"You are not happy," said Mrs. Brand, throwing up her hands with a curiously tragic gesture. "You are miserable—miserable; and I am the most unhappy woman living!"
"No," I said Janetta, gently. "I am not miserable at all. And there are many women more unhappy than you are. You have a home, sons who love you, a grandson, friends—see how many things you have that other people want! Is it right to speak of yourself as unhappy?"
"Child," said the older woman, impressively, "you are young, and do not know what you say. Does happiness consist in houses and clothes, or even in children and friends? I have been happier in a cottage than in the grandest house. As for friends—what friends have I? None; my husband would never let me make friends lest I should expose my ignorance, and disgrace him by my low birth and bringing up. I have never had a woman friend."
"But your children," said Janetta, putting her arms tenderly round the desolate woman's neck.
"Ah, my children! When they were babies, they were a pleasure to me. But they have never been a pleasure since. They have been a toil and a pain and a bondage. That began when Wyvis was a little child, and Mr. Brand took a fancy to him and wanted to make every one believe that he was his child, not John's. I foresaw that there would be trouble, but he would never listen to me. It was just a whim of the moment at first, and then, when he saw that the deceit troubled me, it became a craze with him. And whatever he said, I had to seem to agree with. I dared not contradict him. I hated the deceit, and the more I hated it, the more he loved it and practiced it in my hearing, until I used to be sick with misery. Oh, my dear, it is the worst of miseries to be forced into wrong-doing against your will."
"But why did you give way?" said Janetta, who could not fancy herself in similar circumstances being forced into anything at all.
"My dear, he made me, I dared not cross him. He made me suffer, and he made the children suffer if ever I opposed him. What could I do?" said the poor woman, twisting and untwisting her thin hands, and looking piteously into Janetta's face. "I was obliged to obey him—he was my husband, and so much above me, so much more of a gentleman than I ever was a lady. You know that I never could say him nay. He ruled me, as he used to say, with a rod of iron—for he made a boast of it, my dear—and he was never so happy, I think, as when he was torturing me and making me wince with pain."
"He must have been——" when Janetta stopped short: she could not say exactly what she thought of Mrs. Brand's second husband.
"He was cruel, my dear: cruel, that is, to women. Not cruel amongst his own set—among his equals, as he would have said—not cruel to boys. But always cruel to women. Some woman must have done him a grievous wrong one day—I never knew who she was; but I am certain that it was so; and that soured and embittered him. He was revenging himself on that other woman, I used to think, when he was cruel to me."
Janetta dared not speak.