The Suspicions of Ermengarde

Maxwell Gray

Sep 2020 · Library of Alexandria

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Fog of the colour known as pea-soup—in reality amber mixed with lemon-peel and delicately tinted with smut—pervaded the genial shades of Kensington Gardens and cast a halo of breathless romance over many a "long, unlovely street" and many a towering pile of crudely hideous flats in the regions round about. It sneaked down chimneys, stalked insolently through front doors, regardless of locks, curtains and screens; it wandered noiselessly about houses, penetrating even to my lady's chamber; it permeated cosy drawing-rooms and snug dining-rooms with gloom like that of an ancestral ghost, or an unforgettable sorrow, or—the haunting horror of unpaid bills.

"Yes, that is the true, the inevitable simile, the fitting word," Ermengarde said to herself with melancholy triumph, from her downy nest in the deep warm Chesterfield by the fire, "the haunting horror of unpaid bills. 'Haunting horror' is good. And it's not so much the unpaidness of the bills as the size of them—and the kind of them. The butcher's bill, for instance—how enormous—and yet Arthur takes it as coolly as the collection in church, or the waiter's tip, that just means a finger slipped into a waistcoat pocket and out again, without even looking. When one thinks of the lovely things one might buy with the butcher's quarterly bill and can't!"

Looking up at the ceiling as if in ecstatic vision of lovely things, she sighed deeply, and wished that man was not carnivorous, and wondered why the world went so thwartingly, and what was the matter with everything, and if civilization was worth that last, worst penalty of a real London fog—an ideally high and gamey one like this, that you might smell all the way across Dover Straits—as least, so Arthur once averred of a fog of less powerful bouquet.

All of a sudden, out of the hidden heart of darkness, whence those heavy fog-folds rolled, came, on the wings of some evil spirit of the nether pit, the deadly thought—was Arthur worth—worth what? the pains and penalties of wedded bliss? Poor old Arthur! No, no, that was unthinkable; the downy depths of the Chesterfield suddenly became void of the resting form; there was quick pacing to and fro in fire-gleam and shadow, with knitted brow and troubled glance.

The Demon Influenza was to blame for much, for everything—yes, everything, even that little rift within the lute of household joy and peace. For the little rift was there. But could the Influenza Demon be blamed for those five successive and expensive hats, that in the space of half as many weeks had to be discarded, each after either, as impossible—with her complexion—or for those two gowns, creations of a tailor of European renown, that on the second Wearing made her an absolute frump? Had the Demon so irrevocably impaired her looks and altered her figure? That was conceivable; but not Arthur's conduct on the occasion. No demon, nothing, short of original sin, could be answerable for that.