Sydney sighed as she read this letter. It was not often Eugenia wrote so despondently, but Sydney’s perceptions were acute.
“Poor Eugenia,” she thought. “It isn’t only these outside things which are wrong, I fear. If other things had equalled her hopes, these would have been all right. The want lies deeper, I fear – the blank is one hard to fill. How I wish I could see her!”
The next week brought Eugenia’s invitation. It would have been difficult to decline it. “You must come,” she wrote. “I am living in the thoughts of it, Sydney; it will be absolute cruelty to refuse. I cannot tell you how I long to see you all again.”
So, though leaving home even for a few days, was now no small effort to Mr Laurence, and though Frank Thurston groaned a good deal in anticipation, he “hated fine houses and grand people,” and all his people, the East-enders of Wareborough, would go to the bad in double-quick time if he let them out of his sight for the best part of a week; who would take the night schools? who would see to the confirmation classes? etc, etc, etc – it ended, as Sydney had quietly determined it should, in a letter of acceptance being sent to Halswood by return of post. And Mrs Thurston took the opportunity of chaffing her husband a little on what she termed his growing self-conceit.
”‘Un bon prêtre,’” she said, ”‘c’est bien bon.’ I quite agree with Jean Valjean. But still, Frank, of the very best of things it is possible to have too much.”
Whereupon Frank told her she was very impertinent. There was little fear of these two misunderstanding each other.
There is a mischievous French proverb which tells us that “le malheur n’est jamais si près de nous qu’alors que tout nous sourit.” Things were certainly more smiling than usual with Eugenia Chancellor the morning that she received Sydney’s cheerful acceptance of the invitation to Halswood, and was graciously told by Beauchamp in answer to her announcement of the news “that he was glad they were coming, and he hoped the weather would be fine.” But misfortune – disappointment, at least, was near at hand; misfortune in the shape of a plain-looking little old lady in a shabby pony carriage, who about an hour after luncheon this same day made her appearance under the ugly portico, and learning that Mrs Chancellor was at home, alighted, and was shown into the morning-room, giving a name for announcement to the footman newly imported from town, which, taken in conjunction with her unimposing appearance, somewhat excited that gentleman’s surprise.
She had not driven in by the grand entrance, but by the second best lodge, that on the road leading to the village of Stebbing-le-Bray. Captain Chancellor, setting off on a long ride, passed the old lady in the funny little carriage, and, wondering who she could be, asked for information on the subject from the man at the lodge, a venerable person thoroughly up in local celebrities. The answer he received caused him to open his handsome blue eyes, and to change his programme for the afternoon. He rode out at the Stebbing lodge, made a cut across the country which brought him on to the Chilworth Road, and re-entering his own domain, dismounted at home twenty minutes after he had set off, to find his wife and the little old lady in evidently friendly converse in the morning-room.
Somewhat startled by her husband’s unlooked-for reappearance, uncertain if he and her visitor were already acquainted, Eugenia hesitated a moment in introducing her companions. But the stranger was quite equal to the occasion.
“How do you do, Captain Chancellor?” she said, cordially. “I am so pleased to meet you at last. By hearsay, do you know, you are already an old friend of mine?”
Beauchamp bowed with a slight air of inquiry.
“A nephew of mine, or, to be exact, which they say women never are, a grand-nephew of my husband’s, has so often spoken of you to me. You will remember him – George Vandeleur; he was in your regiment in the Crimea, though you have seldom met each other since?”
Captain Chancellor’s face lightened up, and what Eugenia called his nicest look came over it. He had been very kind to young Vandeleur, at the time little more than a boy, and it was pleasant to find himself remembered.
Lady Hereward had the happiest knack of saying agreeable things, of pleasing when she wished to please. Those who liked her liked her thoroughly, and trusted her implicitly; but, on the other hand, those who disliked her were quite as much in earnest about it. And both parties, I suspect, coalesced in being more or less afraid of her, for, insignificant as she appeared, she could hit hard in certain directions, though her heart was true, her sympathies wide. Coming, perhaps, within Roma Eyrecourt’s category of “those to whom it was easy to be good,” there had certainly been nothing in the circumstances of her life to develop meanness in any form, and on this, in whatever guise she came across it – humbug, petty ambition, class prejudice – she was therefore, as is the tendency of poor humanity towards the foibles oneself “is not inclined to,” apt to be rather too hard. Since birth she had been placed in a perfectly assured and universally recognised position. She had had nothing to be ambitious about; even her want of beauty had not amounted to a trial, for her powers of fascination, as is sometimes the case with plain women, had been more than compensatingly great; and before she was twenty she had had every unexceptionable parti of the day at her feet. How it came to pass she was not “spoilt” those who knew her best often marvelled, but even they did not know all about her. For she had had her sorrows, had passed through a fiery furnace – how it all happened matters little, the love-story of a plain-looking old woman of sixty would hardly be interesting begun at the wrong end – and the gold of her nature had emerged, therefrom, unwasted and pure. In the end she had married, at twenty-two, Lord Hereward, a peer of great wealth and position, a man whom she liked and respected, and with whom she had bravely made the best of her life. Trouble was not over for her yet, however. She had two children, a son who grew up satisfactorily to man’s estate, behaving himself creditably at school, and college, and everywhere, who in time married, as was to be expected, and became the centre of another family; and a daughter, who was as the apple of her mother’s eye, whom she loved as strong natures only can love. And one day – one awful day – the little daughter died suddenly and painfully, and Margaret Hereward’s heart broke.
And all the outside world said: “How sad for the poor Herewards; but what a blessing it was not the boy,” and then forgot all about it, for the chief sufferer never reminded any one of her woe.
It was forty years ago now, and few remembered that a little Lady Alice Godwin had ever existed. In time, of course, her mother came to learn that even with a broken heart one can go on living, and her healthy nature reasserted itself in an increased power of sympathy – an active energy in lightening or, at least, sharing other women’s sorrows. But still, as she grew older, she hardened in her special dislikes, her pet intolerances.
She went on talking about her nephew for a while, explaining, by the way, how it was she had come to make her first call at Halswood in so informal a fashion.
“I am staying at Stebbing Rectory for a day or two,” she said. “A young cousin of mine is the wife of Mr Mervyn, the clergyman there. She has just got her first baby – a little girl;” she paused for an instant; “such a nice baby, and I came over to look after her a little. She has no mother. Hearing how very near I was to you, I thought I would not miss the opportunity of seeing you so easily. It is a long drive from Marshlands here. When you come to see me it must not be only for a call.”
She did not tell that the calling on the new Mrs Chancellor, which had been a vague and indefinite intention in her mind before coming to Stebbing, had taken active form, from hearing from her cousin some of the local gossip about the stranger – that she was pretty, but so stiff and reserved that no one could get on with her; that some people called her awkward and underbred, others suspected that she was not happy (Mrs Mervyn’s own opinion), but that from one cause or another her life bid fair to become a lonely and isolated one. And the sight of Eugenia’s face rewarded the old lady for the kindly effort she had made. It was not so much her beauty, though Lady Hereward loved to see a pretty face; it was her sweet, bright, yet wistful expression, that straightway touched the maternal chord in her visitor’s heart. Possibly, too, contradiction had something to do with the interest Eugenia at once awakened.
“Underbred, indeed!” she said to herself, contemptuously. “I wish I could teach some people I know, what good breeding really is. As to her being unhappy, I can’t say. I must see more of her.”
She acted at once on this determination, for, before she left, she invited her new young friends to spend three days of the next week but one at Marshlands. There was a particular reason for fixing this time; “George” was coming, and would be delighted to meet Captain Chancellor again.
“I would give you a choice if I could,” she went on, fancying that she perceived a slight hesitation in Mrs Chancellor’s manner, “for I really do want you to come. But I fear I cannot. We are going away the end of the same week to Hereward, for some time. We old people need a breath of sea air now and then.”
“It is exceedingly kind of you. I should have liked very much to go to you the week after next,” began Eugenia, looking as if she meant what she said. “It is so unlucky – but I am afraid we must decline. We are engaged for the whole of that week at home. You remember, Beauchamp? I heard this morning that – ”
“I think you have made a confusion between the week after next and the week after that,” said Captain Chancellor, blandly. “I don’t know of anything to prevent our accepting Lady Hereward’s invitation. We did expect some friends; but, don’t you remember, Eugenia, that Colonel Masterton put off his visit for a week?”
“Yes,” said Eugenia, quietly; “I remember.”
“Then may I hope to see you,” asked Lady Hereward, feeling a little puzzled, “on Tuesday? – that will be the 22nd. George comes the same day.”
“Certainly,” said Beauchamp. “We shall be delighted to join you.”
And “Thank you – you are very, very kind,” said Eugenia again.
The tone in which the simple words were uttered was almost girlishly cordial, yet, somehow, Lady Hereward did not feel satisfied. “Her manner is a little peculiar,” she thought to herself, as she drove back again to Stebbing-le-Bray, “though at first she seemed so frank. I hope my invitation did not really interfere with anything. Could it be shyness that made her not want to come? How very lovely her eyes are! I wonder if my Alice’s eyes would have looked like that – they were brown. Alice would not have been so pretty. And, dear me, by this time she might have had a daughter as old as that child! Ah, my little Alice!”
When Lady Hereward had gone, Eugenia sat still for a moment or two, then rose and left the room. In the hall she met her husband.
“Where are you going?” he said. “Come in here for a minute,” opening the door of his study, beside which they were standing. She followed him, but did not sit down. “Tell me,” he went on, “how do you like the old lady?”
“Very much,” replied Eugenia; then turned again, as if eager to go.
“What are you in such a hurry about? Can’t you wait a minute?” he said, impatiently. “Where are you going?”
“To write to Sydney, of course, to put off their visit,” she answered, her lips quivering. “I must do it at once.”
“Confound Sydney!” he broke out, rudely. “Your temper, Eugenia, is enough to provoke a saint. Wait an instant – do be reasonable – why can’t you propose to Sydney to – ”
But he had gone too far. Eugenia turned and looked at him for a moment with the unlovely light of angry indignation in her eyes; then left the room quietly.
“By Jove!” said Beauchamp, when left to himself, “I begin to suspect I have been a great fool, after all!”
But reflection and a cigar soothed him a little; half an hour later he followed his wife to her boudoir. She was writing busily.
“Eugenia,” he began, “I am sorry for my rudeness just now, but you are very unreasonable. Why can’t you write to your people, and ask them to come on the Friday? We return then. Any one but you would understand my reasons for wishing to go to Marshlands.”
“I do understand them, rather too well,” replied his wife, coldly. “As for asking my people to come on Friday, it is out of the question. My brother-in-law cannot be away on Sunday; and besides, I cannot ask my father and Sydney – neither of them strong – to come so long a journey for only two days.”
“Why for only two days?”
“Because on Monday all your friends are coming, and you do not wish mine to be here at the same time.”
“I never said anything of the kind,” exclaimed Beauchamp, angrily, aware nevertheless that he had thought something very much of the kind. It was not that he was ashamed of Mr Laurence or Sydney; he liked them both very well; but there had been a good deal of “chaff” about his Wareborough marriage, and he had imagined more. He could ill bear chaff, and his constitutional and avowed arrogance laid him peculiarly open to it in certain directions. How he had sneered and made fun of other men in the old days for being “caught” by a pretty face or a pair of bright eyes! He was not ashamed of his marriage – he was proud of his wife in herself – but on the whole, he preferred that his old friends, on their first visit, should not find the house full of his Wareborough relations-in-law. But he had not imagined that Eugenia suspected this.
“I never said anything of the kind,” he repeated, working himself into a rage. “But I warn you, Eugenia, if you don’t take care what you are about, you will drive me into thinking, and saying too, many things I never wish to think or say.”
She got up from her seat, and stood facing him.
“I know what you mean,” she said, huskily, a white despair creeping over her face. “You mean that you regret your marriage. Why did you do it at all then? – tell me. Why did you make me think you everything great and noble, to open my eyes now like this? Why did you not leave me where I was, happy and loved, instead of making me care for you? Why did you ask me to be your wife?”
“Why, indeed? You may well ask,” replied Captain Chancellor, in a bitter, contemptuous tone.
Then he turned and left the room. He put down all she had said to “temper,” of course; but some of her words had wounded and mortified him not a little.
Eugenia stood there where he had left her, in blank, bewildered misery. Only one thought glanced with any brightness through the black cloud of wretchedness which seemed to choke her.
“He did love me once,” she said to herself. “If all the rest was a dream, still he did love me once.”
And but for this, she thought she must have died.
Volume Three – Chapter Four.
“By the Spring.”
Life, that dares sendA challenge to his end,And when it comes, say, “Welcome, friend.”Crashaw.Tuesday the 22nd came, but Captain Chancellor set off on his visit to Marshlands alone. Eugenia was ill – too ill to leave her room, though better than she had been. The restrained suffering of the last few weeks, the unhealthily reserved and isolated life she had begun to live – she to whom sympathy was as the air she breathed – all had told upon her; and the excitement of the painful discussion with her husband the day of Lady Hereward’s unfortunate visit, had been the finishing stroke. After that she gave way altogether.
She was not sorry to be ill. On the whole, she felt it the best thing that could have happened to her. She was glad to be alone. She was very glad now that Sydney’s visit had been deferred. With all her haste and impulsiveness, there was in her a curious mixture of clear-headedness and reasoning power. She liked to understand things – to get to the bottom of them. Now that she had left off pretending to deceive herself with false representations – now that she had ceased to try to cheat herself into imagining she was happy – she found a strange, half-morbid satisfaction in dissecting and analysing the whole – her own character and her husband’s; the past lives of both, and the influences that had made them what they were; the special, definite causes of their discordancy.
“He is not – I see it plainly now,” she said to herself, with a curious, hopeless sort of calm, “he is not in the very least the man I imagined. That Beauchamp has never existed. Is it just, therefore, that I should blame the real one for not being what he never was?” Here she got a little puzzled, and tried to look at it from a fresh point of view. “And being what he is, and no more, why should I not make the best of it? It seems to me there is something repulsive and unworthy in the thought. I would almost rather go on being miserable. Yet I suppose many women have had to do it. I could fancy Sydney, for instance, doing it, and never letting any one suspect she had had it to do. In time, perhaps, I may find it easier, or grow callous.”
Then she would set to work to think out a new rôle for herself – that of an utterly lonely, impossibly self-reliant woman, living a life of self-abnegation, of lofty devotion to duty – unappreciated devotion, unsuspected abnegation – such as no woman has ever yet lived since women were. Seen through the softening medium of physical weakness, not amounting to actual suffering, this new way of looking at things came to have a certain attraction for her. The idea of total and lasting sacrifice of all hopes of personal happiness, all yearning for sympathy, was grand enough and impossible enough to recommend itself greatly to this ardent, extreme nature, to which anything was better than second bests, nothing so antagonistic as compromise in any form.
“I have staked my all and lost,” she said to herself with a sort of piteous grandiloquence; “there is nothing left me but duty and endurance; for though he did love me, I doubt if he does so now. I am not necessary to his happiness. He does not and cannot understand me.”
Only unfortunately there were two or three little difficulties in the way of settling down comfortably to this conclusion. In the first place, notwithstanding her love of theorising, and of idealising even the woes of her lot, Eugenia was essentially honest, and being so she could not allow to herself that her conduct had been blameless, especially in this last and most serious disagreement. She had said things which she knew would gall and irritate her husband. In the morbid excitement of the moment she owned to herself that she had even wished them to have this effect, that his behaviour might excuse the violence of her indignation. And her conduct in general – her conduct ever since their marriage – ever since, at least, the first few weeks of careless happiness – how did that now appear to her from her new point of view? She knew she had been gentle, and in a superficial sense unselfish; with but very rare exceptions she had entirely merged her own wishes in those of her husband, had opposed nothing that he had suggested. Such submission, such sinking of her own individuality, had been unnatural and forced, completely foreign to her character. And, what had been its motive? Not the highest – far from it. It had not been that she really believed that in so doing she was acting her wifely part to perfection; it had not been earnest endeavour after the best within her reach that had prompted her, but rather, a cowardly, a selfish determination to close her eyes to the facts of her life – a weak refusal to see anything she did not want to see – the old wilful cry, “All or nothing; give me all or I die” – the shrinking from owning, even to herself, the self-willed impetuosity with which she had acted – the terror of acknowledging that she had been deceived, or rather, had deceived herself.
“Yes,” she said, “I have been all wrong together. How selfish I have been too! Months ago how indignant I used to get with poor Sydney if she ever attempted, as she used to call it, to ‘clip my wings for me.’ How angry I was with papa when he suggested that we should defer our marriage till we knew a little more of each other! How selfish I was in Paris, too – selfish and unsympathising in Beauchamp’s change of fortune! Perhaps, after all, it is no more than I have deserved that he should feel as he does now.”
The reflection was a wholesome one, and its influence softening, and Beauchamp had been very kind since her illness. He might not understand her, but at times she felt it was certainly going too far to say that he no longer cared for her. He seemed to have already quite forgotten all about this last discussion, and in truth the impression it had made upon him had been by no means a deep one. “It was all a fit of temper of Eugenia’s,” he said to himself, and as one of his fixed ideas was that such a thing as a woman without a temper had never existed, he resigned himself to his fate, with the hope that his share of this unavoidable drawback to the charms of married life might be small.
Up to the last Captain Chancellor hoped that his wife would be able to accompany him to Marshlands. To do him justice, he was very reluctant to go without her.
“It is such a pity,” he said. “It would be just what I should like, for you to see a good deal of Lady Hereward. It isn’t every one that she takes to, I can tell you.”
“I like her in herself,” said Eugenia; “the only thing I dislike her for is that she is Lady Hereward. I got tired of her name before I had ever seen her.”
The moment she had said this she regretted it. Beauchamp’s brow clouded over.
“Of course,” he replied, coldly, “if you set yourself against her I can’t help it. Perhaps the best plan would be for me to write making an excuse for us both, and have done with the acquaintance. I am sick of discussions about everything I propose.”
It was hard upon her; it was so seldom, so very seldom she had opposed him in anything, or even expressed an opinion.
“I am very sorry I cannot go,” she said, “but your giving up going is not to be thought of. There is no reason for it. I am not seriously ill. There is nothing wrong with me but what a few days’ rest will set right.”
This was true. So Captain Chancellor set off for Marshlands alone, and Eugenia, solitary and suffering, spent in her own room the week she had so eagerly anticipated.
Time went on. November past, midwinter is soon at hand, and Christmas had come and gone before, contrary to the Chilworth doctor’s sanguine opinion, Mrs Chancellor was at all like herself again. It was a dreary winter to her. Had she been in good health, some reaction from the hopeless depression which had gradually taken hold of her would have been pretty sure to set in – a reaction, perhaps, of a sound and healthy nature; possibly, nevertheless, of the reverse. This, however, was not the case. At the beginning of her illness, things had looked more promising: her husband’s kindness had touched and softened her, her own reflections had pointed the right way. But as the days went on and Eugenia felt herself growing weaker instead of stronger, her clearer view of things clouded over again. It takes a great reserve of mutual trust and sympathy to stand the wearing effects of a trying though not acute illness. Beauchamp got tired of his wife’s never being well – so at least she fancied – tired of it, and then indifferent, or if not indifferent, accustomed to it. And whether this was really the case or not, there was some excuse for her believing it to be so, for the habitual small selfishness of his nature was thrown out in strong relief by circumstances undoubtedly trying.
“If people looked forward to realities, they would choose their husbands and wives differently. It is only about a year ago since I first met Beauchamp. Oh, how silly and ignorant I must have been! How perfect life – life with him – looked to me,” thought Eugenia, bitterly.
She was more than usually depressed that day. Captain Chancellor had left home to spend a week at Winsley, where a merry Christmas party was expected, and though Eugenia had no wish to accompany him, even had she been able to do so, though she had not put the slightest difficulty in the way of his going, yet his readiness to do so wounded and embittered her. For he had got into the habit of often leaving home now – never for very long at a time, certainly – never without making every arrangement for her comfort; but yet the fact of his liking to go, increased her unhappy state of mind. Everything seemed against her. During all these months she had never succeeded in seeing her own people. Another invitation had been sent to them and accepted. For Eugenia had had the unselfishness to place the deferring of their first visit in a natural and favourable light, making it appear to be quite as much her own doing as her husband’s, and a subject of great regret to both.
