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Page 9
For Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had no money of her own, was obliged to
live on the proceeds of Frederick's activities, and her very nest-egg
was the fruit, posthumously ripened, of ancient sin. The way Frederick
made his living was one of the standing distresses of her life. He
wrote immensely popular memoirs, regularly, every year, of the
mistresses of kings. There were in history numerous kings who had had
mistresses, and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had
kings; so that he had been able to publish a book of memoirs during
each year of his married life, and even so there were greater further
piles of these ladies waiting to be dealt with. Mrs. Arbuthnot was
helpless. Whether she liked it or not, she was obliged to live on the
proceeds. He gave her a dreadful sofa once, after the success of his
Du Barri memoir, with swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it
seemed to her a miserable thing that there, in her very home, should
flaunt this re-incarnation of a dead old French sinner.
Simply good, convinced that morality is the basis of happiness,
the fact that she and Frederick should draw their sustenance from
guilt, however much purged by the passage of centuries, was one of the
secret reasons of her sadness. The more the memoired lady had
forgotten herself, the more his book about her was read and the more
free-handed he was to his wife; and all that he gave her was spent,
after adding slightly to her nest-egg--for she did hope and believe
that some day people would cease to want to read of wickedness, and
then Frederick would need supporting--on helping the poor. The parish
flourished because, to take a handful at random, of the ill-behavior of
the ladies Du Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de l'Enclos, and even
of learned Maintenon. The poor were the filter through which the money
was passed, to come out, Mrs. Arbuthnot hoped, purified. She could do
no more. She had tried in days gone by to think the situation out, to
discover the exact right course for her to take, but had found it, as
she had found Frederick, too difficult, and had left it, as she had
left Frederick, to God. Nothing of this money was spent on her house
or dress; those remained, except for the great soft sofa, austere. It
was the poor who profited. Their very boots were stout with sins. But
how difficult it had been. Mrs. Arbuthnot, groping for guidance,
prayed about it to exhaustion. Ought she perhaps to refuse to touch
the money, to avoid it as she would have avoided the sins which were
its source? But then what about the parish's boots? She asked the
vicar what he thought, and through much delicate language, evasive and
cautious, it did finally appear that he was for the boots.
At least she had persuaded Frederick, when first he began his
terrible successful career--he only began it after their marriage; when
she married him he had been a blameless official attached to the
library of the British Museum--to publish the memoirs under another
name, so that she was not publicly branded. Hampstead read the books
with glee, and had no idea that their writer lived in its midst.
Frederick was almost unknown, even by sight, in Hampstead. He never
went to any of its gatherings. Whatever it was he did in the way of
recreation was done in London, but he never spoke of what he did or
whom he saw; he might have been perfectly friendless for any mention he
ever made of friends to his wife. Only the vicar knew where the money
for the parish came from, and he regarded it, he told Mrs. Arbuthnot,
as a matter of honour not to mention it.
And at least her little house was not haunted by the loose lived
ladies, for Frederick did his work away from home. He had two rooms
near the British Museum, which was the scene of his exhumations, and
there he went every morning, and he came back long after his wife was
asleep. Sometimes he did not come back at all. Sometimes she did not
see him for several days together. Then he would suddenly appear at
breakfast, having let himself in with his latchkey the night before,
very jovial and good-natured and free-handed and glad if she would
allow him to give her something--a well-fed man, contented with the
world; a jolly, full-blooded, satisfied man. And she was always
gentle, and anxious that his coffee should be as he liked it.
He seemed very happy. Life, she often thought, however much one
tabulated was yet a mystery. There were always some people it was
impossible to place. Frederick was one of them. He didn't seem to
bear the remotest resemblance to the original Frederick. He didn't
seem to have the least need of any of the things he used to say were so
important and beautiful--love, home, complete communion of thoughts,
complete immersion in each other's interests. After those early
painful attempts to hold him up to the point from which they had hand
in hand so splendidly started, attempts in which she herself had got
terribly hurt and the Frederick she supposed she had married was
mangled out of recognition, she hung him up finally by her bedside as
the chief subject of her prayers, and left him, except for those,
entirely to God. She had loved Frederick too deeply to be able now to
do anything but pray for him. He had no idea that he never went out of
the house without her blessing going with him too, hovering, like a
little echo of finished love, round that once dear head. She didn't
dare think of him as he used to be, as he had seemed to her to be in
those marvelous first days of their love-making, of their marriage.
Her child had died; she had nothing, nobody of her own to lavish
herself on. The poor became her children, and God the object of her
love. What could be happier than such a life, she sometimes asked
herself; but her face, and particularly her eyes, continued sad.
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