‘Their going to nurse him is not as if Sir Guy suspected it.’
‘I don’t suppose he did, nor Amy either. No one ever had so much power over himself.’
Philip would not have thanked his sister for her surmise, but it was so far in his favour that it made her avoid the subject, and he was thus spared from hearing much of Amabel or of Redclyffe. It was bad enough without this. Sometimes in nursery tales, a naughty child, under the care of a fairy, is chained to an exaggeration of himself and his own faults, and rendered a slave to this hateful self. The infliction he underwent in his sister’s house was somewhat analogous, for Mrs. Henley’s whole character, and especially her complacent speeches, were a strong resemblance of his own in the days he most regretted. He had ever since her marriage regarded her as a man looks at a fallen idol, but never had her alteration been so clear to him, as he had not spent much time with her, making her short visits, and passing the chief of each day at Stylehurst. Now, he was almost entirely at her mercy, and her unvarying kindness to him caused her deterioration to pain him all the more; while each self-assertion, or harsh judgment, sounded on his ear like a repetition of his worst and most hateful presumption. She little guessed what she made him endure, for he had resumed his wonted stoicism of demeanour, though the hardened crust that had once grown over his feelings had been roughly torn away, leaving an extreme soreness and tenderness to which an acute pang was given whenever he was reminded, not only of his injuries to Guy, but of the pride and secret envy that had been their root.
At the same time he disappointed her by his continued reserve and depression. The confidence she had forfeited was never to be restored, and she was the last person to know how incapable she was of receiving it, or how low she had sunk in her self-exaltation.
He was soon able to resume the hours of the family, but was still far from well; suffering from languor, pain in the head, want of sleep and appetite; and an evening feverishness. He was unequal to deep reading, and was in no frame for light books; he could not walk far, and his sister’s literary coteries, which he had always despised, were at present beyond his powers of endurance. She hoped that society would divert his thoughts and raise his spirits, and arranged her parties with a view to him; but he never could stay long in the room, and Dr. Henley, who, though proud of his wife and her talents, had little pleasure in her learned circle, used to aid and abet his escape.
Thus Philip got through the hours as best he might, idly turning the pages of new club-books, wandering on the hills till he tired himself, sitting down to rest in the damp air, coming home chilled and fatigued, and lying on the sofa with his eyes shut, to avoid conversation, all the evening. Neither strength, energy, nor intellect would, serve him for more; and this, with the load and the stings of a profound repentance, formed his history through the next fortnight.
He used often to stand gazing at the slowly-rising walls of Miss Wellwood’s buildings, and the only time he exerted himself in his old way to put down any folly in conversation, was when he silenced some of the nonsense talked about her, and evinced his own entire approval of her proceedings.
CHAPTER 39
Beneath a tapering ash-tree’s shade
Three graves are by each other laid.
Around the very place doth brood
A strange and holy quietude.
—BAPTISTERY