"I know," said the girl, and murmured something about "reforming" him.
Neither mother nor aunt achieved her surrender. Pleading and plain-speaking did nothing, nor ever do. The wedding took place at the registry office, as in those days the Brethren's Meeting Houses were not licensed for solemnization of marriages, and neither bride nor bridegroom would enter a church or chapel: temples of Antichrist. Hannah sat through the ceremony with a queer sense of foreboding, of sickness, and coming sorrow; an order of sentiment which, as a sensible Devon woman with no tomfool tombstone fancies ever in her head, in sixty years she had not known. Immediately after the ceremony, at the registry office door, the bridegroom suddenly loosened himself from the bride's arm, and walked sharply away without saying a word. Nobody knew why. Everybody stared. The wedding breakfast at Northgate House began without him. They waited; he did not come. After an hour the tension became unbearable. The guests whispered in groups; Rachel and her mother bore already on their brows the sorrow of the years to come. Aunt Jael's face was a gloomy triumphant "I told you so." Pastries were nibbled, wine was sipped; the joy-feast continued. After nearly two hours a bell rang, and the bridegroom appeared.
"Your explanation?" asked Hannah. Rachel dared not look.
"Oh, I had another woman to see. A glass of sherry please. Besides, it amused me."
He took her away to his house at Torquay. Their married life was wretched from the start. Among many evil passions these two predominated in Mr. Philip Traies: desire and cruelty. Here was a lovely and gentle girl who would satisfy both. The first was soon appeased (shattering love in her heart once and for all), the second never. Cruelty is insatiable. With this man it was a devouring passion. It is doubtful perhaps if he was sane. Taunts, foulness, sneers.... He starved her sometimes, taunted her with her lowlier birth, engaged the servants on the condition of ill-treating their mistress, dismissed them if they wavered. All the time he talked religion. The knees of his elegant trousers were threadbare with prayer. He could fit a text to every taunt. Then a baby-boy came to cheer the sinking heart. A few hours after the child was born, when the young mother lay in the agony and weakness she alone can know, Mr. Philip Traies entered the room—with a gentler word to-day surely?—no, with this: "So this is how you keep your fine promises to make a good lady of the house, a busy housewife and the rest of it"—he raised his voice savagely—"idling in bed at four in the afternoon. Get up, you idle bitch!" Leaning over the end-rail, he spat in her face.
The baby soon died. He taunted her with nursing it badly; and doubled every cruelty he knew save blows.
"Strike me," she said once.
Her patience was a fool's, a saint's, a loving woman's; her goodness, if not her spirits, unfailing. In writing home she made the best of things. But her heart was broken, her spirit wasting away.
"Why did you marry me?" she asked.