MORNING CLOUDS.
——The little rift within the lute——
Sutton brought back his bride in April, all the better, as it appeared, in health and spirits for her two months' expedition. The beautiful rose of her cheeks had a tinge of brown which spoke only of healthy exercise in the open air. Everybody pronounced her prettier, brighter and more charming than ever. She was in the highest spirits to be back, and Sutton seemed pleased to bring her and to be once more amongst old friends.
To all who saw them, except Felicia's observant eye, they seemed everything which a newly-wedded pair should wish to be. But Felicia felt less confident of their happiness. Whether Maud's letters had unconsciously sounded a little note of distress, or whether it was that she knew both their natures so well and how they ought to harmonise, that the least approach to discord caught her ear—something, at any rate, made her aware of the existence of a subtle disquietude between Maud and her husband. The discovery, or rather the suspicion, filled her with a distress which she attempted in vain to ignore. She found herself joining languidly and insincerely in the chorus of gratulation which the Dustypore community set up over the happy couple. When Mrs. Vereker came to call, rustling in the loveliest of new dresses, and poured out a little stream of gossiping remarks—how pretty it was to see them together, and what a charming lover Sutton made, and was not Maud a picture of a girl-wife?—Felicia responded with a coldness which puzzled her visitor and which Felicia was conscious of trying in vain to conceal. Something, her fine instinct told her, was amiss. One alarming symptom was the obvious relief which Maud found in her society, and the profuse tenderness and affection which she displayed whenever there was no one else to see. She lavished on her a sort of unconscious fondness, for which Felicia looked in vain in her behaviour to her husband. With him her affection seemed constrained, conscious, too deferential to be natural and happy. There was about Maud, when she and Felicia were alone together, a joyous self-abandonment to animal high spirits, which was for ever flowing out into some pretty childish act of fun or affection, but which vanished at the appearance of Sutton or any other onlooker. She became a girl again—she sang, she danced, she got into the wildest games with the children—she let off her excitement and mirth in a thousand natural acts. Then Jem would come in, and it all seemed to die away. When visitors arrived, and Felicia had presently more on her hands than was at all to her taste, Maud would seem to enjoy it and to get amused and interested; then, as the door closed upon the strangers, she would come and throw her arms round Felicia and caress her, as if her one feeling about the visit was that it had been an inconvenient restraint on love which was wanting every moment to express itself in some outspoken fashion; 'I love you the best, the best of all,' she would say impetuously.
'Of all women,' Felicia put in.
'Of all women and of all men too, except Jem,' Maud answered; 'yes, and I believe I love you better even than Jem; anyhow, I love you.'
More than once, too, Felicia detected little manœuvres on Maud's part to walk or drive with her and to quit her husband's society in order to do so. Altogether Felicia felt frightened, anxious and sad about her friends: and Vernon, who always knew her melancholy moods and could generally guess their cause, in vain endeavoured to console her with the assurance that all was right and that Sutton's had been a wise and happy choice.
The truth was that the march had not been altogether a success. A great authority on such matters has said that people often endanger the permanent happiness of married life by putting too severe a strain upon it at its outset. Now a two-month's tête-à-tête is a serious strain. Life wants something besides mere affection to make it run smoothly: it wants the ease and comfort of familiarity, the freedom of tastes ascertained to be congenial, the pleasant usages of common action. The first year of wedded life is, no doubt, a series of experiments in getting on; two wheels, however nicely fitted, are likely to rub a little at some point of contact or other. And then Paradise itself would lose its charm if it were all the same; and the days on Maud's first journey had a distracting resemblance. Her eyes ached with the interminable horizon of dust and sand, the scrubby brushwood, the lonely crumbling tomb, the rare clumps of palms, the scuffling, bellowing herds of cattle. Sutton's cook, whom his master in his simple tastes believed a prodigy of culinary skill, used to send up the same dishes with depressing monotony, and, do what she would, Maud could not like them. Then some marches were over terribly rough ground, and her Arab made stumbles that took her breath away, though she was ashamed to say so. But it was not the little things which really mattered. Her husband's very nobility of nature oppressed her. A hundred times she had felt how good he was, how true, how really great, how chivalrous in his devotion, how tenderly considerate, and yet—and yet—something more unheroic would perhaps have been sometimes a relief. When the most ineffably stupid young officers rode across from some neighbouring station and plunged with cheerful volubility into the gossip of last season at Elysium, there was, Maud felt, something welcome in the humbler companion and the more trivial theme. Then, too, the solitary days oppressed her. Sutton had often outlying posts to visit and would accomplish them by starting off three or four hours before Maud was awake and making a detour, so as to meet her at their new halting-place at breakfast. On these mornings Maud had the company of an escort of troopers, her greyhound Punch, and her own thoughts, which were apt to get gloomy. Even Punch, she fancied, thought it a bore, and went along in a dejected fashion. Sometimes Sutton's work could not be so quickly disposed of, and he would be detained till the evening, and then the solitary day seemed sad and interminably long. More than once the tears had come unbidden to her eyes. Did Sutton forget her? Never for an instant, her heart told her clearly enough; but he did not perhaps sufficiently realise the wants and wishes, the flickering, uncertain spirits, the wayward moods, the causeless melancholy of one who, though invested with the dignities of womanhood, was in character and powers in reality still a child.
Then, though Sutton was never in the slightest degree imperative, and though her every spoken wish was law, Maud was conscious sometimes of being kept in better order than she liked and being forced up to a standard which was inconveniently high. Her husband spoke little of his tastes; no word from him ever assumed the resemblance of a command; yet Maud not unfrequently felt that a secret pressure was constraining her to something that was not exactly congenial; she knew with an almost distressing distinctness what her husband liked and disliked, and the knowledge was something of a burden. She was conscious when she hurt him; sometimes from mere waywardness she chose to do it, but she hurt herself in the process as much as him. She had given him her heart and made him all her world, and was glad to have done so. None the less there was sometimes an undefined pang about her self-devotion; she became restless, anxious, uncertain in her moods, and the tears seemed to lie near the surface and would spring to light, in unwary moments, at trifles too slight to cause their flow.
Then on some matters her husband's tastes and hers were by no means in harmony. On one occasion Desvœux had seized the opportunity of the Agent's camp being in the neighbourhood and had ridden across and travelled a couple of marches with them. Maud had looked forward to seeing him with pleasure and greeted his arrival with marked animation. The visit turned out as pleasant as she had expected; but the pleasure was marred by a secret conviction of her husband's disapproval. Nothing could quench Desvœux's light-heartedness or impede the easy flow of his amusing small-talk. Sutton, however, did not seem to find it amusing, and assumed, quite unconsciously, a dignified air, which Maud felt to be rather awful, though Desvœux was, as usual, imperturbable in his gaiety. His spirits, however, were better, and she was more at her ease to be infected by them when Sutton was not by. It vexed her to the heart to know that it was so, but so she knew it was.
The morning that Desvœux went away was one of Sutton's busy days, and Maud was alone when their guest bade her farewell. 'Good-bye,' she said, with a sort of sigh; 'how I wish you could have stopped and ridden with me this morning! I shall be alone all day and feel that I am going to have a fit of low spirits.'
'And so am I,' said Desvœux, 'a very bad fit indeed, which will last till next time we meet. Good-bye.'
Maud saw him turning pale, as he used to do when he got excited, and heard the eager tremble in his voice. He held her hand for an instant as if he could not bear to give it up, and looked at her with a look that was earnest and reproachful and, Maud felt, very, very sad. Then Desvœux had left without another word, but how eloquent may silence sometimes be!
Was she smiling or crying, and did she really want his company; and was she neglected and miserable? Desvœux had galloped away with his heart in a tumult from queries such as these, cursing the cruel fate which obliged him to be at his master's camp, full thirty miles away, with endless boxes of despatches ready for disposal before to-morrow morning.
Thus it was that Maud's early married life had not been without its morning clouds and sorrows. Then, as people do when they are unhappy, casting about for a cause of her unhappiness, she began to reproach herself. The old doubts of her fitness, her worthiness for her position, her power to retain her husband's love, began to haunt her. 'Ah me!' she sometimes felt inclined to cry, 'I fear that I am no true wife.' And yet she knew that, not even if her inmost thoughts were read, could she bring any charge of doubtful love or allegiance against herself. Sutton's men had, she had often heard, begun to worship him when his exploits in the Mutiny had raised their enthusiasm to its height. Maud felt that she could understand the feeling; in fact, she did worship him with all her being. But then worship is not all that is wanted for a happy married life. Maud, at any rate, felt it delightful to be with Felicia once again.