Chapter Fifteen
We went on a walk together, he and I.
He went right down to it. “You cannot think that I would be that way with her if I were planning on making you a cuckold. Give me some credit. If I were going to do things with your wife, I should behave in public as if I were indifferent to her.”
“This is your defense?” I was all agog. “You are an absolute fiend, I think.”
“I only want you to stop,” he said. “I cannot bear it, and she might, in fact, need me right now, so I think that you must allow me to assist you both, and you must not feel threatened, because there is no threat.”
“I am not threatened,” I muttered. “I never communicated to you—”
“You did not need to,” he said. “I could read it all over you. Darcy, you may think you conceal your emotions from others, but you are terrible at it.”
I winced. “Terrible? Really?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Now, sometimes, I think you do not even know what you are feeling. I shall say to you that you must not feel a way that you are obviously feeling, and you will say that you have not felt that at all, and will be affronted that I should say such a thing, and then will insist you did not feel that way—”
“I do not know what you are speaking of!” I said, glaring at him. “You have brought me on this walk to scold me, but I have not done anything wrong, and you have been brazenly flirting with my wife since the moment you met her.”
“I have not. This is the way I talk to positively everyone,” he said.
I was about to protest, but then I realized it was actually true. He was a horrible flirt, and he flirted with everyone—married women, widows, grandmothers, everyone.
“I have this, you see.” He pointed to his face.
Richard was not handsome. There was nothing to point out in his countenance that was exactly unappealing, but it was sort of a matter of all of the parts not really working together in harmony.
His teeth might have been too big? Or perhaps it was only that his nose was too small?
“People are not naturally drawn to me, so I must work hard to make them like me. You would not understand, because you have every advantage and it is a good thing, too, because you put exactly zero effort into making people like you, and yet, they like you anyway.”
“I put in effort,” I said. “You have no idea.”
He scoffed.
I decided not to belabor this point, but it seemed to me that the effort it took for me to do something that was supposed to be simple—dancing with a stranger at a dance or something of that nature—was much higher than it was for everyone else, and that it took more out of me.
“Anyway, I have not come to scold you,” he said. “I have come to reassure you that I am no threat to you. I would never do such a thing, no matter how I felt, Will, and you ought to know that of me.”
I supposed I did know it. “I apologize. It was not fair of me to accuse you, even if I only did it in my mind.”
“I find, in situations such as this, it is not the behavior of the man in question, anyway. It is something else. Something in the relationship has gone wrong, and it makes it easy to look about for trouble. The easy trouble to find is another man, because one can do something about that trouble. Just challenge it to a duel. Problem solved.”
“I would never challenge anyone to a—”
“Anyway, it’s almost never the problem,” said Richard.
“Who have you been dueling over?” I said. “You have never, to my knowledge, so much as courted a woman.”
“Oh, Will, this is not the point.”
“What, then, you’re that attached to your affairs with opera singers, is that it?”
“She was an actress,” said Richard tightly, “and I won’t have you mocking it.
She was…” He sighed, scratching his forehead.
“Look, trust me when I say it’s never another man that is the root of the problem.
Women do not seek other men when they are happy with the one they have.
If she is looking elsewhere, something has already gone wrong. ”
I stopped walking at that, halted by what he had said. Yes, he was right.
He stopped walking, too. “So, then, that arrow struck true? What has gone wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I’m not sure anything in this marriage of ours has gone right.”
“Why did you marry her? She’s lovely and rather your perfect match, I think, and if you tell me it’s that, that you fell madly in love, I shall accept it, but it doesn’t sound like you, truly.”
I started walking again. “It was all complicated. Everyone thought I compromised her—”
“Yes, I heard that rumor, and I knew it was not true. You would never elope.”
“Well, precisely,” I said.
“Nor would you jilt a woman if she had hurt her ankle,” said Richard. “I couldn’t even understand that. What man would?”
“Well, the point was simply that she was a great deal more trouble to elope with if she had a hurt ankle is all. There are men who would rethink it all at that juncture.”
“I suppose,” said Richard. “So, then I heard the thing about the house.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Ah,” he said.
“So, the rumors were spreading, and there was damage to her family’s reputation, and her father has no heir, and there are five daughters and…”
“You rescued her, yes, I see that. That is something you would do.”
“It was no rescue. She was not inclined to be rescued.”
“Oh, well, that is good, however! Because you have no worry that she is only pretending to like you because of what you did for her.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling. “Yes, of course.”
“What is the trouble in the marriage?”
“It is this,” I said, gesturing with both hands. “The fact she is not proper, that she is not accepted, that she is not the sort of woman I should have married.”
“But you did marry her,” said Richard. “And I see the way you look at each other, and everything is quite obviously… that seems fine.” He chuckled.
“Yes, but I think that’s part of it. She thinks I married her because of, er, lust. Which, I suppose, is accurate.”
“No,” said Richard, laughing. “No, truly, Will, that is nothing like you at all—”
“I know!” I said with some heat. “I do not understand it, Richard, but I saw her, and I lost my head.”
“That’s not lust, it’s love,” said Richard. “It’s different.”
“How?” I said.
“That’s what love is. When a man has that notion to go against everything, to go to the ends of the earth if necessary, for a woman. That’s love.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s still lust. Love is more than that.
It’s when you care about more than simply securing her, it’s when you have a continued interest in her happiness and pleasure, and when you want to please her more than you want to please yourself and when she cares for you in return in much the same way and—”
“That develops later,” he said.
“You would know because you have ever so much experience with this,” I said dryly. “You’ve been in love a number of times.”
“Just the once.”
“With the actress.”
His nostrils flared.
I repented of it, then. I should not have teased him in that way, I supposed. I opened my mouth to apologize, but he was talking again.
“All right, yes, it’s abominably embarrassing to have fallen for an actress in that way.
And I cannot but admit it was foolish, in the end, and that she may never have felt the same things for me in return, but she also had to be concerned with her own well-being, and I had not the means or the inclination to keep her, so she had to keep up her time on the stage, and I resented it, and things went badly, and then he arrived, with his money and his offer of renting a whole house for her, and I was so resentful of the fact she would not give up acting to be with me that what enticement did she have to stay with me?
Of course she left.” He turned to me. “What is wrong with your marriage, Will? What are you doing wrong?”
“I…” I shook my head. “I do not know. But we were together every night until the night of the dinner with your parents, and she has rebuffed me since then.”
“And you thought that was because of me,” he said. “Yes, I can see why you did.”
We walked in silence for some time.
“She thinks you married her because of lust,” he said. “So, she is removing that element of your relationship and she wishes to see what you will do.”
“That makes sense, actually,” I said.
“Let it be for now,” he said. “Do not visit her bedchamber, don’t ask about it, act as if it is nothing, and everything goes on as it has before.”
“This is your advice?”
“Yes,” he said. “But it is not enough, of course, something else is wrong. Go back to what you were saying about how she does not like it that everyone in society thinks she’s improper, again? It hardly seems fair she is holding that against you. You cannot change everyone else’s minds.”
“It is not… everyone else,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I sighed heavily. “I begged off the dinner with your mother. The invitation was addressed to her, but I never let her see it. I lied and said we had a previous engagement and did not tell her.”
“You what?” Richard shook his head, air whistling through his teeth.
I sighed.
“I do not understand. You did marry her, Will.”
“Yes, obviously,” I said.
“But… she is correct? You married her because you lusted after her, nothing more, because you do not wish her to be your wife? You are ashamed that she is your wife—”
“Why does everyone keep saying I am ashamed?” I might have yelled it.
“Because you are hiding her—”
“It’s not about what I think, it’s about what they think,” I said.
“Obviously, I think she’s wonderful, flawless, the epitome of everything a wife should be, the most lovely and delightful of creatures.
Obviously, since the moment I saw her—well, since the moment with the hair and the mud and the—never mind.
Obviously, once I fell for her, I have thought of little else than her. Obviously, I am devoted to her.”
“I’m so very confused right now.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter what I think. Society at large thinks something else.”