Leaving the old lady at the door of her lodgings, Frank strode on at a rapid pace, neither looking to the right nor to the left, seeing none of the people by whom he passed, thinking of nothing but his lost love. At length the long fasting he had undergone began to tell upon him, he felt sick and faint, and determined to go to his Club to get some refreshment,--not to the Flybynights; he could not have borne the noisy racket, the bewildering chaff, of that circle of free-lances; so he strode steadily down to Pall Mall, and turned into the Retrenchment. Even that solemn temple of gastronomy and politics was far too lively for him in his then mood. The coffee-room was filled with a number of men who had dined late, many of whom, just returned from their autumnal expeditions, and not having met for a couple of months, had "joined tables," and were loudly talking over their holiday experiences. All was light and lively and jolly; and Frank felt, as he sat in the midst of them, like the death's-head at the banquet. At one table close by his four men were sitting over their wine, one of the number being rallied by the rest about his approaching marriage. "You're a lucky fellow, by Jove, Hope!" Frank heard one of them say; "I always said Miss Chudleigh was the prettiest girl out since the Lexden's year." "What's become of the Lexden--didn't she get married or something?" asked another. "Oh, yes!" answered the first--"married a man who's a member here. I don't know him; but a cleverish fellow, I believe. No tin--regular case of spoons, they said it was." "Mistake that!" said the fiancé, whose future father-in-law was a wealthy brewer; "spoons is all very well, but it wants something to back it." "Ah, but it's not every one that has your luck," said old Tommy Orme, who just then joined the party--"nor, I will say, Hope it isn't every one that deserves it, by Jove!" and on the Hope of that speech, old Tommy determined to borrow a ten-pound note from his friend on the first opportunity. Frank shuddered as he listened, and bent his head over his cutlet. "Was there any thing in what those men had said?" he asked himself, as he walked home. Could it have been that the state of comparative poverty into which he had brought his wife had soured her temper, rendered her jealous and querulous, and so disgusted her as to cause her to avail herself of the first excuse which presented itself for returning to her former life? It might be so, indeed. If a were, Frank was not disposed to think of her very uncharitably: he knew the whole wealth of love which he had bestowed upon her; but he thought that her bringing-up might perhaps have rendered her incapable of appreciating it; and he went to his solitary bed with a feeling of something more than pity for his absent wife, after imploring peace to and pardon for them both in his prayers.
The evening of the next day, however, found him in a very different frame of mind. Not one word had been heard from Barbara; and the fact of her absence, and the manner of her departure, had been thoroughly well discussed throughout the neighbourhood. Early in the morning, Frank, with the conviction that all must eventually be known, had removed the seal from his mother's lips; and the old lady's circumstantial account, softened as much as her conscience would allow,--for she felt really more strongly than she had admitted about Barbara's defection,--was detailed to various knots of fa-miller friends throughout the day. The astonishment of the Mesopotamians was immense; immense their horror, deep the condemnation they poured upon the peccant one. The good women of the district could not realise what had occurred. If Barbara had eloped, they would have had some slight glimmering of it; though an elopement was a thing which in their idea only occurred in highly aristocratic families. They had heard through the medium of the newspapers, stories of post-chaise followed by post-chaise speeding along the northern road, guilty wife and "gay Lothario" (Mesopotamian phrase for cavalier villany varying from seduction to waltzing) in the one, injured husband in the other. But how a woman could take herself off, leave her home and her husband, and send a servant for her things afterwards, my dear, as cool as if she were going by the railway train,--that beat them altogether. But though they could not understand, they could condemn, and did, in most unmeasured terms. Whatever the motive might have been, and the most energetic among them could not find in what was said any thing particularly damnifying ("in what is said, my dear; but I'm sure there must be something behind all this that we don't know of, but which will come out some day"),--whatever the motive might have been, there was the fact; that could not be got rid of or explained away: Mrs. Frank Churchill had left her home and was not living with her husband. What more or less could you make of that? Some of them had seen it in her from the first.
There was something--one section said, in her eye, another in her manner--which showed discontent, or worse. "Something" in her walk which displeased many of them greatly--"as though the ground she trod upon was not good enough for her," they said. And she who had held her head so high, for whom none of them were good enough, had come to this. Well, if being a fine lady and being brought up amongst great people led to that, thank goodness they were as they were.
Mrs. Harding had been one of the earliest to receive old Mrs. Churchill's confidence, and had been so much astonished and impressed by what she heard, that she at once returned home and proceeded to rouse her husband, then peacefully sleeping off his hard night's work. It must have been something quite out of the common to have prompted such a step, as George Harding was never pleased at having his hard-earned rest broken in upon; but on this occasion his wife thought she had a complete justification. So she went softly into the closed room, undrew the curtains and let in the full morning sun; then she shook the sleeper's shoulder and called "George!" Harding roused himself at once and demanded what was the matter; he always had an idea, when suddenly awakened from sleep, that something had happened to the paper, either an Indian mail omitted, or a leader of the wrong politics inserted, or something equally dreadful in its result; and he had scarcely got his eyes fairly open, when his wife said, "Oh, my dear, such a terrible thing for poor Churchill!"
"What do you mean?" asked George, broad-awake in an instant; "nobody ill?"
"Oh, no, my dear; much better if it were. She's gone, my dear!"
"Who's gone; what on earth do you mean?" and then his wife told him the story circumstantially. And after hearing it George Harding dressed himself at once and went out to see his friend.
He found Churchill sitting in his little study, looking vacantly before him. There were no signs of work on the desk, no book near him; he had evidently been sitting for some time in a state of semi-stupor. He was very pale; but he looked up at the opening of the door and smiled faintly when he saw who it was. There was something so cheery in dear old George Harding's presence, that it shed light wherever he went, no matter how dark the surroundings: men who, as they knelt by the coffins of their wives, had prayed to God to take them then and there,--men who, contemplating the ruin sweeping down upon them, had horribly suggestive thoughts of the laudanum-bottle or the pistol-barrel,--had felt the dark clouds pass away at the sound of his genial voice and the sight of his hopeful face. But there were tears in George Harding's gray eyes as he took his friend's hand, and his voice shook a little as he said, "My dear old Frank! my poor dear fellow!"
"I'm hard hit, Harding, and that's the truth. You've heard all about it, of course?" Frank asked nervously, fearing he might have again to recount the miserable history.
"Yes, my wife has told me,--she heard it from your mother, I believe,--and I came on at once. Do you know I'm horribly afraid, Frank, that it was from your taking my advice that this quarrel took place?"