The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories Part 34

'Friday.'

'Where shall you live in the meantime?'

'I don't know--I haven't thought about it.'

'I should go to some hotel, if I were you,' said Munden, 'and I have a proposal to make. If I wait till Sat.u.r.day, will you come with me to Como?'

Shergold did not at once reply. He was walking hurriedly, and making rather strange movements with his head and arms. They came into the shadow of the vaulted way beneath London Bridge Station. At this hour the great tunnel was quiet, save when a train roared above; the warehouses were closed; one or two idlers, of forbidding aspect, hung about in the murky gaslight, and from the far end came a sound of children at play.

'You won't be wanted here?' Munden added.

'No--no--I think not.' There was agitation in the voice.

'Then you will come?'

'Yes, I will come.' Shergold spoke with unnecessary vehemence and laughed oddly.

'What's the matter with you?' his friend asked.

'Nothing--the change of circ.u.mstances, I suppose. Let's get on. Let us go somewhere--I can't help reproaching myself; I ought to feel or show a decent sobriety; but what was the old fellow to me? I'm grateful to him.'

'There's nothing else on your mind?'

Shergold looked up, startled.

'What do you mean? Why do you ask?'

They stood together in the black shadow of an interval between two lamps.

After reflecting for a moment, Munden decided to speak.

'I called at your lodgings early to-day, and somehow I got into talk with the girl. She was cheeky, and her behaviour puzzled me. Finally she made an incredible announcement--that you had asked her to marry you. Of course it's a lie?'

'To marry her?' exclaimed the listener hoa.r.s.ely, with an attempt at laughter. 'Do you think that likely--after all I have gone through?'

'No, I certainly don't. It staggered me. But what I want to know is, can she cause trouble?'

'How do I know?--a girl will lie so boldly. She might make a scandal, I suppose; or threaten it, in hope of getting money out of me.'

'But is there any ground for a scandal?' demanded Harvey.

'Not the slightest, as you mean it.'

'I'm glad to hear that. But she may give you trouble. I see the thing doesn't astonish you very much; no doubt you were aware of her character.'

'Yes, yes; I know it pretty well. Come, let us get out of this squalid inferno; how I hate it! Have you had dinner? I don't want any. Let us go to your rooms, shall we? There'll be a hansom pa.s.sing the bridge.'

They walked on in silence, and when they had found a cab they drove westward, talking only of Dr. Shergold's affairs. Munden lived in the region of the Squares, hard by the British Museum; he took his friend into a comfortably furnished room, the walls hidden with books and prints, and there they sat down to smoke, a bottle of whisky within easy reach of both.

It was plain to Harvey that some mystery lay in his friend's reserve on the subject of the girl Emma; he was still anxious, but would not lead the talk to unpleasant things. Shergold drank like a thirsty man, and the whisky seemed to make him silent. Presently he fell into absolute muteness, and lay wearily back in his chair.

'The excitement has been too much for you,' Munden remarked.

Shergold looked at him, with a painful embarra.s.sment in his features; then suddenly he bent forward.

'Munden, it's I who have lied. I _did_ ask that girl to marry me.'

'When?'

'Last night.'

'Why?'

'Because for a moment I was insane.' They stared at each other.

'Has she any hold upon you?' Munden asked slowly.

'None whatever, except this frantic offer of mine.'

'Into which she inveigled you?'

'I can't honestly say she did; it was entirely my own fault. She has never behaved loosely, or even like a schemer. I doubt whether she knew anything about my uncle, until I told her last night.'

He spoke rapidly, in a thick voice, moving his arms in helpless protestation. His look was one of unutterable misery.

'Well,' observed Munden, 'the frenzy has at all events pa.s.sed. You have the common-sense to treat it as if it had never been; and really I am tempted to believe that it was literal lunacy. Last night were you drunk?'

'I had drunk nothing. Listen, and I will tell you all about it. I am a fool about women. I don't know what it is--certainly not a sensual or pa.s.sionate nature; mine is nothing of the sort. It's sheer sentimentality, I suppose.

I can't be friendly with a woman without drifting into mawkish tenderness--there's the simple truth. If I had married happily, I don't think I should have been tempted to go about philandering. The society of a wife I loved and respected would be sufficient. But there's that need in me--the incessant hunger for a woman's sympathy and affection. Such a hideous mistake as mine when I married would have made a cynic of most men; upon me the lesson has been utterly thrown away. I mean that, though I can talk of women rationally enough with a friend, I am at their mercy when alone with them--at the mercy of the silliest, vulgarest creature. After all, isn't it very much the same with men in general? The average man--how does he come to marry? Do you think he deliberately selects? Does he fall in love, in the strict sense of the phrase, with that one particular girl?

No; it comes about by chance--by the drifting force of circ.u.mstances. Not one man in ten thousand, when he thinks of marriage, waits for the ideal wife--for the woman who makes capture of his soul or even of his senses.

Men marry without pa.s.sion. Most of us have a very small circle for choice; the hazard of everyday life throws us into contact with this girl or that, and presently we begin to feel either that we have compromised ourselves, or that we might as well save trouble and settle down as soon as possible, and the girl at hand will do as well as another. More often than not it is the girl who decides for us. In more than half the marriages it's the woman who has practically proposed. She puts herself in a man's way. With her it rests almost entirely whether a man shall think of her as a possible wife or not. She has endless ways of putting herself forward without seeming to do so. As often as not, it's mere pa.s.sivity that effects the end. She has only to remain seated instead of moving away; to listen with a smile instead of looking bored; to be at home instead of being out,--and she is making love to a man. In a Palace of Truth how many husbands would have to confess that it decidedly surprised them when they found themselves engaged to be married? The will comes into play only for a moment or two now and then. Of course it is made to seem responsible, and in a sense it _is_ responsible, but, in the vast majority of cases, purely as an animal instinct, confirming the suggestion of circ.u.mstances.'

'There's something in all this,' granted the listener, 'but it doesn't explain the behaviour of a man who, after frightful experience in marriage--after recovering his freedom--after finding himself welcomed by congenial society--after inheriting a fortune to use as he likes--goes and offers himself to an artful hussy in a lodging-house.'

'That's the special case. Look how it came to pa.s.s. Months ago I knew I was drifting into dangerous relations with that girl. Unfortunately I am not a rascal: I can't think of girls as playthings; a fatal conscientiousness in an unmarried man of no means. Day after day we grew more familiar. She used to come up and ask me if I wanted anything; and of course I knew that she began to come more often than necessary. When she laid a meal for me, we talked--half an hour at a time. The mother, doubtless, looked on with approval; Emma had to find a husband, and why not me as well as another?

They knew I was a soft creature--that I never made a row about anything--was grateful for anything that looked like kindness--and so on.

Just the kind of man to be captured. But no--I don't want to make out that I am their victim; that's a feeble excuse, and a worthless one. The average man would either have treated the girl as a servant, and so kept her at her distance, or else he would have alarmed her by behaviour which suggested anything you like but marriage. As for me, I hadn't the common-sense to take either of these courses. I made a friend of the girl; talked to her more and more confidentially; and at last--fatal moment--told her my history. Yes, I was a.s.s enough to tell that girl the whole story of my life. Can you conceive such folly?

'Yet the easiest thing in the world to understand. We were alone in the house one evening. After trying to work for about an hour I gave it up. I knew that the mother was out, and I heard Emma moving downstairs. I was lonely and dispirited--wanted to talk--to talk about myself to some one who would give a kind ear. So I went down, and made some excuse for beginning a conversation in the parlour. It lasted a couple of hours; we were still talking when the mother came back. I didn't persuade myself that I cared for Emma, even then. Her vulgarisms of speech and feeling jarred upon me.

But she was feminine; she spoke and looked gently, with sympathy. I enjoyed that evening--and you must bear in mind what I have told you before, that I stand in awe of refined women. I am their equal, I know; I can talk with them; their society is an exquisite delight to me;--but when it comes to thinking of intimacy with one of them--! Perhaps it is my long years of squalid existence. Perhaps I have come to regard myself as doomed to life on a lower level. I find it an impossible thing to imagine myself offering marriage--making love--to a girl such as those I meet in the big houses.'

'You will outgrow that,' said Munden.

'Yes, yes,--I hope and believe so. And wouldn't it be criminal to deny myself even the chance, now that I have money? All to-day I have been tortured like a soul that beholds its salvation lost by a moment's weakness of the flesh. You can imagine what my suffering has been; it drove me into sheer lying. I had resolved to deny utterly that I had asked Emma to marry me--to deny it with a savage boldness, and take the consequences.'

'A most rational resolve, my dear fellow. Pray stick to it. But you haven't told me yet how the dizzy culmination of your madness was reached. You say that you proposed _last night_?'

'Yes--and simply for the pleasure of telling Emma, when she had accepted me, that I had eighty thousand pounds! You can't understand that? I suppose the change of fortune has made me a little light-headed; I have been going about with a sense of exaltation which has prompted me to endless follies.

I have felt a desire to be kind to people--to bestow happiness--to share my joy with others. If I had some of the doctor's money in my pocket, I should have given away five-pound notes.'

'You contented yourself,' said Munden, laughing, 'with giving a promissory-note for the whole legacy.'