CHAPTER XII.

Mr. Armstrong does not return home until after office-hours on Monday.

His wife, hearing him in the hall, hurries out to meet him as he is

about to enter the room, and stands with her back against the door,

blocking the way. She looks up into his face and begins impetuously

before she has time to lose courage.

"Where have you been? Why did you not return home on Saturday? What do

you mean by--"

"Did you not receive my note?" he asks in surprise. "I wrote explaining

to you the cause of my absence. Was not my note delivered?"

She feels her courage oozing out, and makes a desperate rally.

"What if I refused to accept your explanation--to believe in your

excuses?"

He shrugs his shoulders faintly.

"I have no remedy to suggest; I think the reason given was a credible

and acceptable one. Business detained me until it was too late to

return, and the next day I rode over to Crokestown to see my cousin,

Ellen Murphy, and she made me remain to dinner. I can not improve that

statement of affairs, I fear, so will not try. Your sisters are in the

drawing-room. Will you not let me enter, my dear?"

She draws back, and follows in, mute and cowed.

"Well," he says pleasantly, "let me hear how my precious household got

on in my absence. The boys came over of course? That's right. I am sure

you enjoyed yourselves all together famously; yesterday was such a

lovely day, too!"

"I didn't," says Addie shortly, "for I had a villainous headache all

day."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Then you did not celebrate Lottie's birthday

in the grove, as you had intended?"

"Oh, yes! They all went and enjoyed themselves very much, I believe. I

stayed at home, my head was too bad."

Armstrong making no reply, the subject drops.

After dinner, Pauline, who has left her tennis-racket lying on the

grass, runs out to fetch it, and is immediately followed by her younger

sister, who begins eagerly--

"Oh, Polly, did you hear her about the tea in the grove and that stupid

old headache, making such a ridiculous fuss? You were right about her,

after all, you see. I must say I never could have believed Addie would

become such a tell-tale! Perhaps, now that we're gone, she'll tell a

lot more--tell that we treated her unkindly, made her head worse with

the noise. Perhaps Mr. Armstrong will never let the dear boys come here

again. Oh, Polly, let us go back and stop her telling more!"

"No, it is not necessary; she's not telling any more. I don't fancy,"

continues Miss Pauline, in a tone more of musing analysis than for the

information of her eager companion, "that Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong have

quite as much to say to each other when they're alone as when we're

keeping them company."

"No, Polly? Why? What makes you think that?"

"Several things make me think it," Pauline replies, shaking her head.

"Addie has not seen fit to confide any of her secrets to me, though in

the old days we never had a thought apart; but, all the same, she can't

take me in--can't bandage my eyes as easily as that. No, no, my young

lady, no!"

"I should think not indeed," says Lottie, with wily emphasis. "If she

tries to deceive you, Poll, she'll find she's mistaken--pretty soon, I

fancy. And so you think, Poll, you think--"

"I think," resumes Pauline, swallowing the bait, "that all is not quite

on the square between Addie and her vitriol husband."

"But, Polly, they seem so attached to each other. How do you make

that out? They are always anxious to please each other. He gives her

everything she can possibly want, and she never contradicts him, or

answers him sharply, or loses her temper, or anything."

"That's just where the main hitch is, you little simpleton! Don't you

see they're much too polite, too ceremonious, too anxious, as you put

it, to please each other to be a happy couple? Don't you see that their

attitude of studied care, of smiling deference, is just assumed to hide

something they don't want the world to see?"

"How sharp you are, Polly! How did you guess all that?"

"Instinct, I suppose--I have no experience to go by. And instinct

tells me that it argues an extremely unwholesome state of domestic

affairs to see a husband as polite, as courteously attentive to his

wife, as Tom is to Addie."

"Yes, yes; you are right; he is very polite to her."

"He is treacherously so--smolderingly so, if there is such a word. To

see that man walk across the room to relieve her of her cup, stand

up to open the door for her when she passes out, hand her cushions,

footstools, newspapers, in the way he does, with that sort of heavy

mechanical gallantry, is simply unnatural, unwholesome, volcanic.

Something will come of it sooner or later, mark my words, Charlotte

Lefroy!"

Charlotte draws a quick excited breath, and clutches the sibyl's slim

young arm.

"Oh, Pauline, it's like a picture out of a novel! Go on, go on!

Something will come of it--eh?"

"For instance, now, you, in your ignorance and childish inexperience,

imagine that Addie is at this moment pouring all her grievances into

the marital ear, cooing perhaps at his feet, like the honeymoon pairs

in 'Punch,' telling him how brutally we and the boys behaved to her

while he was away."

"Yes, yes; say I imagine all that. Now what do you imagine, Pauline?"

"I imagine quite the contrary. We can easily see who is right by

peeping through the Venetian blinds into the drawing-room. I don't

think the shutters are closed yet."

The two girls step lightly back and peep. They see Addie seated at her

end of the table, cracking nuts, with absorbed downcast face, a little

red with the exertion, and Mr. Armstrong, at his end of the table,

sipping his wine silently, apparently occupied with manufacturing

thoughts, the evening edition of the "Kelvick Mercury" resting on his

knee.

"There," hisses Pauline triumphantly--"there! Did I not tell you?

There's the attentive, courteous husband, returning after a three-days'

absence to the bosom of his family! There's a picture after Hogarth for

you with a vengeance, and they not a month married yet! Oh, fie!"

"Pauline, Pauline, how clever you are!" breathes Lottie ecstatically.

"I wish I could see things like you."

"Well, Lottie, that's a picture I'd rather not see anyhow. It inspires

me with no feeling of elation, I can tell you; on the contrary--"

"But, Pauline, I heard you say twenty times that Addie's marriage was

not like any one else's, that she could not be expected to care for Mr.

Armstrong as if he were one of her own class, young and a gentleman,

and all that, you know!"

"I know. The marriage was one of convenience on his side--of necessity

almost on hers; but, all the same, it's rather too soon for them to

have found out their mistake--rather too soon. I suppose it's all

Addie's fault. She's so awfully hot-blooded and impulsive. Bob and I

are the only two with heads in any way steady on our shoulders. What

a little fool she will be if she quarrels with her bread-and-butter

before the honeymoon is out--such good bread-and-butter too!"

"And you think she may, seriously?"

"I don't know. I can't tell. I'm almost afraid to turn my thoughts to

the third volume"--with a quick impatient sigh. "I hope it will not

end as it did with the Greenes of Green Park. If it does that will

be a precious bad look-out, Lottchen, for you, for me, and for the

boys--precious bad!"

"The Greenes of Green Park--the people in that pew near us in church,

who used to be near us--the tall good-looking man with the glasses, and

the pretty lady with the golden hair? Oh, I know! Tell me about them,

Polly; how did they end?"

"Sir James Hannen," says Polly shortly; "that's how they ended. And

nobody knew anything, even suspected anything, until the very last.

They were the model couple of the whole country. Grandison Greene he

used to be called, though his real name was Adolphus; but he was named

Grandison, after a very courteous old swell in some book or other,

on account of the fascinating elegance of his manners to the world

at large and to his wife in particular. You never saw anything like

their picturesque devotion to each other; they seemed to walk through

matrimony in a sort of courtly minuet; and I've heard Lady Crawford

tell auntie that it would just bring tears to your eyes to see that man

shawl his wife in the cloak-room after a concert or dance. And this, my

dear, went on for years and years, until one morning Mrs. Greene ran

home to her mamma--she was a Miss Pakenham of Clare Abbey--and said she

couldn't stand it any longer. And then it all came out in the Courts,

for she refused to return to him, and he sued her publicly to make her

do so, for a restitution of something or other--I forget the legal

way of putting it. Any way, it came out that they simply loathed each

other, and that Grandison had led the unfortunate woman the life of a

fiend behind the scenes."

"Oh, Pauline, how truly thrilling!"

"It came out that, when he was wrapping her up so tenderly before every

one, he used to pinch her poor arm until she was ready to scream with

pain, but daren't; that he used to stealthily crunch her poor little

foot when he was bending lovingly over her or bowing her out of the

room; that he used to run pins into her flesh when he was adjusting

a flower or knot of ribbons on her shoulder. You never heard such

revelations. Aunt Jo hid all the papers at the time; but Bob and I

found them, and read everything. He was a regular Bluebeard; and the

very first evening I saw Armstrong offer his arm to Addie to bring her

in to dinner, and the sort of shy shivery way she took it, made me

think on the instant of Grandison Greene and his--"

"Polly, Polly," breaks in Lottie excitedly, "do you think Mr. Armstrong

and Addie have come to that? Do you think he runs pins into her,

pinches her when we're not looking? Oh"--after a pause, with a burst of

relief--"I don't believe it! Because, if he did, she'd pinch him back;

I know she would. She is not like Mrs. Greene; she has a spirit of her

own, has Addie. She'd pinch him back just as hard, and then we should

find out."

"Lottie, don't argue like a fool! I never said Armstrong ill-used her

actively, never said he was a born brute like Adolphus Greene, though

he is not the style of a man I should care to call husband. I give

him his due, and honestly believe he would not touch a hair of her

head unkindly, no matter what provocation he got. No; what I mean is

that they have simply found out that they are utterly unsuited to each

other--had a bit of difference, perhaps. I dare say he taxed her with

marrying him for his money, and she answered back something of the

kind; and the upshot was, they determined to hide their discovery from

every one, even from us, which was a vain and foolish resolve so far as

I am concerned."

"I should like to know, I should like to find out," murmurs Lottie

fervently. "I'll watch them closely, I'll ask Addie questions when

she's off her guard, I'll--"

"Lottie," cries Pauline sharply, facing her sister, "if you attempt to

do anything of that kind, if you ever by word, look, or act, betray

what I have so foolishly confided to you, you will rue the day to the

end of your life! Do you hear me? You don't know what mischief you'll

do. You are an unfortunate child at the best of times, Lottie; you

seldom come into a room without making some one uncomfortable with your

luckless remarks and questions."

"I don't mean to make them uncomfortable," she answers tearfully.

"I don't say you do; but the effect is the same. And, in this case, if

you thrust yourself into the fray, you will simply ruin us all."

"Oh, how, Pauline?"

"You will just spring the mine on which our present prosperity

flourishes, and bring us to the wall again. We're very well off just

at present. Though it is not necessary to proclaim the fact from the

house-tops--Bob may grumble as he likes about the desecrating breath

of vitriol and all that--I maintain--and am not ashamed to do so--that

the new state of affairs suits my constitution and my tastes better

than the old. It is far pleasanter to be well fed, well clothed, well

housed, than not; pleasanter any day to partake of stalled ox than a

dish of herbs; to lie on patent spring beds than on mattresses teased

in the reign of James the First; pleasanter to tread the earth in satin

shoes than in cobblers' clogs. To bring the case nearer to your heart

and understanding, Goggles, it is pleasanter to nibble plum-cake than

dry bread, isn't it?"

"It is--it is," murmurs the little maid pathetically. "Who's--"

"'A denigin' of it?' Not I, indeed! Very well, then; as we both agree

on that point, let us combine to agree on the other, which is more

important--namely, to do everything to keep our position among the

flesh-pots, which is anything but a stronghold, I greatly fear, just at

present. Do you agree?"

"I do--I do!"

"Then let me impress on you, my child, a piece of advice which you

will find invaluable, not only at this crisis, but at many another

of your life. Never interfere between man and wife; let them keep

their secrets, hide their troubles, fight their battles unmolested,

unobserved. Do not seem to see, feel, or understand what is going

on. Be deaf, dumb, blind to all that does not concern your immediate

person, or else you may just find yourself in Queer Street, before you

know where you are."

"Queer Street? Where is that, Pauline? I never heard of it."

"Queer Street is not a nice street to live in, my dear. Almost every

town has a street of that name. Queer Street in your case would

probably mean Miss Swishtale's Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies,

Minerva House, Kelvick, where the little Douglases were sent to school

by their step-mother, you know. You wouldn't like to be there?"

"No--oh, no!"

"Then keep my advice in your heart."