Muslin | Page 5

her
easy-chair about the second spring after her marriage, the shaggy shape
that haunts the back of my mind would hear her dreams, and the
wooing that began with the daffodils would continue always, for she is
a woman that could keep a lover till the end of time. At her death
husband and lover would visit her grave together and talk of her
perfections in the winter evenings. But if Violet did not die another
vagrant male would steal through the ilex-trees, a hunter in pursuit of
game, or else it might be a fisher, seated among the rocks waiting, for
tunny-fish. Either might take Violet's fancy. The author of Muslin
seems to have entertained a thought of some such pastoral frolic in the
Shelbourne Hotel--the opposition of husband and lover to the
newcomer, Harding, whom it had occurred to Mrs. Barton to invite to
Brookfield, and whom she would have invited had it not been for her
great matrimonial projects; my forerunner, who was an artist, saw that
any deflection of Mrs. Barton's thoughts would jeopardize his
composition, and he allowed Mrs. Barton to remain a chaperon. He was
right in this, but Violet should have been the impulse and nucleus of a
new story. . . . I began to think suddenly of the blight that would fall on
the twain if Violet's lover were to die, and to figure them sitting in the
evenings meditating on the admirable qualities of the deceased till in
their loneliness he would come to seem to them as a being more than
human, touching almost on the Divine. Their ears would retain the
sound of his voice, and the familiar furniture would provoke
remembrances of him. Ashamed of their weakness, their eyes would
seek the chair he used to sit in: it is away in a far corner, lest a casual
visitor should draw it forward and defile it with his presence--a thing
that happened once (the unhappy twain remember how they lacked
moral courage to beg him to choose another chair). The table, laid for
two, was too painful to behold, and they never enjoyed a meal, hardly
could they eat, till at last it was decided that his place should be laid for
him as if he had gone away on a journey, and might appear in the
doorway and sit down with them and share the repast as of yore--a
pretty deception the folly of which they were alive to (a little) but
would not willingly be without.

His room, too, awaits him, and his clothes have not been destroyed or
given to the poor, but he folded by charitable hands in the drawers kept
safe from moth with orris-root and lavender. His hat hangs on its
accustomed peg in the hall, and they think of it among many other
things. At last the silence of these lonely meditations is broken by
sudden recollections--for dinner the cook had sent up a boiled chicken
instead of roast, and he had looked upon boiled chicken as a vulgar
insularism always. Nor were there bananas on the table. Bananas were
an acquired taste with them, they had learned to eat the fruit for love of
their friend, and since he has gone they have not eaten the chicken roast
nor the fruit, and it seems to them that they should have eaten of these
things in memory of him. In the Spring they come upon his
pruning-knife, and discourse sadly on the changes he would have
advised. Spring opens into summer, and when summer drops into the
autumn Kilcarney's black passes into grey; he appears one morning in a
violet tie, and the tie, picked out of a drawer with indifferent hand,
causes Violet to doubt her husband's constancy. It was soon after this
thoughtless act that he began, for the thousandth time, to remind her
that the world might be searched in its dimmest corners and no friend
again found like the one they had lost. . . . The reflection had become
part of their habitual thought, and, feeling a little trite and
commonplace, Violet listened, or half-listened, engulfed in retrospect.
'I met in Merrion Square,' and she mentioned a name, 'and do you know
whom he seemed to be very like?' The colour died out of Kilcarney's
cheek and he could but murmur, 'Oh, Violet!' and colouring at being
caught up on what might be looked upon as a mental infidelity, she
answered, 'of course, none is like him . . . I wish you would not seek to
misunderstand me.'
The matter passed off, but next evening she sat looking at her husband,
her thoughts suspended for so long that he began to fear, wrongly
however, that she was about to put forward some accusation, to twit