“I thought you said she wouldn’t care.”
“My dear, she cares for her home and her position and the children. You forget the children.”
Yes. She had forgotten the children. She had forgotten Muriel. She had left off thinking of Oscar as a man with a wife and children and a home.
He had a plan. His mother-in-law was coming to stay with Muriel in October and he would get away. He would go to Paris, and Harriott should come to him there. He could say he went on business. No need to lie about it; he had business in Paris.
He engaged rooms in an hotel in the rue de Rivoli. They spent two weeks there.
For three days Oscar was madly in love with Harriott and Harriott with him. As she lay awake she would turn on the light and look at him as he slept at her side. Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it entirely hid his eyes.
In six days reaction had set in. At the end of the tenth day, Harriott, returning with Oscar from Montmartre, burst into a fit of crying. When questioned, she answered wildly that the Hotel Saint Pierre was too hideously ugly it was getting on her nerves. Mercifully Oscar explained her state as fatigue following excitement. She tried hard to believe that she was miserable because her love was purer and more spiritual than Oscar’s; but all the time she knew perfectly well she had cried from pure boredom. She was in love with Oscar, and Oscar bored her. Oscar was in love with her, and she bored him. At close quarters, day in and day out, each was revealed to the other as an incredible bore.
At the end of the second week she began to doubt whether she had ever been really in love with him.
Her passion returned for a little while after they got back to London. Freed from the unnatural strain which Paris had put on them, they persuaded themselves that their romantic temperaments were better fitted to the old life of casual adventure.
Then, gradually, the sense of danger began to wake in them. They lived in perpetual fear, face to face with all the chances of discovery. They tormented themselves and each other by imagining possibilities that they would never have considered in their first fine moments. It was as though they were beginning to ask themselves if it were, after all, worth while running such awful risks, for all they got out of it. Oscar still swore that if he had been free he would have married her. He pointed out that his intentions at any rate were regular. But she asked herself: Would I marry him? Marriage would be the Hotel Saint Pierre all over again, without any possibility of escape. But, if she wouldn’t marry him, was she in love with him? That was the test. Perhaps it was a good thing he wasn’t free. Then she told herself that these doubts were morbid, and that the question wouldn’t arise.
One evening Oscar called to see her. He had come to tell her that Muriel was ill.
“Seriously ill?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s pleurisy. May turn to pneumonia. We shall know one way or another in the next few days.”
A terrible fear seized upon Harriott. Muriel might die of her pleurisy; and if Muriel died, she would have to marry Oscar. He was looking at her queerly, as if he knew what she was thinking, and she could see that the same thought had occurred to him and that he was frightened too.
Muriel got well again; but their danger had enlightened them. Muriel’s life was now inconceivably precious to them both; she stood between them and that permanent union, which they dreaded and yet would not have the courage to refuse.
After enlightenment the rupture.
It came from Oscar, one evening when he sat with her in her drawing-room.
“Harriott,” he said, “do you know I’m thinking seriously of settling down?”
“How do you mean, settling down?”
“Patching it up with Muriel, poor girl. … Has it never occurred to you that this little affair of ours can’t go on for ever?”
“You don’t want it to go on?”
“I don’t want to have any humbug about it. For God’s sake, let’s be straight. If it’s done, it’s done. Let’s end it decently.”
“I see. You want to get rid of me.”
“That’s a beastly way of putting it.”
“Is there any way that isn’t beastly? The whole thing’s beastly. I should have thought you’d have stuck to it now you’ve made it what you wanted. When I haven’t an ideal, I haven’t a single illusion, when you’ve destroyed everything you didn’t want.”
“What didn’t I want?”
“The clean, beautiful part of it. The part I wanted.”
“My part at least was real. It was cleaner and more beautiful than all that putrid stuff you wrapped it up in. You were a hypocrite, Harriott, and I wasn’t. You’re a hypocrite now if you say you weren’t happy with me.”
“I was never really happy. Never for one moment. There was always something I missed. Something you didn’t give me. Perhaps you couldn’t.”
“No. I wasn’t spiritual enough,” he sneered.
“You were not. And you made me what you were.”
“Oh, I noticed that you were always very spiritual after you’d got what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” she cried. “Oh, my God—”
“If you ever knew what you wanted.”
“What—I—wanted,” she repeated, drawing out her bitterness.
“Come,” he said, “why not be honest? Face facts. I was awfully gone on you. You were awfully gone on me—once. We got tired of each other and it’s over. But at least you might own we had a good time while it lasted.”
“A good time?”
“Good enough for me.”
“For you, because for you love only means one thing. Everything that’s high and noble in it you dragged down to that, till there’s nothing left for us but that. That’s what you made of love.”
Twenty years passed.
It was Oscar who died first, three years after the rupture. He did it suddenly one evening, falling down in a fit of apoplexy.
His death was an immense relief to Harriott. Perfect security had been impossible as long as he was alive. But now there wasn’t a living soul who knew her secret.
Still, in the first moment of shock Harriott told herself that Oscar dead would be nearer to her than ever. She forgot how little she had wanted him to be near her, alive. And long before the twenty years had passed she had contrived to persuade herself that he had never been near to her at all. It was incredible that she had ever known such a person as Oscar Wade. As for their affair, she couldn’t think of Harriott Leigh as the sort of woman to whom such a thing could happen. Schnebler’s and the Hotel Saint Pierre ceased to figure among prominent images of her past. Her memories, if she had allowed herself to remember, would have clashed disagreeably with the reputation for sanctity which she had now acquired.
For Harriott at fifty-two was the friend and helper of the Reverend Clement Farmer, Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin’s, Maida Vale. She worked as a deaconess in his parish, wearing the uniform of a deaconess, the semi-religious gown, the cloak, the bonnet and veil, the cross and rosary, the holy smile. She was also secretary to the Maida Vale and Kilburn Home for Fallen Girls.
Her moments of excitement came when Clement Farmer, the lean, austere likeness of Stephen Philpotts, in his cassock and lace-bordered surplice, issued from the vestry, when he mounted the pulpit, when he stood before the altar rails and lifted up his arms in the Benediction; her moments