Ainslee's Magazine/The Other Woman and Roger

by Alice Muriel Williamson

THE OTHER WOMAN AND ROGER

BY MRS. C. N. WILLIAMSON*

Author of “The Lightning Conductor”

THE duchess was unhappy. She wanted so much to cry, that she could hardly wait to begin until she had sent her maid out of the room. But when Angéle was gone, after all the tears would not come.

She sat resting her bare arms on the dressing table, where she had pushed the gold toilet things away, looking at her white image in the glass, and pitying herself horribly. It seemed all the worse because so many people envied her. Nobody knew; nobody would understand how she felt, even if they did know, for they would see only the outside of things, not the way in which those things affected her nature.

“I thought I was pretty. I thought I was the kind of woman who could keep a man’s love,” she said to her big-eyed reflection. “I was sure—sure he loved me for myself. But he couldn’t have cared, really, or he wouldn’t have stopped caring so soon. Only two years, and I loved him better than ever! I was so happy, believing he loved me as much as I did him. Now it’s all over—already. Nothing can ever be the same again in this world. Oh, I can’t bear the agony of it—of knowing that it’s real, that it isn’t a dream I shall wake up from, crying to be comforted; that I’ve just got to live on, and smile hateful, false smiles, while my heart’s dead; I shall be like some galvanized body, moving and nodding when the soul is gone. No, I won't live. Why should I live? It will be better to die.”

Now, at last, the tears were falling like rain, the lovely face puckered piteously like a child’s, but Aline did not care. No one could see her. No one cared any more whether she were pretty or plain. The end of all things had come, for she believed that her husband had fallen in love with another woman.

Yes, she said to herself again, she would die, and then perhaps he would be sorry. All her money would be his, if that were what he had wanted. Thank goodness, that other woman had a husband knocking about the world somewhere, so Cyril couldn’t marry her; otherwise——

She had borne this wearing anguish for weeks, but to-night had been the climax. Everyone at Lady Volney’s ball must have been talking about the Duke of Beltowers and Mrs. Raleigh. What a humiliation for Aline, who would not have believed two months ago that she could need to be jealous of any woman. But jealous? No, that was not the word even now. Since he loved the woman’s society better than hers, let him have it, but let him not have both; let his wife not flatter his hypocrisy by feigning the confidence in him which once had been so true and sweet—the one most heavenly thing on earth. She would step aside; it was more dignified than to fight for him with that woman, who was never happy, people said, unless in taking somebody else’s husband away; it was more sincere and less difficult than toleration.

“I wonder if Roger Wentworth would give me some of his chloral?” she thought. “He is sure to be awake. I could knock at his door, ask for it, and tell him I had come home early from the ball with a headache. Heaven knows it’s true enough. Afterward—I think Cyril’s conscience would teach him the real truth, but no one else need guess. They would think I had taken too much by mistake.”

Roger Wentworth was the duke’s cousin, a man of forty, ten years older than Beltowers. The duke loved him dearly—Aline had never quite been able to see why, though Roger had now been visiting them at their town house for several weeks, and she had known him slightly ever since her marriage. Years ago, Roger Wentworth’s back had been injured in a fall when hunting. The accident had made of him an invalid and, Aline thought, a cynic. She fancied sometimes that he looked at her with a kind of somber criticism, which she resented, and his eyes were always sad. He was never free from pain, Cyril said, and took chloral at night, if he would sleep.

Roger’s quarters were on the ground floor, as it was difficult for him to get about. Aline ran down, in her ball dress, and tapped lightly at the door of his sitting room.

An answering “Come in” followed instantly, and the duchess framed herself in the doorway. Roger Wentworth lay on a sofa, reading “Amadis de Gaul.” A light leaped up in his eyes at sight of the tall, white figure, and the expression which annoyed Aline made tense the lines of his face. She did not dream that, instead cf “somber criticism,” it meant the struggle in his heart not to care for her save as Cyril’s wife. By and by he would conquer the yearning in his soul, because the soul was strong; then the drawn lines round his mouth would disappear, and his eyes would be less sad, even when the pain in his back was at its worst.

“I won't come in and interrupt you,” Aline said. “I only want to know if you can spare me your bottle of chloral. I’ve come home with such a headache—the worst I ever had in my life.” Her voice trembled.

He gave her one of his long, melancholy, searching looks.

“But please come in,” he said. “Please do. I beg you will. I should like to talk to you about the headache.”

Aline’s heart was too sore to withstand a kind word. Half against her will she obeyed, and, as if compelled by his eyes, poised lightly on the arm of a chair on the opposite side of the reading table.

“Is the headache so hard to bear, little Aline?” he asked, with such brotherly tenderness that the duchess’ heart swelled. She began to cry again, and covered her face with her hands.

“I know, dear, you are not quite happy lately,” he said. “I have seen it in your face. You won't mind, I hope, for Cyril and I are like brothers. I wish you would let me be yours, too—a brother nearly twenty years older than you, but not too old to understand things. Do let me help. Something tells me I can. What has made you so unhappy that you want to end everything with a dose of chloral? A way out of troubles, poor little girl, only fit for cowards, so you mustn’t take it; and, by and by, you will be thankful to me for refusing.”

Aline did not attempt to deny the accusation, if it were an accusation.

“Cyril doesn’t care for me any more,” she wept. “He has fallen in love with that hateful Raleigh creature.”

“You are mistaken, I know, dear,” Roger answered. “Cyril is in love with no woman but you.”

“You don’t know. You can’t have noticed, or you would have seen how changed he has been toward me these last few weeks. He doesn’t take any interest in me, as he used. He doesn’t see what I wear, or hear what I say, or care in the least about anything I do. Once we had delicious talks. He let me feel he attached importance to my poor little opinions. He told me I spoiled him for other women. He made me believe I really was the one woman in the world for him; but all is very different now. He is absent-minded, and doesn’t think about me or my affairs. He would rather go out alone than with me, and I know why. He is always with Gwendolen Raleigh. He sends her flowers and presents—much better ones than any he has ever given me since we were married. Whenever he and I go anywhere together, she comes; probably they have arranged it; and as soon as he can, with any sort of conventional decency, he rushes to her. What a reward to me, for never looking twice at any other man! At the ball to-night they disappeared together for at least an hour. People were talking—I heard them. And, oh, it has hurt my poor vanity so, as well as broken my heart. I’m younger, and I thought I was prettier and nicer, than she; but now I’ve lost all confidence in my power to please him, even if I cared to try and exert it any more.”

“Don’t stop trying to exert it,” said Roger. “He may be a little infatuated with a handsome woman for the moment, but he loves you with all his heart.”

“I don’t want his heart, if it can hold infatuation for a woman like that. I won't fight for him with her. Some women, I dare say, would be satisfied if their husbands were agreeable to them; but I want all or nothing. I think ordinary marriages, where people have only a mild, comfortable affection for each other, and are ready to be content with one another’s second best feelings, are odious. I am disappointed in Cyril, and through him with life. I want to end it.”

“Don’t be disappointed in anything yet, child. Wait.”

“What is there to wait for? I suppose you mean that he will come back to me when he is tired of the fascinating lady who bleaches her hair and paints her lashes and lips. But even if he could really fall in love with me again, after such an infatuation, what good would it do? All the sparkle would be gone from the champagne. I should never be able to believe that he really cared for me as I once thought he did, and I won’t have anything else from him but the best.”

“You shall have the best; the real, true love, and nothing else, I promise you. You are only a girl, but if you were a woman, you could not understand this thing as a man can understand it. Such a mild infatuation as this of Cyril’s will pass as some simple disease of childhood passes, without leaving a mark. If only you are kind and sweet to him now, he is yours forever, just as he was at first, and has always been at heart. But don’t be bitter with him, and make him turn to the other for his amusement. Will you have my advice, and, instead of taking chloral, take a dose of Mrs. Raleigh’s society, and give Cyril the same, in unlimited quantities? Invite her to Belcastle Abbey for a week end. She’d accept like a shot.”

Aline flushed and threw up her head.

“No doubt she would. She'd laugh at me for playing into her hands.”

“Let her laugh—at first. You shall be the one to laugh last; and your turn will come soon.”

“You seem confident. Suppose, instead of tiring, Cyril should grow more foolish about her than ever?”

“He won't.”

“You look as if you had some definite plan.”

“I have. I can even almost promise you something mildly dramatic, if you will take my advice, and—invite me up the river, too.”

In spite of herself, Aline’s curiosity was piqued. She had something to look forward to, Though scarcely conscious of the change, she began to feel vaguely hopeful. Perhaps life might be worth living again, and Cyril worth taking back; perhaps, as Roger said, he did love her in spite of all, and appearances were graver than the reality, in this first flirtation of his. Perhaps the cloud between them had darkened because she had been stiff and harsh in her manner of late.

The Duchess of Beltowers took no chloral that night. The next day she informed her husband casually that she had invited Mrs. Raleigh to go down with them to Belcastle Abbey, from Friday to Tuesday. The duke was surprised, and his handsome face changed slightly, but whether with pleasure or annoyance Aline could not be sure, for she felt that she no longer understood him and his moods. He said very little, even when the duchess showed him Gwendolen Raleigh’s rather gushing note of acceptance. No one else was invited, except Roger Wentworth, who was practically a member of the family at present; nevertheless, Aline told her maid to pack a number of particularly lovely frocks, too beautiful, in Angéle’s opinion, for an occasion when there was no one but a husband and a crippled cousin to “impress.”

Mrs. Raleigh took charming frocks, too; however, with her it was not a case of impressing her own husband, but the husband of somebody else, in which game she was an expert. She had never “flown” quite as high as a duke before, not because she had lacked ambition, but opportunity. This flirtation with the Duke of Beltowers was a joy to her, not only because he was a duke, young—younger than she, if the truth had been known—good-looking and agreeable, but because there was a keen delight to be had in the duchess’ humiliation. She liked it to be seen that she had the power to part married lovers once so devoted; and then, she thought, it was always a pleasure to score off one of those “spoiled American girls” who come over to England thinking themselves superior in charm to English women, Aline was an American heiress; and though everyone said the marriage had been a love match on both sides, it would be ecstatic to make the duchess believe that it had not really been so on her husband’s. Gwendolen Raleigh pleased herself by thinking that the duke had obliged his wife to send the invitation, otherwise she might have been puzzled and uneasy.

Aline left the duke and Mrs. Raleigh much together. She even threw them into each other’s society by suggesting that Cyril should teach their guest to punt; and the two spent hours on the river. “She doesn’t mind a bit,” Cyril said to himself of Aline. “Jolly little girl, not to turn rusty the first time I’ve ever given her occasion. I thought at first she meant to be rather hard on me, but I was mistaken, it seems. After all, why should she mind? I’m doing no harm. She knows I put her above all other women; but Gwendolen Raleigh is pretty and fetching, with very attractive ways, and there’s no disloyalty to one’s love in having an amusing friend.”

His arguments were technically correct; there was no harm in having a “friend”; but if he had not begun unconsciously to take his wife’s love too much for granted, he could not have bothered with anything so superfluous as intimate friendship with another woman. He was not in love with Mrs. Raleigh, but for the past few weeks he had certainly found her society more amusing than Aline’s, which could be his continually; Gwendolen had enlisted his sympathy by telling him “in confidence” all about Her “troubles,” and what a cruel disappointment her marriage had been. She could make her eyes fill with tears—they were dark eyes, and her hair was golden—when she told anecdotes illustrating her own angelic disposition, contrasting it with her absent husband’s loutish baseness; and there was a thrill in being asked to give so popular and pretty a lady Platonic advice. Beltowers, though fate had made him a duke, had by nature something in him of the Puritan. He had been a reading man at Oxford, had gone in earnestly for politics later, and, being at heart chivalrous and somewhat romantic, had never vulgarized his ideals by becoming what is known as a “woman’s man.” He placed women too high to understand the common run of them, and so he never guessed how threadbare those pathetic anecdotes had been worn from frequent telling and retelling to other “friends.”

There had been for Cyril a certain piquancy in a secret escape from the absorbing sway of Aline’s love, and he had enjoyed spending long afternoons at Gwendolen’s flat, sending her flowers and a birthday present of pearls. But now, when he found himself obliged to entertain her for hours on end at the riverside place bought with American money, something of the spice was gone. Gwendolen was not at her best on the river, when the sun was bright. Her complexion, so radiant in her own boudoir or by lamplight, looked slightly meretricious, and in trying to reach what she thought were his intellectual heights in conversation, her smatterings of information, her lack of humor, her self-centered point of view, came near to boring him. He wondered sometimes what Roger and Aline were doing; they seemed to have struck up a tremendous friendship lately.

So the time passed till Monday night. Nothing particular had happened; and if the time had dragged a little with the duke, it had been a black eternity to the duchess. She was sick at heart; she felt old and tired with the strain. She was irritable with Roger when he tried to assure her that already the charm had begun to work.

On Wednesday they were all going back to town, and Aline’s brain was hot with the dreadful thought that, bad as these days had been, there were no better ones to come. She had been a fool to believe Roger.

That night she could not sleep. Two o’clock had struck, and still she lay with wide, burning eyes, which stared into darkness as she gathered up each separate crumb of her misery, piling them jealously together. Then, suddenly, came a sound which broke the night silence rudely. A door slammed; Roger Wentworth’s voice called “Fire—fire!” There was a smell of smoke, or she imagined it.

Her first thought was of Cyril. She had just been planning a separation and a return to America, but she forgot all that now in a second, or that she had any cause for anger against her husband. She ran to the door of his room, which adjoined hers, and found him on his way to her.

“Don’t be frightened, darling,” he said. “It’s probably nothing serious, and, anyhow, you are safe. Here’s your dressing gown. Slip it round you and come with me. I want to see if poor Roger is all right.”

A stab of suspicion pierced Aline’s heart.

“And Mrs. Raleigh?” she said, bitterly. “Of course, you must be anxious about her.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed Cyril, with unmistakable sincerity. “I’m hanged if I didn’t forget her for a minute.”

Aline could have kissed him; but there was no time for dallying. Cyril had slipped something on also, and they went out into the corridor, which was hazy with smoke, though not dark, for the gas was burning, and there was, besides, a reddish light flickering through Roger’s open door. As the duke and duchess came into the corridor, they faced an apparition in white.

It was Gwendolen Raleigh, yet a fantastic caricature of the Gwendolen Raleigh they knew. Her hair, instead of waving in a halo of gold round her head, seemed scanty, and was fringed over the high, narrow forehead with little, bobbing lumps of leather. Her eyes were ringed with a faint, dark smear from lashes not warranted to stand night wear. Her dazzling skin had faded to a pallid, parchment hue; her lips were no longer a rosy cupid’s bow; and her sharpened features glittered with cold cream.

“Where’s the fire—where's the fire?” she demanded, shrilly. “Oh, save me! I’m afraid!”

“I’m so dreadfully sorry,” exclaimed Roger Wentworth, showing himself, fully dressed, at his door. “I believe I’ve frightened you all for nothing. I was reading in bed, with my lamp too near the curtains. They caught fire, and perhaps I lost my presence of mind a little. My man came when I rang, and together we’ve got the blaze nearly out. Too bad to have alarmed you. I’m so sorry.”

“Lost your presence of mind! I should think you had. And it’s most unlike you, Roger,” said Cyril. “However, there’s no great harm done.”

Roger’s eyes and Aline’s met. She was not at all sure that he had lost his presence of mind. When she turned, Gwendolen Raleigh had vanished and her door was shut.

Next morning, very early, the guest went way, leaving a note to say her nerves were so upset after the shock and a sleepless night, that she felt she must go to her doctor by the first train; and she did not wish to disturb the household.

Aline would have liked a talk with Cyril—a long talk, plunging down to the very depths of things; but Roger advised her not to indulge this wish. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps some things are better not “thrashed out,” despite the temptation to thrash them. At all events, the duchess was surprised to find how possible it is for a young woman whose “life was over” to be as happy as ever again.

Mrs. Raleigh went out to India to join her husband in the autumn, but even if she hadn't, the duchess would not have cared. The duke was hers, and hers alone; and she will never know how much credit was due to poor Roger Wentworth for his disinterested advice.

• Alice Muriel Williamson