Campbell ground something between his teeth. He fancied himself full of righteous wrath: he was really in a very unchristian temper. Be it so: perhaps there were excuses for him (as there are for many men) of which we know nothing.
Elsley, meanwhile, watched Campbell with fast lowering brow. Losing a woman's affections? He who does so deserves his fate. Had he been in the habit of paying proper attention to Lucia, he would have liked Campbell all the more for his conduct. There are few greater pleasures to a man who is what he should be to his wife, than to see other men admiring what he admires, and trying to rival him where he knows that he can have no rival. Let them worship as much as they will. Let her make herself as charming to them as she can. What matter? He smiles at them in his heart; for has he not, over and above all the pretty things which he can say and do ten times as well as they, a talisman—a dozen talismans which are beyond their reach?—in the strength of which he will go home and laugh over with her, amid sacred caresses, all which makes mean men mad? But Elsley, alas for him, had neglected Lucia himself, and therefore dreaded comparison with any other man; and the suspicions which had taken root in him at Aberalva grew into ugly shape and strength. However he was silent, and contented himself with coldness and all but rudeness.
There were excuses for him. In the first place, it would have been an ugly thing to take notice of any man's attentions to a wife; it could not be done but upon the strongest grounds, and done in a way which would make a complete rupture necessary, so breaking up the party in a sufficiently unpleasant way. Besides, to move in the matter at all would be to implicate Lucia; for, of whatsoever kind Campbell's attentions were, she evidently liked them; and a quarrel with her on that score was more than Elsley dared face. He was not a man of strong moral courage; he hated a scene of any kind; and he was afraid of being worsted in any really serious quarrel, not merely by Campbell, but by Lucia. It may seem strange that he should be afraid of her, though not so that he should be afraid of Campbell. But the truth is, that the man who bullies his wife very often does so—as Elsley had done more than once—simply to prove to himself his own strength, and hide his fear of her. He knew well that woman's tongue, when once the "fair beast" is brought to bay, is a weapon far too trenchant to be faced by any shield but that of a very clear conscience toward her; which was more than Elsley had.
Beside—and it is an honour to Elsley Vavasour, amid all his weakness, that he had justice and chivalry enough left to know what nine men out of ten ignore—behind all, let the worst come to the worst, lay one just and terrible rejoinder, which he, though he had been no worse than the average of men, could only answer by silent shame,—
"At least, sir, I was pure when I came to you! You best know whether you were so likewise."
And yet even that, so all-forgiving is woman, might, have been faced by some means: but the miserable complication about the false name still remained. Elsley believed that he was in his wife's power; that she could, if she chose, turn upon him, and proclaim him to the world as a scoundrel and an impostor. And, as it is of the nature of man to hate those whom he fears, Elsley began to have dark and ugly feelings toward Lucia. Instead of throwing them away, as a strong man would have done, he pampered them almost without meaning to do so. For he let them run riot through his too vivid imagination, in the form of possible speeches, possible scenes, till he had looked and looked through a hundred thoughts which no man has a right to entertain for a moment. True; he had entertained them with horror; but he ought not to have entertained them at all; he ought to have kicked them contemptuously out and back to the devil, from whence they came. It may be again, that this is impossible to man; that prayer is the only refuge against that Walpurgis-dance of the witches and the fiends, which will, at hapless moments, whirl unbidden through a mortal brain: but Elsley did not pray.
So, leaving these fancies in his head too long, he soon became accustomed to them; and accustomed too, to the Nemesis which they bring with them; of chronic moodiness and concealed rage. Day by day he was lashing himself up into fresh fury, and yet day by day he was becoming more careful to conceal that fury. He had many reasons: moral cowardice, which made him shrink from the tremendous consequences of an explosion— equally tremendous, were he right or wrong. Then the secret hope, perhaps the secret consciousness, that he was wrong, and was only saying to God, like the self-deceiving prophet, "I do well to be angry;" then the honest fear of going too far; of being surprised at last into some hideous and irreparable speech or deed, which he might find out too late was utterly unjust: then at moments (for even that would cross him) the devilish notion, that, by concealment, he might lure Lucia on to give him a safe ground for attack. All these, and more, tormented him for a wretched fortnight, during which he became, at such an expense of self-control as he had not exercised for years, courteous to Campbell, more than courteous to Lucia; hiding under a smiling face, wrath which increased with the pressure brought to bear upon it.
Campbell and Lucia, Mellot, Valencia, and Frank, utterly deceived, went on more merrily than ever, little dreaming that they walked and talked daily with a man who was fast becoming glad to flee to the pit of hell, but for the fear that "God would be there also." They, meanwhile, chatted on, enjoying, as human souls are allowed to do at rare and precious moments, the mere sensation of being; of which they would talk at times in a way which led them down into deep matters: for instance,—
"How pleasant to sit here for ever!" said Claude, one afternoon, in the inn garden at Beddgelert, "and say, not with Descartes, 'I think, therefore I exist;' but simply, 'I enjoy, therefore I exist.' I almost think those Emersonians are right at times, when they crave the 'life of plants, and stones, and rain.' Stangrave said to me once, that his ideal of perfect bliss was that of an oyster in the Indian seas, drinking the warm salt water motionless, and troubling himself about nothing, while nothing troubled itself about him."
"Till a diver came and tore him up for the sake of his pearls?" said
Valencia.