Jean understood, at least in a measure, and trusted Evelyn entirely: yet there was a sense of pain.
The workings of Evelyn's mind, during those hushed hours of solitude, between the day of her husband's death and that of the funeral, were multiform. She was ever reviewing her past life, living again through the years in imagination. Her girlish haste to escape from the bondage of a home with Miss Devereux, had flung her into another bondage, hardly less irksome to her restless nature: and for over seven years she had endured the consequences. But this was not the light in which Evelyn, newly widowed, looked upon her past.
She knew indeed how things had been; yet in the rebound, so often seen with respect to those who have passed away, especially where the love has been defective, she could now allow no fault in her husband. All blame for past difficulties was to be attached to herself; none to him. A remorseful passionate back-wave of love held her in its grasp. She had not so loved him while he was with her: but the loneliness of her young widowhood, the sense of having no one to appeal to, caused a magnified sense of his protection and sympathy, of his unvarying kindness, of his unfailing interest in all that had concerned her.
Evelyn forgot now, or thought of as utterly unimportant, the daily frictions, the differences of opinion, which had so worried her. The absolutism of his judgment, the narrowness of his views, became as nothing, seen beside her thousand recollections of his true nobility and goodness, of his pure and upright life. And his love for her! She knew at last what that had been. What though they had differed theologically on many points? What though he had seemed at times theoretically, though not practically, hard towards those who differed from him? He had been true, constant, honourable, blameless: and how he had loved her! The world grew into a desert, without that unfailing love. Evelyn had not measured its worth until she had lost it.
She grieved for him sorely; not with the peaceful sorrow of a wife who has been perfectly at one with her husband; but with the bitter distress of one who has failed to appreciate till too late. All her little coldnesses, all her little takings of offence, all her little stiffnesses of demeanour, rose up in overwhelming array, enlarged by the microscope of imagination into gigantic proportions. In him she could see nothing now but goodness and beauty. All failings were struck away by the hand of death. She went over and over the different manifestations of his rectitude, his kindness, his chivalrous gentleness, his loving guardianship of her, his manly readiness to forgive, till he grew into an idol set up on a shrine in her heart, as a being to be reverenced and almost worshipped.
Womanly—all this!
The very will, which others were quick to blame, leaving the whole estate to her, but only so long as she should remain unmarried, supplied fresh fuel to the flame of her ardent devotion. Friends might wonder; Evelyn would allow no word of blame.
"He was right—perfectly right," she said. "The property must of course remain in the Villiers family. He only had to provide for my widowhood—and that means for my lifetime. I shall never marry again. He understood me, and he knew that I should understand him."
One thought of happiness dawned upon her as the hours of those long days dragged by—a thought of happiness, because it meant action completely in the face of her own desires, action which she could therefore feel to be a kind of sacrifice of herself to her husband's memory. She would in all things now be guided solely by his wishes and opinions. She would think what he had thought, she would do what he had done, she would cultivate the friends that he had preferred, she would follow out the lines that he would have chosen for her; and so, at least in a measure, she would make up to him for her non-submission in the past. St. John's should be exclusively her Church; the good people of St. John's congregation should be her especial clique. No matter if they did not suit her taste. Enough of that. They had suited her husband's taste. Since she had not been one with him while he was present, she would be one with him now he was gone.
So wrapped up was Evelyn in these thoughts, that she failed to see the opposite side of the question, failed to remember what was due in other quarters to tried friends of her own. Her whole heart flowed out in imaginative adulation of the man she had lost; and for a time all else went down before this phase of affairs.