At first its loss was all she could take in, but very quickly she began to connect the loss with Jan, and with the £600 he had asked her to get for him at their last conversation. With this conviction her tears ceased, her face grew hard and white as ice. If Jan had used her money she was sure that she would never speak to him, never see him again. At that hour she almost hated him. He was only the man who had taken her £600. She forgot that he had been her lover and her husband. As soon as she could control herself she fled to her father’s house, and kneeling down by Peter’s side sobbed out the trouble that had filled her cup to overflowing.
This was a sorrow Peter could heartily sympathize with. He shed tears of anger and mortification, as he wiped away those of his daughter. It was a great grief to him that he could not prosecute Jan for theft. But he was quite aware that the law recognized Jan’s entire right to whatever was his wife’s. Neither the father nor daughter remembered how many years Jan had respected his wife’s selfishness, and forgiven her want of confidence in him; the thing he had done was an unpardonable wrong.
Thora said very little. She might have reminded Peter that he had invested all her fortune in his business, that he always pocketed her private earnings. But to what purpose? She did not much blame Jan for taking at last, what many husbands would have taken at first, but she was angry enough at his general unkindness to Margaret. Yet it was not without many forebodings of evil she saw Peter store away in an empty barn all the pretty furniture of Margaret’s house, and put the key of the deserted house in his pocket.
“And I am so miserable!” wailed the wretched wife, morning, noon, and night. Her money and her husband supplied her with perpetual lamentations, varied only by pitiful defenses of her own conduct: “My house was ever clean and comfortable! No man’s table was better served! I was never idle! I wasted nothing! I never was angry! And yet I am robbed, and betrayed, and deserted! There never was so miserable a woman—so unjustly miserable!” etc.
“Alas! my child,” said Thora, one day, “did you then expect to drink of the well of happiness before death? This is the great saying 73 which we all forget: There—not here—there the wicked cease from troubling; there the weary are at rest. There God has promised to wipe away all tears, but not here, Margaret, not here.”
CHAPTER V.
SHIPWRECK.
“A man I am, crossed with adversity.”