As the long low banks of Port Phillip faded from the sight of the passengers on board the "homeward bound," not a heart among the number but yearned with some keen and strong regret, too keen and strong to be overborne by the gladness of hope and the relief of having really begun the long voyage. Not a heart, not even that of Margaret Hungerford; for she had looked her last on the land where she had left her youth, and all its dreams and hopes; where love had died for her, and truth had failed; where she had been rudely awakened, and had never again found rest.
At such a time, at such a crisis in life, retrospection is inevitable, however undesirable; however painful and vain, it must be submitted to. The mind insists on passing the newly-expired epoch in review; in repeating, in the full and painful candour of its reverie, all the story so far told; in returning to the old illusions, and exposing their baselessness; in summoning up the defeated hopes, which, gauged by the measure of disappointment, appear so unreasonable--weighed in the balance of experience, seem so absurd.
Can I ever have been such a fool as to have believed that life held such possibilities? is the question we all ask at such times; and the self-contempt which inspires it is only as real, and no more, as the pain which no scorn or wonder can decrease.
So, like one performing an enforced task, with what patience it is possible to command, but wearily, and longing for the end, and for release, Margaret Hungerford, during the early days of the long voyage from Australia to England, gazed into her past life as into a mirror, and it gave her back a succession of images, of which the chief were these which follow.
[CHAPTER II.]
PAGES FROM THE PAST.
The woman who was now returning to her native land after a long and painful exile looked back, in her retrospective fancy, upon a home which had external beauty, calm, and comfort to recommend it. She was the daughter of a gentleman named Carteret, a man of small but independent fortune, and whose tastes, which had been too extensively and exclusively cultivated for the happiness of his son and daughter, led him to prefer a life of quietness and seclusion, in which he devoted himself to study, and to the pursuit of natural history in particular.
Mr. Carteret, who is an old man now, might have been the original of "Sir Thomas the Good," whose wife, "the fair Lady Jane," displayed such becoming resignation on his death. Mr. Carteret, like the worthy knight, "whose breath was short, and whose eyes were dim," would "pore for an hour over a bee or a flower, or the things that come creeping out after a shower:" but he was sadly blind to the subtle processes of the human heart in the development of the human beings under his own roof, which were taking place around him.
He had lost his wife very soon after the birth of his daughter, and when his son was three years old; and within little more than a year, a resolute young woman, who had long made up her mind that a pretty little country place within easy distance of London,--for Mr. Carteret lived in Reigate,--a fair position in the county society, and a comfortable income, were desirable acquisitions, married him.
People said Miss Hartley made all the preliminary arrangements, including even the proposal, herself; and though that statement was probably exaggerated, there can be little doubt that the suggestion, that it would be an advisable and agreeable circumstance that Miss Martley should become Mrs. Carteret, originated with the lady.