Nan began, very slowly, but surely, to amend; and Sydney, going back to his usual pursuits, seemed busier than ever.
But, in spite of himself, he was haunted night and day by the fear of what would happen next; of what Nan meant to do when she grew strong. Would she ever forgive him? And if she did not forgive him, what would she do? Tell the whole story to Sir John, and insist on returning to her brother's house? That would be an extreme thing, and Sir John—who was a man of the world—would probably pooh pooh her virtuous indignation; but Nan had a way of carrying out her resolves whether Sir John pooh-poohed them or not. And supposing that Nan separated herself from him, Sydney could not but see that a very serious imputation would be thrown on his character, even if the true story were not known in all its details. That mock marriage—which he had not at first supposed that Milly had taken seriously—had a very ugly sound. And he had made too many enemies for the thing to be allowed to drop if once it came to the light.
His career was simply at the mercy of two women—the Johnsons were not, he thought, likely to break silence—and if either of them should prove to be indiscreet or vindictive, he was a ruined man. He had injured and insulted his sister: he had shocked and horrified his wife. What Nan though of him he could not tell. He had always believed that women were too small-minded to forget an injury, to forgive an insult, or to keep silence regarding their husbands' transgressions. If Nan once enlisted Sir John's sympathies on her side, he knew that, although he might ultimately recover from the blow inflicted by his brother-in-law's offense and anger, his chance of success in life would be diminished. And for what a cause? He writhed as he thought of the passing, contemptuous fancy, for the indulgence of which he might have to sacrifice so much and had already sacrificed part of what was dearest in life to him. Yes, he told himself, he was at Nan's mercy, and he had not hitherto found women very ready to hold their hands when weapons had been put into them, and all the instincts of outraged vanity made them strike.
Sydney Campion prided himself on a wide experience of men and women, and a large acquaintance with human nature. But he did not yet know Nan.
The story which had been so suddenly unfolded to her had struck her to the earth with the force of a blow, for more than one reason, but chiefly because she had trusted Sydney so completely. She was not so ignorant of the ways of men as to believe that their lives were always free from stain; indeed she knew more than most girls of the weakness and wickedness of mankind, partly because she was well acquainted with many Vanebury working-people, who were her tenants, partly because Lady Pynsent was a woman of the world and did not choose that Nan should go about with her eyes closed, and partly because she read widely and had never been restricted in the choice of books. She was not a mere ignorant child, shrinking from knowledge as if it were contamination, and blindly believing in the goodness and innocence of all men. But this theoretical acquaintance with the world had not saved her from the error into which women are apt to fall—the error of setting up her lover on a pedestal and believing that he was not as other men. She was punished for her mistake, she told herself bitterly, by finding that he was even worse, not better, than other men, whose weaknesses she had contemned.
For there had been a strain of meanness and cruelty in Sydney's behavior to the girl whom he had ruined which cut his wife to the heart. She had been taught, and she had tried—with some misgiving—to believe that she ought to be prepared to condone a certain amount of levity, of "wildness," even, in her husband's past; but here she saw deliberate treachery, cold-blooded selfishness, which startled her from her dream of happiness. Nan was a little too logical for her own peace of mind. She could not look at an action as an isolated fact in a man's life: it was an outcome of character. What Sydney had done showed Sydney as he was. And, oh, what a fall was there! how different from the ideal that she had hoped to see realized in him!
It never once occurred to Nan to take either Sir John or Lady Pynsent into her confidence. Sydney was quite mistaken in thinking that she would fly to them for consolation. She would have shrunk sensitively from telling them any story to his discredit. Besides, she shrewdly suspected that they would not share her disappointment, her sense of disillusion; Sir John had more than once laughed in an oddly amused way when she dropped a word in praise of Sydney's high-mindedness and generous zeal for others. "Campion knows which side his bread's buttered," he had once made her angry by saying. She had not the slightest inclination to talk to them of Sydney's past life and character.
Besides, she knew well enough that she had no actual cause of complaint in the eyes of the world. Her husband was not bound to tell her all that happened to him before he met her; and he had severed all connection with that unhappy young woman before he asked her, Anna Pynsent, to be his wife. Nan's grievance was one of those intangible grievances which bring the lines into so many women's faces and the pathos into their eyes—the grievance of having set up an idol and seen it fall. The Sydney Campion who had deceived and wronged a trusting girl was not the man that she had known and loved. That was all. It was nothing that could be told to the outer world, nothing that in itself constituted a reason for her leaving him and making him a mark for arrows of scandal and curiosity; but it simply killed outright the love that she had hitherto borne him, so that her heart lay cold and heavy in her bosom as a stone.
So frozen and hard it seemed to her, that she could not bring herself to acknowledge that certain words spoken to her husband by the stranger had had any effect on her at all. In the old days, as she said to herself, they would have hurt her terribly. "You cruelly deserted her because you wanted to marry a rich woman." She, Nan, was the rich woman for whom Sydney Campion had deserted another. It was cruel to have made her the cause of Sydney's treachery—the instrument of his fall. She had never wished to wrong anyone, nor that anyone should be wronged for her sake. She would not, she thought, have married Sydney if she had known this story earlier. Why had he married her?—ah, there came in the sting of the sentence which she had overheard: "You wanted to marry a rich woman." Yes, she was rich. Sydney had not even paid her the very poor compliment of deserting another woman because he loved her best—he had loved her wealth and committed a base deed to gain it, that was all.