Mrs. Hammond opened the letter. It was from her solicitor, and informed her that the final decision of the court, on her application for the guardianship of her stepdaughter, had been given that day against her. She frowned, then threw the letter down, with a short laugh.
"Everything is against me, I think. However, it is rather fortunate for Alice."
At the same hour on the following evening Sir Laurence Alsager was writing his letter to Helen Manningtree from Dover.
[CHAPTER XXX.]
NATURE AND ART.
Lady Mitford's composure had been shaken by her interview with Sir Laurence Alsager more rudely than by any of the events which had succeeded each other with such rapidity in the course of the short but troublous time since her marriage. She had reckoned upon his friendship to support and his society to cheer her, and now they must be relinquished. There could be no doubt, no hesitation about that; and she did not doubt or hesitate, but she suffered, as such keenly sensitive and highly-principled natures can suffer, whose only possible course is to do the right thing, and pay, without having counted, the cost.
All the loneliness, all the dreariness of her lot came on her foreboding spirit, as she sat alone in her dressing-room, two days after her parting interview with Sir Laurence. She had been thinking of the day at Redmoor when their first confidence had been interchanged; she had been remembering his counsel, and taking herself to task for having neglected it, or, at any rate, for not having tried more earnestly and more persistently to follow it.
"I must have been to blame in some degree," she thought; "I ought to have tried to please him more; but--" and then she sighed--"I had been used to please him without trying, and it is hard to realize the change; and before one does realize it, it is too late. I wonder if there is any case in which it would not be too late from the first; I wonder if any woman in the world ever yet succeeded in retaining or recovering the heart of any man when it had once in the least strayed from her. I don't grieve for myself now,--I cannot; but I blame myself. I might have tried--no doubt I should have failed; but still I might have tried. I might have asserted myself from the moment that they met at Redmoor, and I saw her clasp his hand as she did. But what is the use of asserting oneself, of putting one's position, one's conventional rights, against the perverted strength of a man's will? No, no; there is no security where the question is one of feeling; in the insecure holding of love we are but tenants-at-will."
She thought thus mournfully of her own lot, and condemned herself for faults she had not committed; she thought of Alsager, and took herself to task because she could not repress or deny the keen and compensating joy which the knowledge that he loved her gave; she thought of her husband with infinite compassion, with apprehension, and with hopelessness. The downward course had been run with awful rapidity by Sir Charles Mitford. Since he had discarded the gentle influence of Georgie, the benignant restraint, the touch of higher aspiration, and purer tastes had vanished, and he had returned to all the low habits and coarse vices of his earlier career. Georgie knew this vaguely, and she experienced all the horror and disgust which were natural to such a mind as hers. At first, when she recognized in the fullest extent the fact of her husband's infatuation with Mrs. Hammond, she could not understand why he should not be restrained by that passion, as he had been by his evanescent love for herself, from coarse and debasing pleasures. But she soon found out, by the light of her clear perceptions and the aid of her intuitive refinement of mind, how widely different were the sentiments which she had ignorantly compared; and learned that while there is no temporal salvation for a man so powerful as love, there is no swifter or surer curse and ruin than an illicit passion. When Georgie came to understand this fully, her apprehensions concerning her husband reached a height of intensity which would have been unreasonable, had she not possessed the painful knowledge of what his former career had been. She had hardly understood it at the time indeed, and her father had softened matters down very much, partly through the invincible amiability of his own disposition, and partly because he believed, in simple sincerity, that all "Charley's" misbehaviour had been caused by want of money alone; and that once rich, and holding a responsible position, he would not again be assailed by temptations to disreputable conduct. Whence it is presumable that the good parson knew a great deal more of the next world than he knew of this.
Lady Mitford's dreary reverie was interrupted by the entrance of her maid, who handed her a letter from Alsager. As she took it in her hand, she saw that it had been sealed with the ring which she had given him, and she broke it open with mingled joy and fear. The letter was brief, kind, and earnest. Sir Laurence told her that he was leaving England, and wished, before doing so, to place within her reach a source of consolation which he felt she might to surely need. Then, in a few words, he told her of his letter to Helen Manningtree; and besought her in any emergency, in any unpleasantness, if she were ill, or even if she were only lonely,--as he knew she had cultivated no intimacies in her own circle,--to send for Helen. He had not waited for Helen's reply; he knew so well how warm and sincere an acquiescence in his request it would convey. He told her of the attachment existing between Helen and the curate, and said, "Had there been no other reason for my rejecting your advice, I knew she was, at the time of my father's death, virtually affianced to Cuthbert Farleigh."