The Beth Book
You see there's a good many in the square, sir. I was just waitin' to
make sure. He come after you'd gone last night, and said he 'ad to
meet the ladies, but he'd forgotten where they were goin' to, and
James, suspectin' nothin', told 'im."
"Well, I don't think he will trouble me again," Beth said cheerfully,
concerned to see Mr. Kilroy so seriously annoyed. "I told him what I
thought of him in such unmistakable terms that he walked out of the
house without any form of farewell."
Angelica looked grave. "I am afraid you've made a spiteful enemy,
Beth," she observed. "That kind of cat-man is capable of any meanness
if his vanity is wounded; if he can injure you, he will."
"Oh, as to that, I don't see what he can do," said Mr. Kilroy.
"He can supply the press with odious personal paragraphs, spread
calumnies at the clubs, and write scratch-cat criticisms on the book
when it appears," Angelica said. "There are plenty of people who will
listen to that kind of man, and take their opinions from him."
"But what does it matter," said Beth in her tolerant way. "All you
whom I love and respect will judge me and my work for yourselves. If
you are pleased, I shall rejoice; if you find fault, I shall be
grateful and profit. But I should be a poor shallow thing, like
society itself, if I allowed myself to be disturbed or influenced by
the Alfred Cayley Pounces of the press. And as to society!" Beth
laughed. "At first, when I went anywhere, I used to ask myself all the
time when would the pleasure begin! But now I am younger, thanks to
you; and I enjoy everything. I look on and laugh. But for the rest, I
must be indifferent. It would be an insult to one's intellect to set
any store on such tinsel as that of which the verdicts of society are
made."
* * * * *
Beth had been thinking a good deal about Dan lately, and had come to
the conclusion that, with all his faults, he was very much to be
preferred to the Alfred Cayley Pounce kind of creature. She had more
hope of him, somehow; and she went back determined that it should not
be her fault if they did not arrive at a better understanding. He gave
her a good opportunity on the evening of her arrival. They were
sitting out in the garden after dinner, on that comfortable seat by
the privet hedge which Beth overlooked from her secret chamber. Behind
them the hedge was thick, and in front a border of flowers surrounded
a little green lawn, which was shut in beyond by a belt of old trees
in full foliage. It was an exquisite evening, warm and still; and Dan,
having dined well, and begun a good cigar, was in a genial mood. As he
grew older he attached a more enormous importance than ever to meals.
If the potatoes were boiled when he wanted them mashed or baked, it
made a serious difference to him, and he would grow red in the face
and shout at the servants if his eggs for breakfast were done a moment
more or less than he liked. He was a ridiculous spectacle in his
impatience if dinner were late, and a sad one in his sensual
satisfaction if it answered to his expectations. Beth watched him at
such times with sensations that passed through various degrees of
irritation from positive contempt to the kindly tolerance one feels
for the greed of a hungry child. Dan had been "doing himself well," as
he called it, during her absence, and was looking somewhat bloated and
blotched. His wonderful complexion was no longer so clear and bright
as it had been; the red was redder and the white opaque. A few more
years and his character would be seen distinctly in the shape and
colour of his face; and Beth, who had marked the first signs of
deterioration slowly set in, was saddened by the progress it had made.
Alfred Cayley Pounce would succumb to his nerves, Daniel Maclure to
his tissues; the one was earning atrophy for himself, the other fatty
degeneration. Beth was right. The real old devil is disease, and our
evil appetites are his ministers.
"You seem solemn this evening," Daniel said to her. "I suppose you're
regretting your friends."
"Yes," said Beth; "but I have been away long enough, and I am glad to
be back. I saw some things in the great wicked city that made me
think--Dan," she broke off abruptly, "I wish you and I were better
friends. So very little would bring us to a right understanding, and I
am sure we should both be the better and the happier."
"Speak for yourself," said Dan complacently. "Personally, I feel good
enough and happy enough. We have our differences, like other people, I
suppose; but whose fault is that, I should like to know?"
"Partly mine," Beth acknowledged. "I don't think I should have been so
defiant. But if you had been different, I should have been different."
"If _I_ had been different!" he ejaculated, knocking the ash from the
end of his cigar. "Well, I'd like to know what fault you have to find
with me? Different indeed!"
"That is the principal one," Beth answered, smiling. "Your great fault
is that you don't believe you have any faults."
"Oh, well," he conceded, "of course I know I've my faults. Who hasn't?
But I'll undertake to say that they're a _man's_ faults. Now, come!"
This reflection seemed to deepen his self-satisfaction, as if it must
be allowed that he was all the better for the faults to which he
alluded. As he spoke, Beth seemed to see him at her wardrobe with his
hand in the pocket of one of her dresses, hunting for treasonable
matter to satisfy his evil suspicions, and she sighed. She would not
acknowledge to herself that she was fighting for the impossible, yet
even at the outset she half despaired of ever making him understand.
It is pitiful to think of her, with her tender human nature, seeking a
true mate where human law required that she should find one, only to
be repulsed and baffled and bedraggled herself in the end if she
persevered. A good man might have failed to comprehend Beth, but a
good man would have felt the force of goodness in her, and would have
reverenced her. Maclure recognised no force in her and felt no
reverence; all that was not animal in her was as obscure to him as to
the horse in his stable that whinnied a welcome to her when she came
because he expected sugar. It is pleasant to give pleasure; but there
must be more in marriage for it to be satisfactory than free scope to
exercise the power to please.
"Well, look here, Dan," Beth pursued. "I'll make a bargain with you.
If you will do your best to correct your faults--what _I_ think your
faults--I'll do my best to correct all you find in me. Only let us
discuss them temperately, and try conscientiously to live up to some
ideals of thought and conduct."
Dan smoked on silently for a little, then he said, with some show of
irritation tempering his self-satisfaction, "Well, all I can say is, I
cannot for the life of me see what you have to complain of."
"I have to complain of your conduct with Bertha Petterick, for one
thing," Beth answered desperately. "Let us be frank with each other. I
know that you have not been loyal to me. I saw you together here on
this seat the day you gave her the bracelet. I saw you put it on her
arm and kiss her; and that decided me to go to Ilverthorpe."
Dan looked round about him with an altered countenance, but nothing
that he knew to be a window overlooked the spot, neither was it
possible to see through the thickness of the privet hedge, nor from
any other point, without being seen.
"You must have imagined it!" he exclaimed.
"I did not imagine that bracelet," Beth replied.
"Well, even if I did give her the bracelet," he said, "you're not
going to be nasty-minded enough to insinuate that there was anything
in that!"
"There was deceit in it," Beth answered, "and in your whole attitude
towards that girl while she was under this roof. If we act so that we
cannot be open and honest about our dealings with people, then there
must be something wrong. Life would be intolerable if it had to be
lived among people any one of whom, while professing friendship for
us, was deceiving us in some vital particular. From the moment that we
act on our own inclinations rather than up to what the noblest of our
friends expect of us, we have gone wrong. But you and I are both young
enough, Dan, to put the past behind us, and forget it. Let us start
together afresh in another place, where there will be no evil
associations, nothing to vex us by reminding us of unhappy days; and
let us be loyal to each other, and honest and open in every act,
making due allowance for each other, and doing our best to help and
please each other. We shall be happy, I am sure. You will see we shall
be very happy."
Dan took his cigar out of his mouth, and flicked the ash from the end
of it with his little finger: "You'd have me give up my appointment
here, I suppose, and the half of my income with it?"
"Most of all I would have you give up your appointment here," she
answered earnestly. "No honest woman can endure to have her husband
pandering to vice. It would not be so much of a sacrifice either," she
added, "for the next session will end this iniquity."
"Thanks to the influence of you cursed women," he exclaimed.
"Thanks to our influence, yes," she answered dispassionately, "and to
some sense of justice in men."
"If you knew how men talk about women who meddle in these matters," he
said, "you would keep out of them, I think."
"Oh, I know the kind of thing they say," she answered, smiling; "but
the people you mean have no influence nowadays. The blatant protest of
the debauched against our demand for a higher standard of life is not
the voice of the community. It is the cry of those who feel their
existence threatened, who only live upon lies, and must be
extinguished when the inevitable day of reckoning comes which shall
expose them. Even now the kind of man who catches at every straw of
opinion which shall secure to him his sacred carnal rights, at no
matter what cost of degradation and disease to women, is out of date,
and we pay no attention to him."
"Oh, women!" Dan jeered. "That is all very fine! But who the devil
cares what women think?"
"Now don't be old-fashioned, Dan," Beth answered, laughing. "When
women only did what they were told, men used to vow at their feet that
there was nothing they couldn't accomplish, their influence was so
great. But now that women have proved that what they choose to do they
can do, men sneer at their pretensions to power, and try to depreciate
them by comparing the average woman with men in the front rank of
their professions. Really, men are disheartening."
The evening calm had deepened about them, a big bright star was
shining above the belt of trees, and waves of perfume from the flowers
made the air a delight to inhale.
"What a heavenly night!" Beth pursued. "Who would live in London when
they might be here?"
"Well, that's consistent!" he exclaimed, "after entreating me to leave
the place!"
"This is not the only peaceful spot in the world," she said with a
little sigh; "and I would rather live in London even than have you
here in an invidious position. Dan, give it up, there's a good fellow!
and learn to look on life from this newer, wider point of view. You
will find interests and pleasures in it you have never even suspected,
I assure you, and you will never regret it."
"For the life of me," he said again, throwing the end of his cigar
into the bushes with an irritated jerk of his arm,--"for the life of
me, I cannot see what you have to complain of; and I shall certainly
not give up any bird in the hand for two such birds in the bush as you
promise me." He rose as he spoke, and shook out first one leg and
then the other to straighten his trousers. "I'm going out," he added.