That thrust too went home. My husband looked at me with flashing eyes and then said:

"As I thought! You've been sent for to help my wife to make a great to-do of her imaginary grievances. You're to stay in the house too, and before long we'll have you setting up as master here and giving orders to my servants! But not if I know it! ... Your reverence, if you have any respect for your penitent, you'll please be good enough to leave my wife to _my_ protection."

I saw that Father Dan had to gulp down his gathering anger, but he only said:

"Say no more, my lord. No true priest ever comes between a man and the wife whom God has given him. It's his business to unite people, not to put them apart. As for this dear child, I have loved her since she was an infant in arms, and never so much as at the present speaking, so I don't need to learn my duty from one who appears to care no more for her than for the rind of a lemon. I'll go, sir," said the old man, drawing himself up like a wounded lion, "but it's not to your protection I leave her--it's to that of God's blessed and holy love and will."

My husband had gone before the last words were spoken, but I think they must have followed him as he went lunging down the stairs.

During this humiliating scene a hot flush of shame had come to my cheeks and I wanted to tell Father Dan not to let it grieve him, but I could do nothing but stoop and kiss his hand.

Meantime two or three of the servants had gathered on the landing at the sound of my husband's voice, and among them was the flinty housekeeper holding the Father's little bag, and she gave it back to him as he passed her.

Then, all being over, the woman came into my room, with an expression of victorious mischief in her eyes and said:

"Your ladyship had better have listened to them as knows, you see."

I was too benumbed by that cruel stroke to reply, but Price said enough for both of us.

"If them as knows," she said, "don't get out of this room inside two seconds they'll get their ugly faces slapped."

I thought I had reached the end of my power of endurance, and that night, before going to bed, while my maid was taking down my hair, and I was thinking of Martin and asking myself if I should put up with my husband's brutalities any longer, I heard her say:

"If I were a lady married to the wrong man, I'd have the right one if I had to go through the divorce court for him."

Now that was so exactly the thought that was running riot in my own tormented mind, that I flew at her like a wild cat, asking her how she dared to say anything so abominably wicked, and telling her to take her notice there and then.

But hardly had she left the room, when my heart was in my mouth again, and I was trembling with fear lest she should take me at my word and then the last of my friends would be gone.

FIFTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Within the next few days the house-party arrived. There would be twenty of them at least, not counting valets and ladies' maids, so that large as Castle Raa was the house was full.

They were about equally divided as to sex and belonged chiefly to my husband's class, but they included Mr. Eastcliff's beautiful wife, Camilla, and Alma's mother, who, much to Alma's chagrin, had insisted upon being invited.

My husband required me to receive them, and I did so, though I was only their nominal hostess, and they knew it and treated me accordingly.

I should be ashamed to speak of the petty slights they put upon me, how they consulted Alma in my presence and otherwise wounded my pride as a woman by showing me that I had lost my own place in my husband's house.

I know there are people of the same class who are kind and considerate, guileless and pure, the true nobility of their country--women who are devoted to their homes and children, and men who spend their wealth and strength for the public good--but my husband's friends were not of that kind.

They were vain and proud, selfish, self-indulgent, thoroughly insincere, utterly ill-mannered, shockingly ill-informed, astonishingly ill-educated (capable of speaking several languages but incapable of saying a sensible word in any of them), living and flourishing in the world without religion, without morality, and (if it is not a cant phrase to use) without God.

What their conduct was when out shooting, picnicking, driving, riding, motoring, and yachting (for Mr. Eastcliff had arrived in his yacht, which was lying at anchor in the port below the glen), I do not know, for "doctor's orders" were Alma's excuse for not asking me to accompany them.

But at night they played bridge (their most innocent amusement), gambled and drank, banged the piano, danced "Grizzly Bears," sang duets from the latest musical comedies, and then ransacked the empty houses of their idle heads for other means of killing the one enemy of their existence--Time.

Sometimes they would give entertainments in honour of their dogs, when all the animals of all the guests (there seemed to be a whole kennel of them) would be dressed up in coats of silk and satin with pockets and pocket-handkerchiefs, and then led downstairs to the drawing-room, where Alma's wheezy spaniel and my husband's peevish terrier were supposed to receive them.

Sometimes they would give "freak dinners," when the guests themselves would be dressed up, the men in women's clothes, the women in men's, the male imitating the piping treble of the female voices, and the female the over-vowelled slang of the male, until, tiring of this foolishness, they would end up by flinging the food at the pictures on the walls, the usual pellet being softened bread and the favourite target the noses in the family portraits, which, hit and covered with a sprawling mess, looked so ridiculous as to provoke screams of laughter.

The talk at table was generally of horses and dogs, but sometimes it was of love, courtship and marriage, including conjugal fidelity, which was a favourite subject of ridicule, with both the women and the men.

Thus my husband would begin by saying (he often said it in my hearing) that once upon a time men took their wives as they took their horses, on trial for a year and a day, and "really with some women there was something to say for the old custom."

Then Mr. Vivian would remark that it was "a jolly good idea, by Jove,"

and if he "ever married, by the Lord that's just what he would do."

Then Mr. Eastcliff would say that it was a ridiculous superstition that a woman should have her husband all to herself, "as if he were a kind of toothbrush which she could not share with anybody else," and somebody would add that she might as reasonably want her dentist or her hairdresser to be kept for her own use only.

After that the ladies, not to be left behind, would join in the off-hand rattle, and one of them would give it as her opinion that a wife might have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be well off.

"Ugh!" said Alma one night, shrugging her shoulders. "Think of a poor woman being tied for life to an entirely faithful husband!"

"I adore the kind of man who goes to the deuce for a woman--Parnell, and Gambetta and Boulanger and that sort," said a "smart" girl of three or four-and-twenty, whereupon Camilla Eastcliff (she was a Russian) cried:

"That's vhy the co-respondents in your divorce courts are so sharming.

They're like the villayns in the plays--always so dee-lightfully vicked."

Oh, the sickening horror of it all! Whether it was really moral corruption or only affectation and pose, it seemed equally shocking, and though I bore as much of it as I could with a cheerful face, I escaped as often as possible to the clean atmosphere of my own room.

But even there I was not always allowed to be alone, for Alma's mother frequently followed me. She was a plump little person in a profuse ornamentation of diamond rings and brooches, with little or no education, and a reputation for saying risky things in blundering French whereof the principal humour lay in the uncertainty as to whether she knew their meaning or not.

Nevertheless she was the only good-hearted woman in the house, and I really believe she thought she was doing a kind act in keeping me company. But oh, how I suffered from her long accounts of her former "visits" to my house, whereby I learned, without wishing to, what her origin had been (the daughter of a London postman); what position she had held in Castle Raa in her winsome and reckless youth (one that need not be defined); how she had met her husband in New York and he had married her to save the reputation of his child; and finally how the American ladies of society had refused to receive her, and she had vowed to be revenged on them by marrying Alma to the highest title in Europe that could be bought with money.

"I was just like your father, my dear. I never did no manner of harm to those people. They used to think I thought myself better blood nor they were, but I never thought no such thing, I assure you. Only when they turned nasty after my marriage I made up my mind--just as your father did--as Alma should marry a bigger husband nor any of them, even if he wasn't worth a dime and 'adn't a 'air on 'is 'ead."

But even these revelations about herself were less humiliating than her sympathy with me, which implied that I was not fitted to be mistress of a noble house--how could it be expected of me?--whereas Alma was just as if she had been born to it, and therefore it was lucky for me that I had her there to show me how to do things.

"Alma's gotten such _ton!_ Such distangy manners!" she would say.

The effect of all this was to make me feel, as I had never felt before, the intolerable nature of the yoke I was living under. When I looked into the future and saw nothing before me but years of this ignoble bondage, I told myself that nothing--no sacrament or contract, no law of church or state--could make me endure it.

From day to day my maid came to me with insidious hints about Alma and my husband. I found myself listening to them. I also found myself refreshing my memory of the hideous scene in Paris, and wondering why I had condoned the offence by staying an hour longer under my husband's protection.

And then there was always another force at work within me--my own secret passion. Though sometimes I felt myself to be a wretched sinner and thought the burden I had to bear was heaven's punishment for my guilty love, at other times my whole soul rose in revolt, and I cried out not merely for separation from my husband but for absolute sundering.

Twice during the painful period of the house-party I heard from Martin.

His first letter was full of accounts of the far-reaching work of his expedition--the engaging of engineers, electricians, geologists and masons, and the shipping of great stores of wireless apparatus--for his spirits seemed to be high, and life was full of good things for him.

His second letter told me that everything was finished, and he was to visit the island the next week, going first to "the old folks" and coming to me for a few days immediately before setting sail.

That brought matters to a head, and compelled me to take action.