Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (easy novels to read txt) 📕

The rich woman tapped the strong man coquettishly on the shoulder with her fan. “Ah! you bad boy!” she said, with a slightly-labored archness of look and manner. “Have I found you at last?”

Geoffrey sauntered on to the terrace—keeping the lady behind him with a thoroughly savage superiority to all civilized submission to the sex—and looked at his watch.

“I said I’d come here when I’d got half an hour to myself,” he mumbled, turning the flower carelessly between his teeth. “I’ve got half an hour, and here I am.”

“Did you come for the sake of seeing the visitors, or did you come for the sake of seeing Me?”

Geoffrey smiled graciously, and gave the flower another turn in his teeth. “You. Of course.”

The iron-master’s widow took his arm, and looked up at him—as only a young woman would have dared to look up—with the searching summer light streaming in its full brilliancy on her face.

Reduced to the plain expression of what it is really worth, the average English idea of beauty in women may be summed up in three words—youth, health, plumpness. The more spiritual charm of intelligence and vivacity, the subtler attraction of delicacy of line and fitness of detail, are little looked for and seldom appreciated by the mass of men in this island. It is impossible otherwise to account for the extraordinary blindness of perception which (to give one instance only) makes nine Englishmen out of ten who visit France come back declaring that they have not seen a single pretty Frenchwoman, in or out of Paris, in the whole country. Our popular type of beauty proclaims itself, in its fullest material development, at every shop in which an illustrated periodical is sold. The same fleshy-faced girl, with the same inane smile, and with no other expression whatever, appears under every form of illustration, week after week, and month after month, all the year round. Those who wish to know what Mrs. Glenarm was like, have only to go out and stop at any bookseller’s or news-vendor’s shop, and there they will see her in the first illustration, with a young woman in it, which they discover in the window. The one noticeable peculiarity in Mrs. Glenarm’s purely commonplace and purely material beauty, which would have struck an observant and a cultivated man, was the curious girlishness of her look and manner. No stranger speaking to this woman—who had been a wife at twenty, and who was now a widow at twenty-four—would ever have thought of addressing her otherwise than as “Miss.”

“Is that the use you make of a flower when I give it to you?” she said to Geoffrey. “Mumbling it in your teeth, you wretch, as if you were a horse!”

“If you come to tha t,” returned Geoffrey, “I’m more a horse than a man. I’m going to run in a race, and the public are betting on me. Haw! haw! Five to four.”

“Five to four! I believe he thinks of nothing but betting. You great heavy creature, I can’t move you. Don’t you see I want to go like the rest of them to the lake? No! you’re not to let go of my arm! You’re to take me.”

“Can’t do it. Must be back with Perry in half an hour.”

(Perry was the trainer from London. He had arrived sooner than he had been expected, and had entered on his functions three days since.)

“Don’t talk to me about Perry! A little vulgar wretch. Put him off. You won’t? Do you mean to say you are such a brute that you would rather be with Perry than be with me?”

“The betting’s at five to four, my dear. And the race comes off in a month from this.”

“Oh! go away to your beloved Perry! I hate you. I hope you’ll lose the race. Stop in your cottage. Pray don’t come back to the house. And—mind this!—don’t presume to say ‘my dear’ to me again.”

“It ain’t presuming half far enough, is it? Wait a bit. Give me till the race is run—and then I’ll presume to marry you.”

“You! You will be as old as Methuselah, if you wait till I am your wife. I dare say Perry has got a sister. Suppose you ask him? She would be just the right person for you.”

Geoffrey gave the flower another turn in his teeth, and looked as if he thought the idea worth considering.

“All right,” he said. “Any thing to be agreeable to you. I’ll ask Perry.”

He turned away, as if he was going to do it at once. Mrs. Glenarm put out a little hand, ravishingly clothed in a blush-colored glove, and laid it on the athlete’s mighty arm. She pinched those iron muscles (the pride and glory of England) gently. “What a man you are!” she said. “I never met with any body like you before!”

The whole secret of the power that Geoffrey had acquired over her was in those words.

They had been together at Swanhaven for little more than ten days; and in that time he had made the conquest of Mrs. Glenarm. On the day before the garden-party—in one of the leisure intervals allowed him by Perry—he had caught her alone, had taken her by the arm, and had asked her, in so many words, if she would marry him. Instances on record of women who have been wooed and won in ten days are—to speak it with all possible respect—not wanting. But an instance of a woman willing to have it known still remains to be discovered. The iron-master’s widow exacted a promise of secrecy before the committed herself When Geoffrey had pledged his word to hold his tongue in public until she gave him leave to speak, Mrs. Glenarm, without further hesitation, said Yes—having, be it observed, said No, in the course of the last two years, to at least half a dozen men who were Geoffrey’s superiors in every conceivable respect, except personal comeliness and personal strength.

There is a reason for every thing; and there was a reason for this.

However persistently the epicene theorists of modern times may deny it, it is nevertheless a truth plainly visible in the whole past history of the sexes that the natural condition of a woman is to find her master in a man. Look in the face of any woman who is in no direct way dependent on a man: and, as certainly as you see the sun in a cloudless sky, you see a woman who is not happy. The want of a master is their great unknown want; the possession of a master is—unconsciously to themselves—the only possible completion of their lives. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this one primitive instinct is at the bottom of the otherwise inexplicable sacrifice, when we see a woman, of her own free will, throw herself away on a man who is unworthy of her. This one primitive instinct was at the bottom of the otherwise inexplicable facility of self-surrender exhibited by Mrs. Glenarm.

Up to the time of her meeting with Geoffrey, the young widow had gathered but one experience in her intercourse with the world—the experience of a chartered tyrant. In the brief six months of her married life with the man whose grand-daughter she might have been—and ought to have been—she had only to lift her finger to be obeyed. The doting old husband was the willing slave of the petulant young wife’s slightest caprice. At a later period, when society offered its triple welcome to her birth, her beauty, and her wealth—go where she might, she found herself the object of the same prostrate admiration among the suitors who vied with each other in the rivalry for her hand. For the first time in her life she encountered a man with a will of his own when she met Geoffrey Delamayn at Swanhaven Lodge.

Geoffrey’s occupation of the moment especially favored the conflict between the woman’s assertion of her influence and the man’s assertion of his will.

During the days that had intervened between his return to his brother’s house and the arrival of the trainer, Geoffrey had submitted himself to all needful preliminaries of the physical discipline which was to prepare him for the race. He knew, by previous experience, what exercise he ought to take, what hours he ought to keep, what temptations at the table he was bound to resist. Over and over again Mrs. Glenarm tried to lure him into committing infractions of his own discipline—and over and over again the influence with men which had never failed her before failed her now. Nothing she could say, nothing she could do, would move this man. Perry arrived; and Geoffrey’s defiance of every attempted exercise of the charming feminine tyranny, to which every one else had bowed, grew more outrageous and more immovable than ever. Mrs. Glenarm became as jealous of Perry as if Perry had been a woman. She flew into passions; she burst into tears; she flirted with other men; she threatened to leave the house. All quite useless! Geoffrey never once missed an appointment with Perry; never once touched any thing to eat or drink that she could offer him, if Perry had forbidden it. No other human pursuit is so hostile to the influence of the sex as the pursuit of athletic sports. No men are so entirely beyond the reach of women as the men whose lives are passed in the cultivation of their own physical strength. Geoffrey resisted Mrs. Glenarm without the slightest effort. He casually extorted her admiration, and undesignedly forced her respect. She clung to him, as a hero; she recoiled from him, as a brute; she struggled with him, submitted to him, despised him, adored him, in a breath. And the clew to it all, confused and contradictory as it seemed, lay in one simple fact—Mrs. Glenarm had found her master.

“Take me to the lake, Geoffrey!” she said, with a little pleading pressure of the blush-colored hand.

Geoffrey looked at his watch. “Perry expects me in twenty minutes,” he said.

“Perry again!”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Glenarm raised her fan, in a sudden outburst of fury, and broke it with one smart blow on Geoffrey’s face.

“There!” she cried, with a stamp of her foot. “My poor fan broken! You monster, all through you!”

Geoffrey coolly took the broken fan and put it in his pocket. “I’ll write to London,” he said, “and get you another. Come along! Kiss, and make it up.”

He looked over each shoulder, to make sure that they were alone then lifted her off the ground (she was no light weight), held her up in the air like a baby, and gave her a rough loud-sounding kiss on each cheek. “With kind compliments from yours truly!” he said—and burst out laughing, and put her down again.

“How dare you do that?” cried Mrs. Glenarm. “I shall claim Mrs. Delamayn’s protection if I am to be insulted in this way! I will never forgive you, Sir!” As she said those indignant words she shot a look at him which flatly contradicted them. The next moment she was leaning on his arm, and was looking at him wonderingly, for the thousandth time, as an entire novelty in her experience of male human kind. “How rough you are, Geoffrey!” she said, softly. He smiled in recognition of that artless homage to the manly virtue of his character. She saw the smile, and instantly made another effort to dispute the hateful supremacy of Perry. “Put him off!” whispere d the