The Folly of Eustace | Page 5

at. Laughter, you know, is the great world's cat-o'-nine-tails. We fear it as little boys fear the birch on a winter's morning at school."
Eustace smiled uneasily.
"Do you laugh at me?" he asked.
"I have. You surely don't mind."
"No," he said, with an effort. Then: "Are you laughing to-night?"
"No. You have done an absurd thing, of course, but it happens to be becoming. You look--well, pretty--yes, that's the word--in your wig. Many men are ugly in their own hair. And, after all, what would life be without its absurdities? Probably you are right to enjoy being laughed at."
Eustace, who had seriously meditated putting off his mask forever that night, began to change his mind. The sentence, "Many men are ugly in their own hair," dwelt with him, and he felt fortified in his powdered wig. What if he took it off, and henceforth Winifred found him ugly? Does not the safety of many of us lie merely in dressing up? Do we not buy our fate at the costumier's?
"Just tell me one thing," Winifred went on. "Are you natural?"
"Natural?" he hesitated.
"Yes; I think you must be. You've got a whimsical nature."
"I suppose so." He thought of his journey with his father years ago, and added: "I wish I hadn't."
"Why? There is a charm in the fantastic, although comparatively few people see it. Life must be a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment to you."
"Sometimes. To-night it is different. It seems a sort of Longfellow life."
"What's that?"
"Real and earnest."
And then he proposed to her, with a laugh, to shoot an arrow at the dead poet and his own secret psalm.
And Winifred accepted him, partly because she thought him really strange, partly because he seemed so pretty in his wig, which she chose to believe his own hair.
They were married, and on the wedding-day the bridegroom astonished his guests by making a burlesque speech at the reception.
In anyone else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church--for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?--put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the happy pair passed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that Bluebeard's Chamber, the honeymoon.

II.
Winifred anticipated this honeymoon with calmness, but Eustace was too much in love to be calm. He was, on the contrary, in a high state of excitement, and of emotion, and the effort of making his ridiculous speech had nearly sent him into hysterics. But he had now fully resolved to continue in his whimsical course, and to play for ever the part of a highly erratic genius, driven hither and thither by the weird impulses of the moment. That he never had any impulses but such as were common to most ordinary young men was a sad fact which he meant to most carefully conceal from Winifred. He had made up his mind that she believed his mask to be his face. She had, therefore, married the mask. To divorce her violently from it might be fatal to their happiness. If he showed the countenance God had given him, she might cry: "I don't know you. You are a stranger. You are like all the other men I didn't choose to marry." His blood ran cold at the thought. No, he must keep it up. She loved his fantasies because she believed them natural to him. She must never suspect that they were not natural. So, as they travelled, he planned the campaign of married life, as doubtless others, strange in their new bondage, have planned. He gazed at Winifred, and thought, "What is her notion of the ideal husband, I wonder?" She gazed at him, and mused on his affection and his whimsicality, and what the two would lead to in connection with her fate. And the old, scarlet-faced guard smiled fatuously at them both through the window on which glared a prominent "Engaged" as he had smiled on many another pair of fools--so he silently dubbed them. Then they entered Bluebeard's Chamber and closed the door behind them.
Brighton was their destination. They meant to lose themselves in a marine crowd.
They stayed there for a fortnight, and then returned to town, Eustace more in love than ever.
But Winifred?
One afternoon she sat in the drawing-room of the pretty little house they had taken in Deanery Street, Park Lane. She was thinking, very definitely. The silent processes of even an ordinary woman's mind--what great male writer would not give two years of his life to sit with them and watch them, as the poet watches the flight of a swallow, or