The Second Mrs. Tanqueray Part 6

DRUMMLE.

[_Smoking, with his back to the fire._] He married a Miss Herriott; that was in the year eighteen--confound dates--twenty years ago. She was a lovely creature--by Jove, she was; by religion a Roman Catholic. She was one of your cold sort, you know--all marble arms and black velvet. I remember her with painful distinctness as the only woman who ever made me nervous.

MISQUITH.

Ha, ha!

DRUMMLE.

He loved her--to distraction, as they say. Jupiter, how fervently that poor devil courted her! But I don't believe she allowed him even to squeeze her fingers. She _was_ an iceberg! As for kissing, the mere contact would have given him chapped lips. However, he married her and took her away, the latter greatly to my relief.

JAYNE.

Abroad, you mean?

DRUMMLE.

Eh? Yes. I imagine he gratified her by renting a villa in Lapland, but I don't know. After a while they returned, and then I saw how wofully Aubrey had miscalculated results.

JAYNE.

Miscalculated----?

DRUMMLE.

He had reckoned, poor wretch, that in the early days of marriage she would thaw. But she didn't. I used to picture him closing his doors and making up the fire in the hope of seeing her features relax.

Bless her, the thaw never set in! I believe she kept a thermometer in her stays and always registered ten degrees below zero. However, in time a child came--a daughter.

JAYNE.

Didn't that----?

DRUMMLE.

Not a bit of it; it made matters worse. Frightened at her failure to stir up in him some sympathetic religious belief, she determined upon strong measures with regard to the child. He opposed her for a miserable year or so, but she wore him down, and the insensible little brat was placed in a convent, first in France, then in Ireland. Not long afterwards the mother died, strangely enough, of fever, the only warmth, I believe, that ever came to that woman's body.

MISQUITH.

Don't, Cayley!

JAYNE.

The child is living, we know.

DRUMMLE.

Yes, if you choose to call it living. Miss Tanqueray--a young woman of nineteen now--is in the Loretto convent at Armagh. She professes to have found her true vocation in a religious life, and within a month or two will take final vows.

MISQUITH.

He ought to have removed his daughter from the convent when the mother died.

DRUMMLE.

Yes, yes, but absolutely at the end there was reconciliation between husband and wife, and she won his promise that the child should complete her conventual education. He reaped his reward. When he attempted to gain his girl's confidence and affection he was too late; he found he was dealing with the spirit of the mother. You remember his visit to Ireland last month?

JAYNE.

Yes.

DRUMMLE.

That was to wish his girl good-bye.

MISQUITH.

Poor fellow?

DRUMMLE.

He sent for me when he came back. I think he must have had a lingering hope that the girl would relent--would come to life, as it were--at the last moment, for, for an hour or so, in this room, he was terribly shaken. I'm sure he'd clung to that hope from the persistent way in which he kept breaking off in his talk to repeat one dismal word, as if he couldn't realise his position without dinning this d.a.m.ned word into his head.

JAYNE.

What word was that?

DRUMMLE.

Alone--alone.

AUBREY _enters._

AUBREY.

A thousand apologies!

DRUMMLE.

[_Gaily._] We are talking about you, my dear Aubrey.

[_During the telling of the story,_ MISQUITH _has risen and gone to the fire, and_ DRUMMLE _has thrown himself full-length on the sofa._ AUBREY _now joins_ MISQUITH _and_ JAYNE.

AUBREY.

Well, Cayley, are you surprised?

DRUMMLE.