Parted with her emerald pendant! The thing had cost him ninety pounds, and he supposed she had got thirty or forty for it. The sheer folly of women had never seemed to him so patent. Five hundred a year, indeed, to throw away in fallals! But a cloud had undoubtedly been lifted from his brain by this letter. Here was at least a definite situation. If he promised her a fixed five hundred a year she would come home. It all came of agitators putting ideas into women’s heads, a mischievous lot! But the boys would be back from school in another week or two; and it would look extremely odd if their mother were not there to go to the seaside with them.
An organ-grinder playing his confounded organ, had said to him only yesterday: “No, Guv’nor, I knows the valley of peace an’ quietness—I don’t move on under ‘arf-a-crown.” The impudence of the ruffian had tickled Nicholas and he had given him the half-crown. Fanny was behaving just like that. And who knew when she wouldn’t be off again to get out of him the rest of the thousand a year he’d received with her. No, on the whole, he didn’t think she’d be as unreasonable as that; but he continued to combat his desire for peace and quietness at so considerable a price. All the time he had a dim feeling that it wasn’t really the money she was after. She had never seemed to know or care much about money, in fact he had often had occasion to reproach her with indifference to its value. What exactly she had in her head he hesitated to characterize by a word which kept creeping nastily into his mind—independence. Fanny independent! Why she’d be in the workhouse tomorrow! Nicholas, indeed, was not unlike most people: he could not understand the need in others for that without which he himself would have been wholly miserable. What would be his own position if he made her independent—he would be subject to her whims and fancies and women’s nonsense of all sorts! And then—this was a bright moment—the solution occurred to him: Make her a fixed and regular allowance, and stop it when he wanted to! Everything seemed suddenly clear, he wondered he hadn’t thought of that before; and by the evening post he wrote off to say that he had reconsidered the matter and was prepared to pay her a regular allowance of a hundred and twenty-five pounds a quarter, and he would send the carriage to meet the five o’clock train the day after tomorrow.
To say that he was surprised on receiving not Fanny, but another letter—saying that she had meant of course that the five hundred a year should be settled on her, with the word settled underlined—would be a gross under-statement. He would never have believed that Fanny of all women could be so sordid. He continued in this mood of surprised disgust for fully an hour seated in his study which specially faced north so that his head should never be heated by the intrusion of the sun. He was determined to do no such thing, and yet extremely conscious that he could not go on much longer in this wifeless condition. She had been away now for seventeen days, and every day his head was getting heavier and less clear. He would have to put an end to it somehow. While he sat thus, turning and turning the wheels of indecision, he was conscious of a whirring noise gradually becoming articulate—that confounded barrel organ, again, grinding out the popular song of the moment: “Up in a balloon boys, up in a balloon.”
A flood of angry colour invaded Nicholas’s clean-shaven face, running almost up into the grizzled cock’s-comb rising from his forehead. He went to the window and threw it wide open. There was the ruffian grinding away and grinning at him. For a moment words failed Nicholas and then a flash of caustic humour redeemed him from his sober self. The fellow’s impudence was really laughable! He grinned back and closed the window. If he’d been the organ grinder it was just what he would have done himself. The beggar seemed to recognise that Greek had met Greek, for, after playing ‘Champagne Charlie,’ he wheeled his organ away.
But in Nicholas the little incident had changed the current of thought, or rather had swung the blood a little more to his head, so that now it seemed to him worth while to get Fanny back even on her own terms. His speech for the General Meeting of the “United Tramways Association” was due on Friday, and in the present heavy state of his head, due to this persistent wifelessness, he would be making a mess of it.
Five hundred a year—what was it after all—settled or not! He would go to James this very minute and get it over; then, with the settlement in his pocket, he would pop down himself tomorrow and bring her back. Calling a hansom, he uttered the word “Poultry” and got in. It was a long drive from Ladbroke Grove, and while he sat, behind the scuttling horse, erect, dapper, and shaken by the cobblestones of the London of those days, he thought of how he should put it to his brother James, in answer to the question the fellow would be sure to ask: “What d’you want to do that for?” And he decided merely to say: “What business is that of yours?” James was always a bit of an old woman, and it was best to be sharp with him.
With a certain dismay therefore he heard James say instead:
“I thought you’d be having to do that—they say Fanny’s on the high horse.”
“WHO says?” barked Nicholas.
James ploughed through one of his ultra-Crimean whiskers: “Oh! They—Timothy and the girls.”
“What business have they to gabble about what they know nothing of?”
James cleared his throat.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, they never tell me anything.”
“What!” snapped Nicholas. “Why, you sit there and talk scandal by the hour together. Well, I’ve no time to waste. Draw this settlement and make yourself and old Bustard the trustees. I want it all ship-shape by eleven o’clock tomorrow. You can put in enough of my Great Western Stock to provide five hundred a year.”
Cheltenham—there was something appropriate about the Stock; and to himself he thought: ‘Railways—I don’t trust them; they’ll be inventing something else before long.’
He left James somewhat agitated over the hurry his brother was in. The fellow however came up to the scratch, and with the settlement all signed and sealed, Nicholas caught the afternoon train to Cheltenham. He spent the hours of travel in coining caustic remonstrances against being treated in the way he had been, but when he arrived and found her having tea in the hotel drawing-room looking quite fresh and young, he decided to postpone them, and all he said was: “Well, Fanny, you look quite bobbish.”
And she answered: “What a long time, dear Nicholas! How are the dear children?”
“I’ve been bad with my head,” said Nicholas, “the children are all right. I’ve brought you this,” and he placed the settlement on the tea-table, “it’s all right—you won’t understand a word of it.”
“I’m sure, dear Nicholas, that you’ve done it beautifully.”
And while she read it, wrinkling her brows, Nicholas watched her, and thought:
‘She’s a better-looking woman than I remembered.’
Throughout the evening he was quite cheerful, not to say witty. It all seemed, indeed, a little like the days of their honeymoon at Brighton.
Not until nearly midnight, did he turn on his elbow and say rather suddenly:
“What on earth made you do it?”
“Oh, dear Nicholas,” replied her voice, close to his own, “I did so want a nice quiet rest.”
“Rest? What d’you want a rest from—you’ve got no work?”
She smiled.
“And now,” she said, “I shall be able to go and have one whenever I feel I want it.”