For three years it was uneventful. I lived much alone, and made a few friends, with one or another of whom I took a holiday every year on the Continent. Then an event occurred which gave birth to the startling incidents and experiences of my life.
Ten years ago this month Barbara Landor and I were married. I was twenty-four, and Barbara was three years my senior. To a young man in love—as I must have been at that time, though my feelings for my wife soon underwent change, and I look back upon them now with amazement—such a disparity is not likely to cause uneasiness. It did not cause me any. I was swayed entirely by my passionate desire to make the woman with whom I was infatuated my wife.
I had known her only a short time before I proposed, and was accepted. Our engagement was of but a few weeks' duration, and during our courtship I observed nothing in Barbara's manner to disturb me. No one warned me; no friend bade me pause before I bound myself irrevocably to a woman who was to be my ruin. Occasionally her face was rather flushed, and she was eager and nervous, which I ascribed to the excitement of our engagement. Her sparkling eyes, her rapid speech, the occasional trembling of her hands—all this I set down to love. She confided to me that she had no fortune, and that she had thought of seeking employment as a governess or as a companion to a lady. She possessed great gifts, which, of course, I magnified; she was a good musician, could speak French, German and Italian fluently, and sang to me in those languages with a rich contralto voice.
"Had it not been for you," she said, "I might even have got into the chorus at the opera."
"Is not this better?" I asked, embracing her.
"Much better," she replied, returning my embrace.
She was a handsome woman, dark, tall, and commanding, and her nearest relative was a half-brother, Maxwell, much older than she, for whom I had no special liking. Naturally, after I had drawn from Barbara an avowal of her love, I addressed myself to him. He stood towards her in the light of a guardian, and she was living in his house. In reply to his questions I was very candid as to my worldly position and prospects, and he professed himself satisfied; but I remembered afterwards that when I came courting his sister he would look at me with an expression of amusement on his features, as though he was enjoying a joke he was keeping to himself. He was in the habit of boasting that he was a man of the world, and knew every trick on the board. It was chiefly at his urging that the marriage was precipitated.
"Long engagements are a mistake," he said. "Don't you think so?"
I replied that I was entirely of his opinion.
"That simplifies matters," he said, "because I am going abroad. I shall not take a sister with me, you may depend upon that."