When Haldane Carteret had been three months in Canada, Godfrey Hungerford was dismissed the service for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; and in another month, Margaret Carteret had clandestinely left her home, joined her lover, and become his wife.
The shock to her father was very severe. It was the first misfortune of his life, including his first wife's death, to which "specimens" offered no alleviation. It was not an evil which brought finality with it; and Mr. Carteret therefore found it difficult to bear. If Margaret had died, her father would have grieved for her, no doubt, but there would have been an end of it; now, though no one could foresee or foretell the end, it was easy to prognosticate evil as the result, and impossible to hope for good.
Like all men of his sort, Mr. Carteret had a great horror of the openly violent and aggressive vices of men. He was incapable of understanding the amount of suffering to be inflicted upon women by the supineness, selfishness, indolence, imprudence, or eccentricity of their husbands and fathers; but the mere idea of a woman being in the power of a man who actually got drunk, lost or won money at cards or dice, used bad language, or had any stain of dishonesty on his name, was terrible to his harmless, if valueless, nature.
Mrs. Carteret was extremely indifferent. Of course it was an unpleasant occurrence, and people would talk unpleasantly about it; but she had never pretended to care much for, or interfere with Miss Carteret,--and no one could blame her.
Of all those who had shared her life, who had seen her grow from childhood to girlhood, James Dugdale was the only one who had made Margaret Carteret's character a subject of close and loving study--the only one who understood its strength and its weakness, its forcible points of contrast, its lurking dangers, its unseen resources. He knew her intellectual qualities, he knew her imaginativeness, and understood the danger which lurked in it for her--a danger which had already taken so delusive and fatal a form. With all the prescience of a calm and unselfish affection, he feared for the girl's future, and grieved as only mature wisdom and disinterested love can grieve over the follies and illusions, the inevitable suffering and disenchantment, of youth and wilfulness.
"She has a dreadful life before her," said her misjudged and despised friend to himself, as he left Margaret's father, after the two had discussed the letter in which the misguided girl had informed him of her marriage; "a dreadful life, I fear, and believe; but, if she lives through it, and over it, and takes it rightly, she may be a noble and strong woman yet, though never a happy one."
For some time Margaret Hungerford's communications with her family were brief and infrequent. She said nothing in her letters of happiness or the reverse, and she made no request to be permitted to revisit her former home. She never wrote to or heard from her brother.
After a while a formal application was made to Mr. Carteret by Mr. Hungerford for pecuniary assistance, as he had determined to try his fortune in Australia. To this Mr. Carteret replied that he would give Margaret half the small fortune which was to have been hers on his death, but required that it should be distinctly understood that she had nothing more to expect from him.
Mr. Carteret went up to London and drew the sum he had named, 500l., out of the funds, and availed himself of that opportunity to make his will, by which he bequeathed to his son all his property, a life-interest in the greater part of which had been secured to his wife by settlement. This done, and provided with the money he had named, he went to see Margaret and her husband. The meeting was brief and final. Mr. Carteret returned on the following day to Chayleigh.
Godfrey Hungerford and his wife were to sail for Sydney in a fortnight, he told Mrs. Carteret, in reply to her polite but quite uninterested inquiries. Nor was he much more communicative to James Dugdale.