Part 8
"But wait a bit,--I promise that yours shall be a model will,--only you seem to have forgotten, my dear fellow, that you may out-live your wife. Now, should you have the misfortune to lose Louise, to whom would you wish to devise this fifteen thousand pounds? It's possible, too, though not very probable, I admit, that you may both die at the same time--both be killed in a railway accident for instance."
"Such good fortune may befall us----" Dering spoke quite simply, and accepted the other's short laugh with great good-humour. "Oh! you know what I mean; I always _have_ thought husbands and wives--who care, I mean--ought to die on the same day. That they don't do so is one of the many strange mysteries which complicate life. But I say, Wingfield----"
The speaker had turned away from the window. He had again taken up his stand opposite the other's broad writing table, and not even the cheap, ill-made clothes could hide the graceful lines of the tall, active figure, not even the turned-down collar and orange silk tie could destroy the young man's look of rather subtle distinction.
"Failing Louise, I should like this money, at my death, to be divided equally between the young Hintons and your kids," and as the other made a gesture of protest, Dering added quickly:
"What better could I do? Louise is devoted to Jack Hinton's children, and I've always regarded you--I have indeed, old man,--as my one real friend. Of course it's possible now,"--an awkward shy break came into his voice--"it's possible now, I say, that we may have children of our own; I don't suppose you've ever realised how poor, how horribly poor, we've been all these years."
He looked away, avoiding the other man's eyes; then, picking up his hat and stick with a quick, nervous gesture, was gone.
* * * * *
After the door had shut on his friend, Wingfield went on still standing for awhile. His hands mechanically sorted the papers and letters lying on his table into neat little heaps, but his thoughts were travelling backward, through his and Dering's past lives.
The friends had first met at the City of London school, for they were much of an age, though the lawyer looked the elder of the two. Then Dering had gone to Cambridge, and Wingfield, more humbly, to take up life as an articled clerk to a good firm of old-established attorneys. Again, later, they had come together once more, sharing a modest lodging, while Dering earned a small uncertain income by contributing to the literary weeklies, by "ghosting" writers more fortunate than himself, by tutoring whenever he got the chance,--in a word, by resorting to the few expedients open to the honest educated Londoner lacking a definite profession.
The two men had not parted company till Dering, enabled to do so with the help of a small legacy, had chosen to marry a Danish girl, as good-looking, as high-minded, as unpractical as himself.
But stay, had Louise Dering proved herself so unpractical during the early years of her married life?
Wingfield, standing there, his mind steeped in memories, compared her, with an unconscious critical sigh, with his own stolid, unimaginative wife, Kate. As he did so he wondered whether, after all, Dering had not known how to make the best of both worlds; and yet he and his Louise had gone through some bad times together.
Wingfield had been the one intimate of the young couple when they began their married life in a three-roomed flat in Gray's Inn; and he had been aware, painfully so, of the incessant watchful struggle with money difficulties, never mentioned while the struggle was in being, for only the rich can afford to complain of poverty. He had admired, it might almost be said he had reverenced with all his heart, the high courage then shown by his friend's wife.
During those first difficult years, when he, Wingfield, could do nothing for them, Louise had gone without the help of even the least adequate servant. The women of her nation are taught housewifery as an indispensable feminine accomplishment, and so she had scrubbed and sung, cooked and read, made and mended, for Philip and herself.
Wingfield was glad to remember that it was he who had at last found Dering regular employment; he who had so far thrown prudence aside as to persuade one of his first and most valuable clients to appoint his clever if eccentric friend secretary to a company formed to exploit a new invention. The work had proved congenial; Dering had done admirably well, and now, when his salary had just been raised to four hundred a year, a distant, almost unknown, cousin of his dead mother's had left him fifteen thousand pounds!
* * * * *
At last James Wingfield sat down. He began making notes of the instructions he had just received, though as he did so he knew well enough that he could not bring himself to draw up a will by which his own children might so greatly benefit.
Then, as he sat, pen in hand, wondering with a certain discomfort as to what ought to be the practical effect of the conversation, there suddenly came a sound of hurrying feet up the shallow oak staircase, and through the door, flung open quickly and unceremoniously, strode once more Philip Dering.
"I say, I've forgotten something!" he exclaimed, and then, as Wingfield instinctively looked round the bare spacious room--"No, I didn't leave anything behind me. I simply forgot to ask you one very important question----"
He took off his hat, put it down with a certain deliberation, then drew up a chair, and placed himself astride on it, an action which to the other suddenly seemed to blot out the years which had gone by since they had been housemates together.
"As I went down your jolly old staircase, Wingfield, it suddenly occurred to me that making a will may not be quite so simple a matter as I once thought it----"
He hesitated a moment, then went on:--"So I've come back to ask you the meaning of the term 'proving a will.' What I really want to get at, old man, is whether my wife, if she became a widow, would have to give any actual legal proof of our marriage? Would she be compelled, I mean, to show her 'marriage lines'?"
Wingfield hesitated. The question took him by surprise.
"I fancy that would depend," he said, "on the actual wording of the will, but all that sort of thing is a mere formality, and of course any solicitor employed by her would see to it. By the way, I suppose you were married in Denmark?" He frowned, annoyed with himself for having forgotten a fact with which he must have been once well acquainted. "If you had asked me to be your best man," he added with a vexed laugh, "I shouldn't have forgotten the circumstances."
Dering tipped the chair which he was bestriding a little nearer to the edge of the table which stood between himself and Wingfield; a curious look, a look half humorous, half deprecating, but in no sense ashamed, came over his sensitive, mobile face.
"No," he said, at length, "we were not married in Denmark. Neither were we married in England. In fact, there was no ceremony at all."
* * * * *
The eyes of the two men, of the speaker and of his listener, met for a moment; but Wingfield, to the other's sudden uneasy surprise, made no comment on what he had just heard.
Dering sprang up, and during the rest of their talk he walked, with short, quick strides, from the door to the window, from the window to the door.
"I wanted to tell you at the time, but Louise would not have it; though I told her that in principle--not, of course, in practice--you thoroughly agreed with me--I mean with us. Nay, more, that you, with your clear, legal mind, had always realised, even more than I could do, the utter absurdity of making such a contract as that of marriage--which of all contracts is the most intimately personal, and which least affects the interests of those outside the contracting parties--the only legal contract which can't be rescinded or dissolved by mutual agreement! Then again, you must admit that there was one really good reason why we should not tell you the truth; you already liked Kate, and Louise, don't you remember, used to play chaperon. Now, Kate's people, you know----!"
All the humour had gone out of Dering's face, but the deprecating look had deepened.
The lawyer made a strong effort over himself. He had felt for a moment keenly hurt, and not a little angry.
"I don't think," he said quietly, "that there is any need of explanations or apologies between us. Of course, I can't help feeling very much surprised, and that in spite of our old theoretical talks and discussions, concerning--well, this subject. But I don't doubt that in the circumstances you did quite right. Mind you, I don't mean about the marriage," he quickly corrected himself, "but only as to the concealment from me."
He waited a moment, and then went on, hesitatingly: "But even now I don't really understand what happened--I should like to know a little more----"
Dering stayed his walk across the room, and stood opposite his friend. He felt a great wish to justify himself, and to win Wingfield's retrospective sympathy.
"I will tell you everything there is to tell!" he cried eagerly; "indeed, it can all be told in a moment. My wife and I entered into a personal contract together, which we arranged, provisionally, of course, should last ten years. Louise was quite willing, absolutely willing...." For the first time there came a defensive note in the eager voice. "You see the idea--that of leasehold marriage? We used to talk about it, you and I, of course only as a Utopian possibility. All I can say is that I had the good fortune to meet with a woman with whom I was able to try the experiment; and all I can tell you is--well, I need not tell _you_, Wingfield, that there has never been a happier marriage than ours." Again Dering started pacing up and down the room. "Louise has been everything--everything--everything--that such a man as myself could have looked for in a wife!"
"And has no one ever guessed--has no one ever known?" asked the other, rather sternly.
"Absolutely no one! Yes, wait a moment--there has been one exception. Louise told Gerda Hinton. You know they became very intimate after we went to Bedford Park, and Louise thought Gerda ought to know. But it made no difference--no difference at all!" he added, emphatically; "for in fact poor Gerda practically left her baby to Louise's care."
"And that worthless creature, Jack Hinton--does he know too?"
"No, I don't think so; in fact I may say most decidedly not--but of course Gerda may have told him, though for my part I don't believe that husbands and wives share their friends' secrets. Still, you are quite at liberty to tell Kate."
"No," said Wingfield, "I don't intend to tell Kate, and there will be no reason for doing so if you will take my advice--which is, I need hardly tell you, to go and get married at once. Now that you have come into this money, your marrying becomes a positive duty. Are you aware that if you were run over and killed on your way home to-day Louise would have no standing? that she would not have a right to a penny of this money, or even to any of the furniture which is in your house? Let me see, how long is it that you have been"--he hesitated awkwardly--"together?"
Dering looked round at him rather fiercely. "We have been _married_ nine years and a half," he said. "Our wedding day was the first of September. We spent our honeymoon in Denmark. You remember my little legacy?"
Wingfield nodded his head. His heart suddenly went out to his friend--the prosperous lawyer had reason to remember that hundred pounds legacy, for ten pounds of it had gone to help him out of some foolish scrape. But Dering had forgotten all that; he went on speaking, but more slowly:
"And then, as you know, we came back and settled down in Gray's Inn, and though we were horribly poor, perhaps poorer than even you ever guessed, we were divinely happy." He turned his back to the room and stared out once more at the greyness opposite.
"But you're quite right, old man, it's time we did like our betters! We'll be married at once, and I'll take her off for another and a longer honeymoon, and we'll come back and be even happier than we were before."
Then again, as abruptly as before, he was gone, shutting the door behind him, and leaving Wingfield staring thoughtfully after him.
That his friend, that the Philip Dering of ten years ago, should have done such a thing, was in no way remarkable, but that Louise--the thoughtful, well-balanced, intelligent woman, who, coming as a mere girl from Denmark, had known how to work her way up to a position of great trust and responsibility in a City house, so winning the esteem and confidence of her employers that they had again and again asked her to return to them after her marriage--that she should have consented to such--to such.... Wingfield even in his own mind hesitated for the right word ... to such an arrangement--seemed to the lawyer an astounding thing, savouring indeed of the fifth dimension.
No, no, he would certainly not tell Kate anything about it. Why should he? He knew very well how his wife would regard the matter, and how her condemnation would fall, not on Louise--Kate had become exceedingly fond of Louise--no, indeed, but on Dering. Kate had never cordially "taken" (a favourite word of hers, that) to Wingfield's friend; she thought him affected and unpractical, and she laughed at his turned-down collars and Liberty ties. No, no, there was no reason why Kate should be told a word of this extraordinary, this amazing story.
* * * * *
On leaving Abingdon Street, Philip Dering swung across the broad roadway, and made his way, almost instinctively, to the garden which lay so nearly opposite his friend's office windows. He wanted to calm down, to think things over, and to recover full possession of himself before going home.
It had cost him a considerable effort to tell Wingfield this thing. Not that he was in the least ashamed of what he and Louise had done--on the contrary, he was very proud of it--but he had often felt, during all those years, that he was being treacherous to the man who was, after all, his best friend; and there was in Dering enough of the feminine element--that element which Kate Wingfield so thoroughly despised in him--to make him feel sorry and ashamed.
However, Wingfield had taken it very well, just as he would have wished him to take it, and no doubt the lawyer had given thoroughly sound advice. This unexpected, this huge legacy made all the difference. Besides, Dering knew well enough, when he examined his own heart and conscience, that he felt very differently about all manner of things from what he had been wont to feel say ten years ago.
After all, he was following in the footsteps of men greater and wiser than he. It is impossible to be wholly consistent. If he had been consistent he would have refused to pay certain taxes--in fact, to have been wholly consistent during the last ten years would have probably landed him, England being what it is, in a lunatic asylum. He shuddered, suddenly remembering that for awhile his own mother had been insane.
Still, as he strode along the primly kept paths of the Thames-side garden, he felt a great and, as he thought, a legitimate pride in the knowledge that in this one all-important matter, so deeply affecting his own and Louise's life, he and she had triumphantly defied convention, and had come out victorious.
The young man's thoughts suddenly took a softer, a more intimate turn; he told himself, with intense secret satisfaction, that Louise was dearer, ay, far dearer and more indispensable to him now than she had been during the days when she was still the "sweet stranger whom he called his wife." He remembered once saying to Wingfield that the ideal mate should be the improbable, be able at once to clean a grate, to cook a dinner, and to discuss Ibsen! Well, Louise had more than fulfilled this early and rather absurd ideal.
From the day when they had first met and made unconventional acquaintance, with no intervening friend to form a gossip-link of introduction, Dering had found her full of ever-recurrent and enchanting surprises. Her foreign birth and upbringing gave her both original and unsuspected points of view about everything English, and he had often thought, with good-humoured pity, of all those unfortunate friends of his, Wingfield included, whose lot it had perforce been to choose their wives among their own country-women.
Dering had not seen much of Denmark, but everything he had seen had won his enthusiastic approval. Where else were modern women to be found at once so practical and so cultivated, so pure-minded and so large-hearted? Perhaps he was half aware that his heaven was of his own creation, but that, in his present exalted mood, was only an added triumph; how few human beings can evolve, and preserve at will, their own stretch of blue sky!
Of course it was not always as easy as it seemed to be to-day; lately Louise had been listless and tired, utterly unlike herself--even, he had once or twice thought with dismay, slightly hysterical! But all that would disappear, utterly, during the first few days of their coming travels; and even he, so he now reminded himself, had felt quite unlike his usual sensible self--Dering was very proud of his good sense--since had come the news of this wonderful, this fairy-gift-like legacy.
The young man passed out of the garden, his feet stepping from the soft shell-strewn gravel on to the wide pavement which borders the Houses of Parliament. He made his way round swiftly, each buoyant step a challenge to fate, to the Members' Entrance, and so across the road to the gate which leads into what was once the old parish churchyard of Westminster. It was still too cold to sit out of doors, and after a momentary hesitation he turned into Westminster Abbey by the great north door.
Dering had not been in the Abbey since he was a child, and the spirit of quietude which fills the broad nave and narrow aisles on early spring days soothed his restlessness. But that, alas! only for a moment; as soon as his busy brain began to realise all that lay about him, he was filled with a sincere if half voluntarily comic indignation. It annoyed him to feel that this national heritage was still a church; why could not Westminster Abbey be treated as are the Colosseum in Rome and the Panthéon in Paris? And so, as he sat down in one of the pews which roused his resentment, he began to think over all the improvements which he would effect, were he given, if only for a few days, a free hand in Westminster Abbey!
Suddenly he saw, at right angles with himself, and moving across the choir, a group of four people, consisting of a man, a woman, and two children.
The man was Jack Hinton, the idle, ill-conditioned artist neighbour of his in Bedford Park, to whom there had been more than one reference in his talk with Wingfield; the children were Agatha and Mary Hinton, the motherless girls of the Danish woman to whom Louise had been so much devoted; and the fourth figure was that of Louise herself. His wife's back was turned to Dering, but even without the other three he would have known the tall, graceful figure, if only by the masses of fair, almost lint-white hair, arranged in low coils below her neat hat.
Dering felt no wish to join the little party. He was still too excited, too interested in his own affairs, to care for making and hearing small talk. Still, a look of satisfaction came over his face as he watched the four familiar figures finally disappear round a pillar. How pleased Louise would be when he told her of his latest scheme, that of commissioning the unfortunate Hinton to paint her portrait! If only the man could be induced to work, he might really make something of his life after all. Dering meant to give the artist one hundred pounds, and his heart glowed at the thought of what such a sum would mean in the untidy, womanless little house in which his wife took so tender and kindly an interest.
Dering and Jack Hinton had never exactly hit it off together, though they had known each other for many years, and though they had both married Danish wives. The one felt for the other the worker's worldly contempt for the incorrigible idler. Yet, Dering had been very sorry for Hinton at the time of poor Mrs. Hinton's death, and he liked to think that now he would be able to do the artist a good turn. He had even thought very seriously of offering to adopt the youngest Hinton child, a baby now nearly a year old; but a certain belated feeling of prudence, of that common sense which often tempers the wind to the reckless enthusiast, had given him pause.
After all, he and Louise might have children of their own, and then the position of this little interloper might be an awkward one. Louise had always intensely wished to have a child--nay, children--and now, if it only depended on him, and if Nature would only be kind, she should have her wish. Perhaps that would be the most tangible good this legacy would bring them.
Dering left the Abbey by the door which gives access to the Cloisters. There he spent half an hour in pleasant meditation before he started home, for the place which he knew to be so much dearer to his wife than to himself. Dering was a Londoner, the son of a doctor who had practised for many years in one of the City parishes, and in his heart he had much preferred the rooms in Gray's Inn which had been their first married home to the trim little villa, of which the interior had acquired an absurd and touching resemblance to that of a Danish homestead.
* * * * *
Those who declare that the borderlands of London lack physiognomy are strangely mistaken. Each suburban district has an individual character of its own, and of none is this more true than of Bedford Park. Encompassed by poor and populous streets, within a stone's throw of what is still one of the great highways out of the town, this oasis, composed of villas set in gardens, has the tranquil, rather mysterious, charm of a river backwater.
The amazing contrast between the stir and unceasing sound of the broad High Road and the stillness of Lady Rich Road--surely the man who laid out Bedford Park must have been a Cromwell enthusiast--struck Dering with a sense of unwonted pleasure. As he put his latch-key in the front door he remembered that his wife had told him that their young Danish servant was to have that day her evening out. Well, so much the better; they would have their talk, their discussion concerning their future plans, without fear of eavesdropping or interruption.
Various little signs showed that Louise was already back from town. Dering went straight upstairs, and, as he began taking off his boots, he called out to her, though the door between his room and hers was shut: "Do come in here, for I have so much to tell you!" But this brought no answering word, and after a moment he heard his wife's soft footsteps going down the house.
Dering dressed himself with some care; it had always been one of his theories that a man should make himself quite as formally agreeable at home as he does elsewhere, and he and Louise had ever practised, the one to the other, the minor courtesies of life. Before going downstairs he also tidied his room, as far as was possible for him to do so, and, delicately picking up his dusty boots, he took them down into the kitchen so as to save their young servant the trouble.
Then, at last, he went through into the dining-room, where he found Louise standing by the table on which lay spread their simple supper.