The Pacific Monthly/Volume 1/That Good May Come

"That Good May Come."

TWO people, a man and a woman, were sitting in a well-furnished room on the ground floor of a house where apartments were to be let. There was the glare of the warm May sun on the road outside, and the noise of passing carriages containing daintily dressed women, with fair, expressionless faces, as befitted those bent on a weary round of afternoon calls.

The man sat close to the window with a cigar between his teeth. The girl had chosen an armchair near the door, which communicated with the bedroom beyond. He was dark and handsome, and, without being stout, had a certain sleek, comfortable appearance which gave an air of strength to the whole figure. There was nothing to find fault with in the man, or in his clothes, and yet some small irregularity of feature would have been welcome. He looked too neat, too self-possessed, too well-contented with himself.

His young wife was dressed in black, for since her marriage she had lost her mother. She was tall and slim and fair-haired. Her eyes were blue, her face refined, and her hands, long-fingered and white, were clasped together nervously. She glanced at the man in silence many times before she took courage and spoke what had been in her thoughts for some weeks.

He had been a successful author, full of interesting ideas, anxious to discuss literary politics, ambitious to get on in his profession — a being to look up to and respect, before she married him. The novels may have merely shown talent, not genius, the ideas may have been second-hand, the ambition simply vanity, but she could not know these things.

He had naturally frivoled during the Paris honeymoon, and she had been glad to feel that they were, for the time, equals; that they could play at being children, and laugh and be lazy, and let the serious side of life go by unrealized or forgotten. But the real secret of her love for him lay in her admiration of a superior intellect, her gladness at being

able to lean on a nature stronger than her own. To the young Scotch girl, her education seemed to begin when she met her future husband. While they waited till their house in London was ready for them (they had been hurriedly sum- moned from abroad by the news of her mother's illness), she realized a dull sense of her husband's lazy, indolent life and vapid conversation. She admitted to herself at last that he was a different man. She thought that, if she did not inspire him to work, she could at least encourage him.

"Gerald," she said, "you never write now."

He turned slowly; all his movements were deliberate. "No," he said.

"Why not?"

"I don't feel in the mood."

"Will the right mood return?"

"I suppose so."

"You don't seem to care." Her voice was sharp.

"Why should I?" he asked. "I am not hard up just now."

They had both money enough, the wife especially.

"But," she exclaimed, "you have already made a name. You cannot allow your reputation to grow rusty."

He laughed good-naturally. "Dear child, I can."

She flushed. "I want to rouse you," she continued. "I can't bear to see you forgetting your work, and all you lived in connection with it, for no reason."

"You are the reason. I love you instead."

"O, but that is awful, Gerald!" She rose and crossed the room. "I dare not be to blame for your loss of ambition. I dread the consequences for us both. O, I love you; don't be afraid. I worship yon quite foolishly, and you know I love you. But I also depend on your strength of character. I take pride in your genius, I admire your brain, just as I cling to the man who is everything in the world to me. I am not clever myself. I move in a small, narrow circle of people, well-bred, I admit, but neither very 'smart,' to use an odious word, nor very interesting, as Bohemians are interesting. I have norrow conventional notions for myself. I shrink from the freemasonry of women who smoke, and talk 'shop,' and go everywhere alone, just because they write for the papers. Your men friends frighten me; they have tidings of the latest discovery, the latest news at the edge of their lips, while I never glance at a newspaper without just missing the one thing you consider worth reading. But then I know that I have been so trained to keep to my own particular path in the world, that I should lose your love by making myself ridiculous and being unnatural if I tried to alter my whole life now. You see, dear, I appreciate what I cannot attain. Many women are the same — women born old-fashioned, who feel what they never speak about to any one. I have merely the courage to confess to you."

"And all this" — he was astonished, but his eyes twinkled — "all this leads to — what?"

"To my greater courage in venturing to beg you to be more yourself."

"Have I changed?" The man's voice was hard and suspicious.

"Yes, dear," she faltered; "you have — a little — you don't write."

"Good God! I need a holiday badly enough."

"You are so lazy, Gerald, about everything. You see, darling, I want to be able to lean on you, to rely on your advice, to be able to count on your help in so many things. I should not complain if I had not been able to do that before, but I must speak when I see you so lazy and indifferent. Gerald, you move and talk as if nothing mattered. There is no business connected with our new home which you will undertake if you can help it. You simply drift where the mood takes you, and, if your love for me were not just the same, I should believe that you were weary of everything, including myself."

He frowned and stared into the street.

"Am I so changed as that?"

She had said all by then, and was grieved to have distressed him, although she could not wholly grieve because her words had taken effect. She knelt down by his chair and put her arms around him.

He turned his head and looked down at her.

"I dare say that you are right, little woman. I'll think about it, and get to work again." He sighed. "I have lost sight of everything but you. I want no friends, no other interests, no other ties. I only" — he bent low — "want your kisses; kiss me — kiss me."

She obeyed, and was glad he was not vexed with her. She did not realize that the man had a passionate craving for a woman's caresses and a woman's sympathy, which might lead him, in later days, to be well pleased with these things from the lips and hearts of other women.

He was merely for the moment taking refuge in the gratification of the feeling which had led him to desert his former life and former ambitions. But she had brought the past vividly before him, and as she sank into a sitting posture, with one arm across his knees, his face (which she could not see) was stern and worried. His hand touched her fair hair gently, for he was very tender with women, and wished to assure her that nothing in her words had wounded him; but he gazed moodily at the bright street, and his thoughts were far from the girl by his side.

He suffered acutely. The child whom he loved and adored had evoked the memory of another beautiful face, with the great mass of black hair lying in a loose knot in the nape of a white neck, the dark eyes flashing scorn into his own, the deep musical voice, strong with passion, reading a burial service over all his ambition, all his past beliefs.

"Go," she had said; "go and marry this mad fancy, this pink-and-white daisy. Throw your pen away, and forget that you have worked for men and women, in the arms of one simple girl. But be content with the life you have chosen. Come no more to me for sympathy, for help in your work or interest in your career. The latter is finished. Gerald Stanley the author is dead from this time to the end of all things, and the woman who helped to make him what he was resigns him to the woman who has crushed his energies, and will live to know his name forgotten. When you have lost me, you will know what I have been to you."

He knew at last—he was to know more later, when evil was done that good might come.

"I think," said Maisie, after a long silence, "that I should like to go out. We might go and see your sister. Will you come?"

***

Maisie sat up in her bed, her hair in pretty disorder, and rubbed her eyes.

"What did you say?" she muttered. "I was so sleepy, I had to go to bed. You dined with the publisher, didn't you?"

"I am glad you got my wire." (She was staring at his face, he was so very white.)

"The book is accepted," he added, much as he might have said that it would probably rain the next day.

She clapped her hands with delight. "O, Gerald!" She was one of those women who put on a certain dignity in the daytime, and become delightfully girlish when they reach their bedrooms. She laughed and congratulated him, and drew him down to kiss her, and chatted of her pride in him and her love for him, until the pain he suffered made his lips and hands grow cold. She was serious at once.

"You are tired, dear?"

He made up his mind that he would tell her that the book had been inspired, and he himself, encouraged and aided,

by a woman of whom he had never spoken and whom she had never seen. He was sick with remorse, but the words would not come.

"Gerald, darling," she whispered tenderly, "do you know what I have been longing to say to you for some time? You are your old self."

He started violently. She laid her head on his shoulder, and continued softly: "When I first begged you to resume work, when I first reproached you for leading an idle, aimless existence, I fancied that I had done wrong, for you were made miserable by what I had said, and for over a month we were not very happy, dear, you and I. Then you found yourself. You began to work; you were 'adorable' to me; you thought and talked as in the old days; you had the same ideas; you were the man I lost my heart to, and have loved ever since. And then this book. Who woke your sleeping faculties into life, sir, but your stupid wife? So I, too, have my little share in your work, as in your heart. I am so proud of you, my husband! And you are not angry because I scolded you for being lazy, are you, darling?"

"No," he answered. "Angry with you? God help me!"

"O, I'm glad you're changed again, and I'm so happy!"

The man tried to speak, and failed.

There was a pause. Then a voice, unlike his own, asked slowly:- "You are—what?"

"Happy — O, so happy!" repeated the girl.