His ogling, it seemed, was not, in spite of its temerity, suspected by Hamilton. Perhaps Cousin George’s confidence in his own most-favoured position was too absolute to cherish a thought of any rival influence outside it. But, whatever the case, it is certain that, even if he observed, he gave himself no concern whatever about an ocular blandishment which was generally at the service of any beaux yeux of a pattern finer than the common.
But, if he remained indifferent, it was far otherwise with the husband, whose vision in a night had changed its blindness for the thousand-lensed optic of spiderous jealousy. Realizing, too late, his own infatuated folly, reduced to a vain coveting of what was by all legal right his own possession, forced into an attitude of apparent insensibility to the promiscuous gallantries offered to his lady on the strength of their estrangement, and prevented, both by policy and pride, from confessing to his altered sentiments, the unhappy man was, in these days, suffering all the pangs the most vindictive wife could have wished. And yet she would have forgiven him, even now, could he have brought that obstinate devil in him to submit to the one condition she had dictated, and have owned to his iniquity and asked absolution for it. But to that extreme he could not go; it was still a point of honour with him to force her into being the first to break the silence; and so he continued to ground what hopes he had on the nature of the compromise suggested by Hamilton. To that absurd faith he clung, soon wearying of the little malapert instrument lent, though he never guessed it, to his purpose, but desperately continuing to play her for the success he looked to achieve. And, in the meanwhile, if his part in private was a difficult one, in public it was an endless anguish. It was not only that, cursed to that compact of silence, he must be perpetually manœuvring to avoid its discovery by others—and always on the edge of a fear lest what he so carefully concealed should be mockingly made known, in a spasm of feminine perversity, by the capricious partner thereto—but that he was wholly debarred by it from uttering a word of warning or menace to that same partner on the subject of the perils, to which her own wilfulness was subjecting her, from oglings, princely or otherwise. He himself was so acutely sensitive to the danger that he found a suggestive meaning in every appreciative glance, every small natural homage paid to a beauty which could not be seen but to be admired. The attractions which should have been his pride had become his torment, while his mind revolted from the memory of a dead infatuation as from something noisome: and in so much the Nemesis of deserved retribution had swiftly overtaken him. From his jealous misery he could find no relief at last but in confiding its fancied justifications to his friend Hamilton. Him, for some inexplicable reason, he never suspected.
“Curse it, George!” he would say. “I am so driven and harassed, curse it! A little more and I shall pack her off to the Peak!”
He spoke of the Peak in Derbyshire, near which his country seat, Bretby Hall, was situated. The phrase at Court came to pass into a jocular proverb; so that to rid oneself of a tiresome wife was to send her to the Peak. But the threat a little alarmed Hamilton. It was true that, if carried into effect, it might prove itself the short cut to his own desired goal, since friends come doubly welcomed into killing solitudes; still, that welcome, gained at the sacrifice, perhaps, of a month in town, was a prospect altogether too wry to be entertained with composure. No, he must certainly counter the suggestion with all his wits.
“Why?” he said. “What is poor Kate’s new offence?”
“Did I speak of any?” snarled Chesterfield. “The old is wide enough and long enough to serve the purpose of a score.”
“How do you mean?”
“How, says he! Why, does she not take advantage of my tongue-tied state to flaunt her coquetries in my very face?”
“Speak to her, then.”
“You know I cannot.”