Certainly, however, one day these present conditions of marriage will he changed. Marriage will be allowed for a certain period, say ten years.
Mr. George Meredith, in the Daily Mail of September 24, 1904.
"GIVE you some heads? My dear fellow, there need be no question of heads! This is to be a model will. You need simply put down, in as few words as are legally permissible—I know nothing of such things—that I leave all of which I die possessed to my wife."
Philip Dering threw his head back and gave the man to whom he was speaking a confident, smiling glance. Then he turned and walked quickly over to the narrow, old-fashioned, balconied window which, commanding the wide, wind-blown expanse of Abingdon Street, exactly faced the great cavity formed by the arch of the Victoria Tower.
To the right lay the riverside garden, a bright patch of delicate spring colouring and green verdure, bounded by the slow-moving grey waters of the Thames; and Bering's eager eyes travelled on till he saw, detaching itself against an April afternoon horizon, the irregular mass of building formed by Lambeth Palace and the Lollards' Tower.
"You wish everything to go to Louise? All right, I'll make a note of that." The speaker, a round-faced, slightly bald, shrewd-looking lawyer, looked indulgently at his friend as he added: "But wait a bit—I promise that yours shall be a model will; only, you seem to have forgotten, my dear fellow, that you may outlive your wife. Now, should you have the misfortune to lose Louise, to whom would you wish to devise this fifteen thousand pounds? It's possible, too, though not very probable, I admit, that you may both die at the same time—both be killed in a railway accident, for instance."
"Such good fortune may befall us——" Dering spoke quite simply, and accepted the other's short laugh with great good humour. "Oh! you know what I mean—I always have thought husbands and wives—who care, I mean—ought to die on the same day. That they don't do so is one of the many strange mysteries which complicate life. But look here, Wingfield——"
The speaker had turned away from the window. He had again taken up his stand opposite the other's broad writing-table, and not even the cheap, ill-made clothes could hide the graceful lines of the tall, active figure, not even the turned-down collar and orange silk tie could destroy the young man's look of rather subtle distinction.
"Failing Louise, I should like this money, at my death, to be divided equally between the young Hintons and your kids"; and as the other made a gesture of protest, Dering added quickly: "What better could I do? Louise is devoted to Jack Hinton's children, and I've always regarded you—I have indeed, old man—as my one real friend. Of course it's possible now,"—an awkward, shy break came into his voice—"it's possible now, I say, that we may have children of our own; I don't suppose you've ever realised how poor, how horribly poor, we've been all these years."
He looked away, avoiding the other man's eyes; then, picking up his hat and stick with a quick, nervous gesture, was gone.
After the door had shut on his friend. Wingfield remained standing for a while. His hands mechanically sorted the papers and letters lying on his table into neat little heaps; but his thoughts were travelling backward through his and Dering's past lives.
The friends had first met at the City of London School, for they were much of an age, though the lawyer looked the elder of the two. Then Dering had gone to Cambridge, and Wingfield, more humbly, to take up life as an articled clerk to a good firm of old-established attorneys. Again, later, they had come together once more, sharing a modest lodging, while Dering earned a small, uncertain income by contributing to the literary weeklies, by ghosting writers more fortunate than himself, by tutoring whenever he got the chance—in a word, by resorting to the few expedients open to the honest educated Londoner lacking a definite profession. The two men had not parted company till Dering, enabled to do so by the help of a small legacy, had chosen to marry a Danish girl as good-looking, as highminded, as unpractical as himself.
But had Louise Dering proved herself so unpractical during the early years of her married life? Wingfield, standing there, his mind steeped in memories, compared her, with an unconscious critical sigh, with his own stolid, unimaginative wife, Kate. As he did so he wondered whether, after all, Dering had not known how to make the best of both worlds. True, he and his Louise had gone through some bad times together. Wingfield had been the one intimate of the young couple when they began their married life in a three-roomed flat in Gray's Inn, and he had been aware, painfully so, of the incessant watchful struggle with money difficulties, never mentioned while the struggle was in being; for only the rich can afford to complain of poverty. He had admired, with all his heart, the high courage then shown by his friend's wife.