The God in the Car: A Novel

"I suppose it was horrid of me," she said. "Can't we turn it round and consider it as a compliment to you?"

Tom looked doubtful, but, before he could answer, Adela cried:

"Oh, here's Evan Haselden, and – yes – it's Mr. Ruston with him?"

As the two men entered, Mrs. Dennison rose from her chair. She was a tall woman; her years fell one or two short of thirty. She was not a beauty, but her broad brow and expressive features, joined to a certain subdued dignity of manner and much grace of movement, made her conspicuous among the women in her drawing-room. Young Evan Haselden seemed to appreciate her, for he bowed his glossy curly head, and shook hands in a way that almost turned the greeting into a deferentially distant caress. Mrs. Dennison acknowledged his hinted homage with a bright smile, and turned to Ruston.

"At last!" she said, with another smile. "The first time after – how many years?"

"Eight, I believe," he answered.

"Oh, you're terribly definite. And what have you been doing with yourself?"

He shrugged his square shoulders, and she did not press her question, but let her eyes wander over him.

"Well?" he asked.

"Oh – improved. And I?"

Suddenly Ruston laughed.

"Last time we met," he said, "you swore you'd never speak to me again."

"I'd quite forgotten my fearful threat."

He looked straight in her face for a moment, as he asked —

"And the cause of it?"

Mrs. Dennison coloured.

"Yes, quite," she answered; and conscious that her words carried no conviction to him, she added hastily, "Go and speak to Harry. There he is."

Ruston obeyed her, and being left for a moment alone, she sat down on the chair placed ready near the door for her short intervals of rest. There was a slight pucker on her brow. The sight of Ruston and his question stirred in her thoughts, which were never long dormant, and which his coming woke into sudden activity. She had not anticipated that he would venture to recall to her that incident – at least, not at once – in the first instant of meeting, at such a time and such a place. But as he had, she found herself yielding to the reminiscence he induced. Forgotten the cause of her anger with him? For the first two or three years of her married life, she would have answered, "Yes, I have forgotten it." Then had come a period when now and again it recurred to her, not for his sake or its own, but as a summary of her stifled feeling; and during that period she had resolutely struggled not to remember it. Of late that struggle had ceased, and the thing lay a perpetual background to her thoughts: when there was nothing else to think about, when the stage of her mind was empty of moving figures, it snatched at the chance of prominence, and thus became a recurrent consciousness from which her interests and her occupations could not permanently rescue her. For example, here she was thinking of it in the very midst of her party. Yet this persistence of memory seemed impertinent, unreasonable, almost insolent. For, as she told herself, finding it necessary to tell herself more and more often, her husband was still all that he had been when he had won her heart – good-looking, good-tempered, infinitely kind and devoted. When she married she had triumphed confidently in these qualities; and the unanimous cry of surprised congratulations at the match she was making had confirmed her own joy and exultation in it. It had been a great match; and yet, beyond all question, also a love match.

But now the chorus of wondering applause was forgotten, and there remained only the one voice which had been raised to break the harmony of approbation – a voice that nobody, herself least of all, had listened to then. How should it be listened to? It came from a nobody – a young man of no account, whose opinion none cared to ask; whose judgment, had it been worth anything in itself, lay under suspicion of being biassed by jealousy. Willie Ruston had never declared himself her suitor; yet (she clung hard to this) he would not have said what he did had not the chagrin of a defeated rival inspired him; and a defeated rival, as everybody knows, will say anything. Certainly she had been right not to listen, and was wrong to remember. To this she had often made up her mind, and to this she returned now as she sat watching her husband and Willie Ruston, forgetful of all the chattering crowd beside.

As to what it was she resolved not to remember, and did remember, it was just one sentence – his only comment on the news of her engagement, his only hint of any opinion or feeling about it. It was short, sharp, decisive, and, as his judgments were, even in the days when he, alone of all the world, held them of any moment, absolutely confident; it was also, she had felt on hearing it, utterly untrue, unjust, and ungenerous. It had rung out like a pistol-shot, "Maggie, you're marrying a fool," and then a snap of tight-fitting lips, a glance of scornful eyes, and a quick, unhesitating stride away that hardly waited for a contemptuous smile at her angry cry, "I'll never speak to you again." She had been in a fury of wrath – she had a power of wrath – that a plain, awkward, penniless, and obscure youth – one whom she sometimes disliked for his arrogance, and sometimes derided for his self-confidence – should dare to say such a thing about her Harry, whom she was so proud to love, and so proud to have won. It was indeed an insolent memory that flung the thing again and again in her teeth.

The party began to melt away. The first good-bye roused Mrs. Dennison from her enveloping reverie. Lady Valentine, from whom it came, lingered for a gush of voluble confidences about the charm of the house, and the people, and the smart little band that played softly in an alcove, and what not; her daughter stood by, learning, it is to be hoped, how it is meet to behave in society, and scanning Evan Haselden's trim figure with wary, critical glances, alert to turn aside if he should glance her way. Mrs. Dennison returned the ball of civility, and, released by several more departures, joined Adela Ferrars. Adela stood facing Haselden and Tom Loring, who were arm-in-arm. At the other end of the room Harry Dennison and Ruston were still in conversation.

"These men, Maggie," began Adela – and it seemed a mere caprice of pronunciation, that the word did not shape itself into "monkeys" – "are the absurdest creatures. They say I'm not fit to take part in politics! And why?"

Mrs. Dennison shook her head, and smiled.

"Because, if you please, I'm too emotional. Emotional, indeed! And I can't generalise! Oh, couldn't I generalise about men!"

"Women can never say 'No,'" observed Evan Haselden, not in the least as if he were repeating a commonplace.

"You'll find you're wrong when you grow up," retorted Adela.

"I doubt that," said Mrs. Dennison, with the kindest of smiles.

"Maggie, you spoil the boy. Isn't it enough that he should have gone straight from the fourth form – where, I suppose, he learnt to generalise – "

"At any rate, not to be emotional," murmured Loring.

"Into Parliament, without having his head turned by – "

"You'd better go, Evan," suggested Loring in a warning tone.

"I shall go too," announced Adela.

"I'm walking your way," said Evan, who seemed to bear no malice.

"How delightful!"

"You don't object?"

"Not the least. I'm driving."

"A mere schoolboy score!"

"How stupid of me! You haven't had time to forget them."

"Oh, take her away," said Mrs. Dennison, and they disappeared in a fire of retorts, happy, or happy enough for happy people, and probably Evan drove with the lady after all.

Mrs. Dennison walked towards where her husband and Ruston sat on a sofa in talk.

"What are you two conspiring about?" she asked.

"Ruston had something to say to me about business."

"What, already?"

"Oh, we've met in the city, Mrs. Dennison," explained Ruston, with a confidential nod to Harry.

"And that was the object of your appearance here to-day? I was flattering my party, it seems."

"No. I didn't expect to find your husband. I thought he would be at the House."

"Ah, Harry, how did the speech go?"

"Oh, really pretty well, I think," answered Harry Dennison, with a contented air. "I got nearly half through before we were counted out."

A very faint smile showed on his wife's face.

"So you were counted out?" she asked.