The transition, effected by the aid of his intense selfishness, from his former state of feeling towards Harriet, to one which required only the intervention of any active cause to become hatred, was not a difficult matter to a man like Routh. Having lost all her former charm, and much of her previous usefulness, she soon became to him a disagreeable reminder. Something more than that--the mental superiority of the woman, which had never before incommoded him, now became positively hateful to him. It carried with it, now that it was no longer his mainstay, a power which was humiliating, because it was fear-inspiring. Routh was afraid of his wife, and knew that he was afraid of her, when he had ceased to love her, after he had begun to dislike her; so much afraid of her that he kept up appearances to an extent, and for a duration of time, inexpressibly irksome to a man so callous, so egotistical, so entirely devoid of any sentiment or capacity of gratitude.
Such was the position of affairs when George Dallas and Mr. Felton left London to join Mr. and Mrs. Carruthers at Homburg. From the time of his arrival, and even when he had yielded to the clever arguments which had been adduced to urge him to silence, there was a sense of insecurity, foreboding in Routh's mind; not a trace of the sentimental superstitious terror with which imaginary criminals are invested after the fact, but with the reasonable fear of a shrewd man, in a tremendously dangerous and difficult position, who knows he has made a false move, and looks, with moody perplexity, for the consequences sooner or later.
"He must have come to England, at all events, Stewart," Harriet said to her husband, when he cursed his own imprudence for the twentieth time; "he must have come home to see his uncle. Mr. Felton would have been directed here to us by the old woman at Poynings, and we must have given his address. Remember, his uncle arrived in England the same day he did."
"I should have sent him to George, not brought George to him," said Routh. "And there's that uncle of his, Felton; he is no friend of ours, Harriet; he does not like us."
"I am quite aware of that," she answered; "civil as he is, he is very honest, and has never pretended to be our friend. If he is George's friend, and George has told him anything about his life since he has known us, I think we could hardly expect him to like us."
Her husband gave her one of his darkest looks, but she did not remark it. Many things passed now without attracting her notice; even her husband's looks, and sometimes his words, which were occasionally as bitter as he dared to make them.
He was possessed with a notion that he must, for a time at least, keep a watch upon George Dallas; not near, indeed, nor apparently close, but constant, and as complete as the maintenance of Harriet's influence with him made possible. For himself, he felt his own influence was gone, and he was far too wise to attempt to catch at it, as it vanished, or to ignore its absence. He acquiesced in the tacit estrangement; he was never in the way, but he never lost sight of George; he always knew what he was doing, and had early information of his movements, and with tolerable accuracy, considering that the spy whose services he employed was quite an amateur and novice.
This spy was Mr. James Swain, who took to the duties of his new line of business with vigorous zeal, and who seemed to derive a grim kind of amusement from their discharge. Stewart Routh had arrived with certainty at the conclusion that the young man had adhered to the promised silence up to the time of his leaving England with his uncle, and he felt assured that Mr. Felton was in entire ignorance of the circumstances which had had such terrible results for Mrs. Carruthers. It was really important to him to have George Dallas watched, and, in setting Jim Swain to watch him, he was inspired by darkly sinister motives, in view of certain remote contingencies--motives which had suggested themselves to him shortly after George's unhesitating recognition of the boy who had taken Routh's note to Deane, on the last day of the unhappy man's life, had solved the difficulty which had long puzzled him. Only second in importance to his keeping George Dallas in view was his not losing sight of the boy; and all this time it never occurred to Routh, as among the remote possibilities of things, that Mr. Jim Swain was quite as determined to keep an eye on him.
Harriet had acquiesced in her husband's proposal that they should go to Homburg readily. It happened that she was rather more cheerful than usual on the day he made it, more like, though still terribly unlike, her former self. She was in one of those intervals in which the tortured prisoner stoops at the stake, during a temporary suspension of the inventive industry of his executioner. The fire smouldered for a little, the pincers cooled. She was in the hands of inflexible tormentors, and who could tell what device of pain might attend the rousing from the brief torpor? Nature must have its periods of rest for the mind, be the agony ever so great; and hers was of the slow and hopeless kind which has such intervals most surely, and with least efficacy. One of them had come just then, and she was placid, drowsy, and acquiescent. She went with Routh to Homburg; he managed to make some hopeful, promising, and credulous acquaintances on the way, and was besides accredited to some "business people," of perfectly authentic character, at Frankfort, in the interest of the flourishing Flinders.
The change, the novelty, the sight of gaiety in which she took no share, but which she looked on at with a partial diversion of her mind, did her good. It was something even to be out of England; not a very rational or well-founded relief, but still a relief, explicable and defensible too, on the theory to which she adhered, that all her ills were merely physical. The torpid interval prolonged itself, and the vital powers of the sufferer were recruited for the wakening.