Since then he had been striving after forgetfulness. He would not hear of her, he would not ask about her. In the various business letters that necessarily passed between him and his solicitor in England—for he was a man of some property—her name was never mentioned. He had left amply sufficient for her maintenance. The property she had brought was paid over to her without the slightest reference to him. Thus, he considered, bare duty was fulfilled, and for anything further—bah! woman-like, would she not rejoice in the absence of restraint? It was possible that he might desire to have a voice in the education of his child; about his wife he would trouble himself no further.
But the mind is volatile and independent; it receives not the "Thou shalt not" with which poor mortals would fetter it. Over flood and field, through cities and solitudes, Maurice had been wandering with this one idea—to banish for ever from his mind the beautiful, haunting face of his lost Margaret—and all was in vain. More persistently than ever it returned on this morning in the wilds, looking at him with her lustrous eyes, speaking to him with her sweet, low voice, maddening him with the cruel recollections it brought of loss and shame.
For in a case of this kind the man is, perhaps, a greater sufferer than the woman. True, he can wander hither and thither, throwing himself into the stirring life of the world—business, pleasure, excitement; but in the deep, strong nature the sting remains, bitter, poignant, ever present; not the soft sadness of the weaker sex, which in many cases, stooping down under the stroke, reaps the reward of submission in a certain gradual dulling of the pain; but the fierce, angry plunging of a soul that will not yield to dire necessity—that will not look its sorrow in the face and bear it.
And no trial is fitter to raise this ceaseless tempest in the spirit than that under which Maurice was smarting. He had trusted in her as he trusted in his God; she had been to him the embodiment of all that is good, pure, beautiful in womankind, and the discovery of her treachery was like the breaking away of solid ground from beneath his feet.
From that moment he believed in nothing. Writhing under the bitter pain of the wound inflicted on him, he would yet show no signs of weakness. He would forget; he would cut the ties that bound him to the past; he would tear her from his heart. In the struggle his nature seemed to change. He whom Margaret had loved for his gentle thoughtfulness, his manly courage, his geniality, his bright, joyous spirit, became another man. Irritable, morose, cynical, gayest among the gay at the festive season, though of his laughter it might have been said that it was mad, of his mirth that it was "the crackling of thorns under a pot;" at other times dull and listless, uneasy, changeable, passionate. These were some of his characteristics after many months' wandering. And he felt the change; sometimes he professed to rejoice in it. He told himself that he was getting hardened—that soon, soon, the past would be as though it had not been; but there was a secret consciousness within which told him that this could not be.
Such was the feeling which spoke to him on that still July morning through the solitude till he could bear his own society no longer. He returned to the hut, awoke his servants with some roughness, and intimated to them, in the best Russian he could command, that he was tired of wandering; he would return to their lord's castle that day, and then join him and his family in St. Petersburg.
The Russians bowed simultaneously. They were accustomed to the caprices of their lord, and did not show the least surprise at this sudden termination, after two or three days, of an excursion that was to have lasted at least a fortnight.
They escorted their lord's guest to the castle, and on the same evening Maurice Grey left it for a St. Petersburg mansion.