She had fretted his passion away in little sticklings for little proprieties, and narrowing understanding, and subservience to effeminate social traditions. She jarred upon the health of his intellect with her unsympathetic refinements and pitiful uncharities, and fear of all catholicity. She was gentility itself, without the spark of nature, and believing that she inhabited the castle towers of exclusiveness and social righteousness, she had made his home the donjon-keep of his knighthood, at once the loftiest domestic apartment and the prison.
Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance, her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.
"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set her the example of respecting nothing else. I have been a fraud, and wonder that she is not wordly-wise."
He found his infirm will very obdurate against making love to his wife again, but the request he had just made of Heaven, to lead him into the right steps, prevailed upon him to make his worship at home this morning.
"Yes," he said, "I will start right. She is sick and alone, and Vesta taken from her. I will send a note to the rector to announce the marriage, as Vesta requested, and do my worship at Teackle Hall this day."
The Manokin, spreading wider as it flowed farther from the town, and widening from a brook to a creek, till it moistened fringes of marsh and cut low bluffs into the fields, never seemed to invite him so much to wander along its sluices as this morn.
"If my wife would only walk with me into the country," he said, restlessly, "how more companionable we would have been to each other! But she cannot walk at all; all masculine intercourse ceased between us years ago, and the dull, small range of household talk, and the dynastic gossip of the good families, wear down my spirits. But I have been a truant husband, and my tongue is parched by dusty rovings in prodigal ways. Let me woo her again with all my might!"
He walked through Princess Anne, worship now having commenced in all the churches, and saw nobody upon the street except a divided group before the tavern. There he heard Jimmy Phœbus speak to Levin Dennis sharply:
"Levin, what you doin' with that nigger buyer? Ain't you got no Dennis pride left in you?"
The Judge saw that Joe Johnson, safe from civil process on Sunday, even if his enemy had not been helpless in bed, was washing Levin Dennis's brandy-sickened head under the street pump, plying the pump-handle and shampooing him with alternate hands.