The Greater Inclination | Page 2

again. I suppose it
was Vincent Rendle's way of taking his tea and has become a sacred
rite."
"Do you know Mrs. Anerton?" cried Danyers, disturbed by this careless
familiarity with the habits of his divinity.
"'And did I once see Shelley plain?' Mercy, yes! She and I were at
school together--she's an American, you know. We were at a pension
near Tours for nearly a year; then she went back to New York, and I
didn't see her again till after her marriage. She and Anerton spent a
winter in Rome while my husband was attached to our Legation there,
and she used to be with us a great deal." Mrs. Memorall smiled
reminiscently. "It was the winter."

"The winter they first met?"
"Precisely--but unluckily I left Rome just before the meeting took place.
Wasn't it too bad? I might have been in the Life and Letters. You know
he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first saw
her."
"And did you see much of her after that?"
"Not during Rendle's life. You know she has lived in Europe almost
entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad,
she was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn't
wanted. The fact is, she cared only about his friends--she separated
herself gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it's different;
she's desperately lonely; she's taken to writing to me now and then; and
last year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me to meet her
in Venice, and I spent a week with her there."
"And Rendle?"
Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. "Oh, I never was allowed a
peep at _him_; none of her old friends met him, except by accident.
Ill-natured people say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one
happened in while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton's study,
and the husband mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had
departed. Anerton, you know, was really much more ridiculous about it
than his wife. Mary was too clever to lose her head, or at least to show
she'd lost it--but Anerton couldn't conceal his pride in the conquest. I've
seen Mary shiver when he spoke of Rendle as our poet. Rendle always
had to have a certain seat at the dinner-table, away from the draught
and not too near the fire, and a box of cigars that no one else was
allowed to touch, and a writing-table of his own in Mary's
sitting-room--and Anerton was always telling one of the great man's
idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his cigars, though
Anerton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a star-sapphire,
and how untidy his writing-table was, and how the house- maid had
orders always to bring the waste-paper basket to her mistress before
emptying it, lest some immortal verse should be thrown into the

dust-bin."
"The Anertons never separated, did they?"
"Separated? Bless you, no. He never would have left Rendle! And
besides, he was very fond of his wife."
"And she?"
"Oh, she saw he was the kind of man who was fated to make himself
ridiculous, and she never interfered with his natural tendencies."
From Mrs. Memorall, Danyers further learned that Mrs. Anerton,
whose husband had died some years before her poet, now divided her
life between Rome, where she had a small apartment, and England,
where she occasionally went to stay with those of her friends who had
been Rendle's. She had been engaged, for some time after his death, in
editing some juvenilia which he had bequeathed to her care; but that
task being accomplished, she had been left without definite occupation,
and Mrs. Memorall, on the occasion of their last meeting, had found
her listless and out of spirits.
"She misses him too much--her life is too empty. I told her so--I told
her she ought to marry."
"Oh!"
"Why not, pray? She's a young woman still--what many people would
call young," Mrs. Memorall interjected, with a parenthetic glance at the
mirror. "Why not accept the inevitable and begin over again? All the
King's horses and all the King's men won't bring Rendle to life-and
besides, she didn't marry him when she had the chance."
Danyers winced slightly at this rude fingering of his idol. Was it
possible that Mrs. Memorall did not see what an anti-climax such a
marriage would have been? Fancy Rendle "making an honest woman"
of Silvia; for so society would have viewed it! How such a reparation
would have vulgarized their past--it would have been like "restoring" a

masterpiece; and how exquisite must have been the perceptions of the
woman who, in defiance of appearances, and perhaps of her own secret