was saying I blurted out:

"But I find that wrong and wicked. Infidelity on the part of the man does not justify infidelity in the woman. The prayer-book says so."

Alma burst out laughing, and the Countess smiled and continued:

"Once in a hundred years there comes a great passion--Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. The woman meets the right man too late. What a tragedy! What a daily and hourly crucifixion! Unless," said the Countess with emphasis, "she is prepared to renounce the law and reject society and live a life of complete emancipation. But in a Catholic country, where there is no divorce, what woman can afford to do that? Nobody in the higher classes can--especially if she has to sacrifice her title. So the wise woman avoids scandal, keeps her little affair with her lover to herself, and . . . and that's marriage, my dears."

A twitter of approval, led by Alma, came from the other women, but I was quivering with anger and I said:

"Then marriage is an hypocrisy and an imposture. If I found I loved somebody better than my husband, I should go to him in spite of the law, and society, and title and . . . and everything."

"Of course you would, my dear," said the Countess, smiling at me as at a child, "but that's because you are such a sweet, simple, innocent little Irish _bambino_."

It must have been a day or two after this that we were invited to the Roman Hunt. I had no wish to go, but Alma who had begun to use me in order to "save her face" in relation to my husband, induced me to drive them out in a motor-car to the place on the Campagna where they were to mount their horses.

"Dear sweet girl!" said Alma. "How could we possibly go without you?"

It was Sunday, and I sat between Alma in her riding habit and my husband in his riding breeches, while we ran through the Porta San Giovanni, and past the _osterie_ where the pleasure-loving Italian people were playing under the pergolas with their children, until we came to the meeting-ground of the Hunt, by the Trappist monastery of Tre Fontane.

A large company of the Roman aristocracy were gathered there with their horses and hounds, and they received Alma and my husband with great cordiality. What they thought of me I do not know, except that I was a childish and complacent wife; and when at the sound of the horn the hunt began, and my husband and Alma went prancing off with the rest, without once looking back, I asked myself in my shame and distress if I could bear my humiliation much longer.

But then came a moment of unexpected pleasure. A cheerful voice on the other side of the car said:

"Good morning, Lady Raa."

It was the young Irish doctor from the steamer. His ship had put into Naples for two days, and, like Martin Conrad before my marriage, he had run up to look at Rome.

"But have you heard the news?" he cried.

"What news?"

"About the South Pole Expedition--they're on their way home."

"So soon?"

"Yes, they reached New Zealand on Saturday was a week."

"And . . . and . . . and Martin Conrad?"

"He's well, and what's better, he has distinguished himself."

"I . . . I . . . I knew he would."

"So did I! The way I was never fearing that if they gave Mart half a chance he would come out top! Do or die--that was his watch-word."

"I know! I know!"

His eyes were sparkling and so I suppose were mine, while with a joyous rush of racy words, (punctuated by me with "Yes," "Yes," "Yes") he told of a long despatch from the Lieutenant published by one of the London papers, in which Martin had been specially mentioned--how he had been put in command of some difficult and perilous expedition, and had worked wonders.

"How splendid! How glorious! How perfectly magnificent!" I said.

"Isn't it?" said the doctor, and for a few moments more we bandied quick questions and replies like children playing at battledore and shuttlecock. Then he said:

"But I'm after thinking it's mortal strange I never heard him mention you. There was only one chum at home he used to talk about and that was a man--a boy, I mean. Mally he was calling him--that's short for Maloney, I suppose."

"For Mary," I said.

"Mary, is it? Why, by the saints, so it is! Where in the name of St. Patrick has been the Irish head at me that I never thought of that before? And you were . . . Yes? Well, by the powers, ye've a right to be proud of him, for he was thinking pearls and diamonds of you. I was mortal jealous of Mally, I remember. 'Mally's a stunner,' he used to say. 'Follow you anywhere, if you wanted it, in spite of the devil and hell.'"

The sparkling eyes were growing misty by this time but the woman in me made me say--I couldn't help it--

"I dare say he's had many girl friends since my time, though?"

"Narra a one. The girls used to be putting a glime on him in Dublin--they're the queens of the world too, those Dublin girls--but never a skute of the eye was he giving to the one of them. I used to think it was work, but maybe it wasn't . . . maybe it was. . . ."

I dare not let him finish what I saw he was going to say--I didn't know what would happen to me if he did--so I jumped in by telling him that, if he would step into the car, I would drive him back to Rome.

He did so, and all the way he talked of Martin, his courage and resource and the hardships he had gone through, until (with backward thoughts of Alma and my husband riding away over the Campagna) my heart, which had been leaping like a lamb, began to ache and ache.

We returned by the Old Appian Way, where the birds were building their nests among the crumbling tombs, through the Porta San Paolo, and past the grave of the "young English poet" of whom I have always thought it was not so sad that he died of consumption as in the bitterness of a broken heart.

All this time I was so much at home with the young Irish doctor, who was Martin's friend, that it was not until I was putting him down at his hotel that I remembered I did not even know his name.

It was O'Sullivan.

FORTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Every day during our visit to Rome I had reminded myself of the Reverend Mother's invitation to call on her, and a sense of moral taint had prevented me, but now I determined to see her at least by going to Benediction at her Convent church the very next day.

It happened, however, that this was the time when the Artists' Club of Rome were giving a Veglione (a kind of fancy-dress ball), and as Alma and my husband desired to go to it, and were still in the way of using me to keep themselves in countenance, I consented to accompany them on condition that I did not dress or dance, and that they would go with me to Benediction the following day.

"Dear sweet girl!" said Alma. "We'll do whatever you like. Of course we will."

I wore my soft satin without any ornaments, and my husband merely put scarlet facings on the lapels of his evening coat, but Alma was clad in a gorgeous dress of old gold, with Oriental skirts which showed her limbs in front but had a long train behind, and made her look like a great vampire bat.

It was eleven o'clock before we reached the theatre, but already the auditorium was full, and so well had the artists done their work of decoration, making the air alive with floating specks of many-coloured lights, like the fire-flies at Nemi, that the scene was one of enchantment.

It was difficult to believe that on the other side of the walls was the street, with the clanging electric bells and people hurrying by with their collars up, for the night was cold, and it had begun to rain as we came in, and one poor woman, with a child under her shawl, was standing by the entrance trying to sell evening papers.