Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 6

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Every diamond, even the finest, has its flaw; every man, even the bravest, his fear; and Gerald Cranston, though nature had dowered him with a physical courage far beyond the average and a moral courage to match it, had his yellow streak—a fear none the less real because unrealized, none the less vital to any understanding of his character because he himself had never wholly understood it.

This fear (a fear one hesitates to describe as “fear of woman,” because it was more than that—an apprehension of the mind rather than of the body, a terror lest, loving some woman overmuch, he should lose that self-control, that self-discipline on which he so prided himself) lay deep-rooted in every fiber of his brain. Always it had been part of him. Always, not realizing it for fear, he had elated himself when considering the casual women of every man’s encounter with a stereotyped, “She suits me—but that’s all.” So now his first thought of the woman he had decided to marry was a thankful, “Praise the Lord, there’s no question of love between us.”

For the war, with its welter of promiscuous sex-gratification, had intensified Gerald Cranston’s early fear to an obsession which drove him, even as his ambitions drove him, to detest the very word “love.” To him, that word—as understood between man and woman—represented only a danger, a form of madness, a disease that might wreck his career, as it had wrecked the careers of half a hundred men he knew. “Man’s love for woman,” he thought on his wedding morning, “is either bodily passion escaped from the brain’s control, or else a sickly sentimentality, a single weakness as fatal to success as one flawed girder can be fatal to some great building.”

Well, there would be no such flawed girder in the edifice of his marriage to Hermione. Its foundations were firm-concreted on the bed-rock facts of their mutual interest. She needed a husband with money; he, a wife with position. For, of course, a man—and more especially a man making his bid for power—needed a wife. The women of casual encounters were unsatisfactory, grasping, dangerous. Wherefore, considering those women with the same cold consecutively reasoned logic he had employed in the consideration of his financial position, Gerald Cranston dismissed them definitely from his life.

Returning to his bedroom, attiring himself meticulously in the clothes Rennie had laid out for him, his consideration of matrimony continued. On his dressing-table stood a silver-framed photograph of Hermione taken with the boy, with Tony Cosgrave’s boy. The child-baronet was fair, with a bonny smile; his mother, dark, serious-eyed, an aristocrat every inch of her.

Dispassionately, Gerald Cranston scrutinized the pair of them. That Hermione had been Cosgrave’s wife affected him hardly at all. “A week’s war honeymoon,” he thought contemptuously. But that she was the mother of that bonny child moved him a little. “Love!” he thought. “Is that love—to marry, as Cosgrave married, a girl of eighteen and leave her child unprovided for?”

It was for the child’s sake, of course, that she had consented to remarry. A fine motive! He could respect her for that.

He remembered the first time she had mentioned little Arthur, remembered her saying: “It isn’t poverty that I mind for him; it isn’t so much that I resent the fact he’ll never be able to keep up Cosgrave. It’s his education that’s worrying me, Mr. Cranston—and his chances. I’d like Tony’s son to go to Tony’s old school; to join Tony’s old regiment; to be the horseman Tony was, the shot, the fisherman—” That was the one occasion on which she had spoken of her feelings for her first husband. “I loved him,” she had said, speaking simply as always. “And he let me down. It wasn’t only over money, Mr. Cranston. There had been some one else. A chorus-girl. I found her letters after he died.”

How that fitted in with his own picture of Love! Love was an instability, a disease of weak minds, of minds like Sir Anthony Cosgrave’s. Lucky for Hermione that Cosgrave had stopped a shell at Ginchy! Love-marriages—had not Hermione herself agreed with the verdict?—were fore-doomed to failure. In the old easy-going days—his mother’s days—the love-match might have been possible. But not to-day! Not in this new and poverty-stricken world, where each man, each nation needed its utmost effort to survive. The new matrimony must be like the new business—orderly, disciplined, systematized. Their home, his and Hermione’s, would be an affair of partnership—the providing for it, his; the running of it, hers.

There would be many children in that home.... But Cosgrave’s child should not suffer on account of them. Cosgrave’s child, when his stepfather had made those two millions, would be able to keep up Cosgrave. That was not in the bond to which he, Cranston, had set his hand on the day she promised herself to him. Indeed there had been no bond—only his promise: “I’ll look after you both, Hermione—after you and the boy.”

A bond! A promise! Wasn’t his marriage to Hermione, though neither of them had ever put the thing into words, more than either bond or promise? Wasn’t it a bargain, a perfectly fair bargain to which he, on his side, brought money, and she, on hers, the potentialities of power? And why not? Better a clean bargain, a businesslike, orderly marriage, than the uncleanliness, the disorderliness of a love such as Tony Cosgrave’s!

Already, as, his dressing finished, Cranston stepped into the sitting-room, his benefits from that bargain were apparent. The newspapers to which he always devoted an exact quarter-hour before his eight o’clock breakfast showed him, even at first glance, the power-potentialities of his marriage. Here was his photograph, her photograph; there the record of his career, of her lineage. “The Lady Hermione Cosgrave, only daughter of the Earl of Rorkton,” he read, “is the widow of Sir Anthony Cosgrave, Bart., of Cosgrave, Lincolnshire. The Rorkton peerage is one of the oldest in England—dating back to before the Restoration.”

“That’ll make Hermione smile,” he thought. Poor Hermione! What was the use of being an earl’s daughter and a baronet’s widow—when two sons and the supertax swallowed your father’s income, and Tony Cosgrave’s white elephant of an unlet entailed estate threatened to encroach even on your four-hundred-a-year jointure. “She, too, benefits from the bargain,” went on Gerald Cranston’s thoughts.

For a full five minutes he continued to dally with the papers. Somehow the various photographs of Hermione annoyed him. It seemed to him that they gave a false impression of her, darkening the pallor of her complexion, fluffing out the straightness of her hair, making her pretty rather than handsome, stiff rather than dignified. “They don’t do her justice,” he said to himself, picturing the dignity of her dark eyes, the dignity of her carriage; and again, recalling the dignity of her voice: “She, as I, has her self-discipline, her self-control....”

Then, once more automatic in his routine, he turned from the social to the financial columns, and was still deep in market reports when the waiter brought his frugal breakfast.