"Judge Roscoe has kindly given me permission to stable here my own horses,—not belonging to the service,—and to use the pasture, and I hope you will ride one that I think is particularly suitable for a lady. Judge Roscoe, to show that he bears no malice, is riding another one to Roanoke City this afternoon."
She said that she had lost her equestrian tastes. But she listened quite civilly while he argued the ethics anew, and, as her interest in the subject had waned with the dissolving view of her horse and she did not care for the question in the abstract, she did not controvert his theory or relish placing obstacles to the justification of his course.
CHAPTER V
Baynell's disposition to recur to the subject inaugurated a habit of conversation with Mrs. Gwynn after the scholastic hours of the "ladies," when he sat in the library through the long afternoons. The vast subject of the abstract values of right and wrong, the ultimate decrees of conscience, whether in matters of great or minute importance, might seem inexhaustible in itself. But he gradually drifted therefrom into a discursive monologue of many things. He began to talk of himself as never before, as he had never dreamed that he could. He described his friends and acquaintances; he rehearsed his experiences; he even repeated traditional stories of his father's college life, and the mad pranks which the staid Judge Roscoe had played in the callow days of their youth, thus emphasizing the bond of intimacy and his own claim to recognition as a hereditary friend; he went farther and detailed his own intimate plans for the future.
Throughout she maintained a conventional pose of courteous attention. Surely, he thought, he must have roused some responsive interest. For himself, in all his life, he had never experienced moments so surcharged with significance, with pleasure, with importance. One day he concluded a long exposition of thought and conviction, intensely vital to him, by making a direct appeal to her opinion. She looked up with half-startled eyes, then hesitatingly replied, while a quick, deep flush sprang into her pale cheeks. Elated, confident, victorious, he beheld the color rise and glow, and noted her lingering, conscious embarrassment; for the subject was unimportant save as it concerned him, and why, but for his sake, should she blush and falter in sweet confusion?
How could he know that hardly one word in ten had she heard! Absent, absorbed, she was silently turning again and again the ashes of the dead past, while he, insistently, clamorously, was knocking at the door of the living present.
Step by step she had been retracing her early foolish fondness for the man who had been her husband. How could she have been so blind! she was asking herself. Why could she not have seen him with the eyes of others,—that wise, kindly, far-sighted vision which scanned the present with caution for her sake, and by its gauge measured the future with an unerring and an appalled accuracy? How contemptuously, like a heroine of romance indeed, she had flouted the well-meant opposition of her relatives to her marriage! They had proved wise prophets. Drunkard, gambler, spendthrift, he had wrecked her fortune and embittered her whole life. The two years she had spent with him seemed an æon of misery. They had obliterated the past as well as excluded the future. Somehow she could not look beyond them into her earlier days save upon those gradations of events—the swift courtship, the egregious, headstrong, romantic resolution, the foolish love founded on false ideals which led her at last to the altar, so confiding, so happy, so disdainful of the grave faces and the disapproving shaking heads of all her elder kith and kindred, so triumphant in setting them at naught and enhancing Rufus Gwynn's victory with the quelling of their every claim.
In these long, quiet afternoons she would silently canvass humiliating details—when was it that she had first known him for the liar he was; when had she admitted to herself his inherent falsity? Even the truth had faltered for his sake. She had eagerly sought to deceive herself—to gloze over his lies, now told for a purpose, and constrained to their misleading device, now thrown off without intention or effect, as if the false were the more native incident of his moral atmosphere. Perhaps, with the love that possessed her, she, too, might have acquired the proclivity; she meditated on this possibility with a bowed head. At first, when he lied to her, she herself could not distinguish the truth from the false in his words. She had found herself at sea without a rudder. However she might have desired to protect him, whether she might have bent in time to deceit for his sake, there is a sort of monopoly in falsehood. It is a game at which two cannot play to good effect. The first time he struck her full in the face was in the fury which possessed him, when, through her agency, a lie had been fairly fixed upon him. She had given him as her authority for a statement she made to Judge Roscoe, and her uncle had, in repeating it to him, discovered the lie—the blatant open lie—that could not be qualified or gainsaid.