CHAPTER III.
Amid the congratulations of friends, under the radiant smiles of her husband, even when her head nestled on his shoulder and his strong arm went lovingly round her; amid all the innumerable gaieties of Paris, of Brussels—a new world to her—this ghost seemed morbidly to haunt her; yet the honeymoon glided away, and the second month found them, amid all the charms of midsummer, located in their luxurious home at Craybourne Hall, from the upper oriels of which she could see the smoke, from the old clustered chimneys of the Vicarage, curling about the leafy coppice.
Daubeny had missed something responsive, he knew not what, in his wife, whose general listlessness, with a certain far-seeing expression of eye, began to pain and bewilder him. He kept his thoughts to himself; yet his brave and loving nature craved ever for some secret sympathy which Laura failed to accord him, and so there gradually began to yawn between them a chasm which neither could define, and the existence of which they would stoutly have denied. To Daubeny it became a source of keen and growing misery. But one night the scales fell from his eyes.
Finding himself alone and idle in London, he turned into the back stalls of the opera. The piece had not commenced; the orchestra were at the overture; the gas was somewhat low; and by some heedless fellows who were sitting in front of him he heard his own name mentioned once or twice in conversation, and was compelled to listen, thereto.
"Jack Westbrook has got over it all now," one said. "Of course the sting of wounded self-esteem, at being thrown over for rich old Phil Daubeny, rankled for a time. The fair Laura was his first love—never saw such a pair of spoons in all my life, don't you know—privately engaged, and all that sort of thing."
"And now I have no doubt she will flirt with any man who will flirt with her. Of course, it is always the way—and she don't care for Daubeny, poor devil!"
"I don't think she will flirt," said the first speaker.
"Bah! every woman has some weak point, if you can only find it out."
"Most men, too, I suspect; but the fair Laura is clad in the armour of virtue."
"Jack Westbrook might find some weak points in that armour, too; and he won't drop out of the hunt, perhaps."
Then followed a reckless laugh that stung the soul of Daubeny to madness. The Opera stalls were no place for that which is so abhorrent in "society"—a scene; so instead of dashing their heads together, as he felt inclined to do, he softly left the place just as the overture ceased and the act-drop rose; and he went forth in a tempest of that kind of rage which always becomes the more bitter for having no immediate object to expend itself on; and even the speed of the night express seemed a thousand degrees too slow as it bore him homeward to Craybourne Hall. She had been engaged, had a lover—her first lover, too—and all unknown to him!
He had both seen and heard of Westbrook; but not in this character. Her first love—her only love! How many uncounted kisses had, of course, been exchanged, of which he knew naught (and had no business with then)? How much of the bloom had been worn off the peach ere it became his? He was full of black wrath, and saw much now that he saw not before, and could quite account for all her coldness. Yet, although he knew it not, the girl who had always esteemed was now learning to love him as she had never even loved Jack Westbrook!
Late though the hour—the first of morning—he proceeded at once to his wife's dressing-room, where she was awaiting his return in a charming blue robe that made her fair beauty look more charming still, for there were colour and brightness in her face and a love-light in her eyes at his approach, till the abruptness of his entrance and the set sternness of his white visage startled her.
"Philip!"
"Can it be true what I have heard to-night, Laura, that you loved Westbrook, of the Hussars," he demanded, "and, while loving him, married me for my money, and what I might do for the old Vicar and his sons? Is it truth that, when he gave you to me at the altar of yonder church, your marriage vow was a black lie and your false heart teemed with love for another? Speak!" he thundered out; but she could only lift her timid eyes to him imploringly, and spread her little white hands in deprecation of the coming malediction. Her voice was gone. "Your silence affirms all I have heard," he continued, in accents that trembled with jealousy and sorrow. "Oh, God, what a fool and dupe I have been!"
"I know not what you have heard, Philip; but, as He hears me, I have been a true and faithful wife to you."
"In playing a part you did not feel," he cried scornfully, "but I will aid your play no more. From this hour we meet never again on earth. Here, in this house, for which you sold yourself, I shall leave you, with all its luxuries, till such time as a more regular separation can be brought about; and the sole sorrow of my heart is now, that I cannot leave you free to wed this fellow Westbrook, the cause of all your incompatibility and coldness to me."
He flung away, and left her in a gust of fury.
"Philip, Philip!" she exclaimed, but she heard the hall door close; and then, as his steps died away in the distance, she fell on the floor, overcome by her sudden and terrible emotions—startled, shocked, and conscience-stricken.