“It annoys you?” said the lady, very coldly, straightening herself to an offended attitude.

“I confess it does.  Or rather, it worries me.  If I may beg——­”

“I understood you to invite me to your room.”

“I did.  And the fact of my having done so ought, I should think, to have withheld you from assailing me with your acrid tedium.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Otway, as she rose to her full height.  “I will leave you to your own tedium, which must be acrid enough, I imagine, to judge from the face you generally wear.”

And she haughtily withdrew.

A scene of this kind—­never more violent, always checked at the right moment—­occurred between them about once every month.  During the rest of their time they lived without mutual aggression; seldom conversing, but maintaining the externals of ordinary domestic intercourse.  Nor was either of them acutely unhappy.  The old man (Jerome Otway was sixty-five, but might have been taken for seventy) did not, as a rule, wear a sour countenance; he seldom smiled, but his grave air had no cast of gloominess; it was profoundly meditative, tending often to the rapture of high vision.  The lady had her own sufficient pursuits, chief among them a rigid attention to matters ecclesiastical, local and national.  That her husband held notably aloof from such interests was the subject of Mrs. Otway’s avowed grief, and her peculiar method of assailing his position brought about the periodical disturbance which seemed on the whole an agreeable feature of her existence.

He lived much in the past, brooding upon his years of activity as author, journalist, lecturer, conspirator, between 1846 and 1870.  He talked in his long days of silence with men whose names are written in history, men whom he had familiarly known, with whom he had struggled and hoped for the Better Time.  Mazzini and Herzen, Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin, Bakounine, Louis Blanc, and a crowd of less eminent fighters in the everlasting war of human emancipation.  The war that aims at Peace; the strife that assails tyranny, and militarism, and international hatred.  Beginning with Chartism (and narrowly escaping the fierce penalties suffered by some of his comrades), he grew to wider activities, and for a moment seemed likely to achieve a bright position among the liberators of mankind; but Jerome Otway had more zeal than power, and such powers as he commanded were scattered over too wide a field of enthusiastic endeavour.  He succeeded neither as man of thought nor as man of action.  His verses were not quite poetry; his prose was not quite literature; personally he interested and exalted, but without inspiring confidence such as is given to the born leader.  And in this year 1886, when two or three letters on the Irish Question appeared over his signature, few readers attached any meaning to the name.  Jerome Otway had fought his fight and was forgotten.