The moonbeams falling on that pale, wan, terror-stricken face, revealed the scarcely recognisable features of the gay, daring, fascinating girl, whom ten years before we saw upon the sands, behind Mrs. Henley's house, parting, in such hysterical grief, from the lover whom she then thought never could be absent from her heart, and whom a few months afterwards she jilted for twelve thousand a year. Yes, that pale, wan woman was Mrs. Meredith Vyner; and she fled from the man for whom she had sacrificed her name!
Her face was a pathetic commentary upon her life. No longer were those tiger eyes lighted up with the fire of daring triumph, no longer were those thin lips curled with a smiling cruel coquetry, no longer drooped those golden ringlets with a fairy grace. The eyes were dull with grief; the lips were drawn down with constant fretfulness; the whole face sharpened with constant fear and eagerness. Her beauty had vanished—her health was broken—her gaiety was gone. Crushed in spirit, she was a houseless fugitive, escaping from the most hateful of tyrants.
Retribution, swift and terrible, had fallen upon her head. From the moment when, in obedience to that wild impulse, she had fled from her husband with her saturnine lover, her life had been one protracted torture. Better, oh! better far, would it have been for her to have refused him, and to have died by his hand, than to have followed him to such misery as she had endured!
It would take me long to recount in detail the sad experience of the last two years. She found herself linked to a man, whose diabolical temper made her shudder when he frowned, and whose mad, unreasonable, minute jealousy kept her in constant terror. She dared not look at another man. She was never allowed to quit his sight for an instant. If she sighed, it made him angry; if she wept, it drew down reproaches upon her, and insinuations that she repented of the step she had taken, and wished to leave him. A day's peace or happiness with such a man was impossible. He had none of the amiable qualities which might have made her forget her guilty position. Dark, passionate, suspicious, ungenerous, and exacting, he was always brooding over the difference between the claims he made upon her admiration and love, and the mode in which she responded to those claims. His tyrannous vanity, could only have been propitiated by the most abject and exorbitant adulation—adulation in word, look, and act. She had sacrificed herself, but that was only one act, and he demanded a continued sacrifice. No woman had ever loved him before, yet nothing less than idolatry, or the simulation of it, would content him. He could not understand how she should have any other thought than that of ministering to his exacting vanity.
Now, of all women, Mrs. Vyner was the last to be capable of such a passion; and certainly, under such circumstances, no woman could have given way to the passion, had she felt it. In constant terror and perpetual remorse, what time had she for the subtleties of love? She dreaded and despised him. She saw that her fate was inextricably inwoven with his; and—what a humiliation!—she saw that he did not love her!
No, Maxwell did not love her. She had not been with him a month before he became aware of the fact himself. It is a remark I have often made, that men thwarted in their desires confound their own wilfulness with depth of passion. With fierce energy, they will move heaven and earth to gain what, when gained, they disregard. This is usually considered as a proof of the strength of their love; it only shows the strength of their self-love.
It was Maxwell's irritated vanity which made him so persisting in his pursuit of Mrs. Vyner. It was his wounded vanity which made him capable of murdering her; not his love: for love, even when wounded, is still a generous feeling;—it is sympathy, and admits no hate.
What, then, was Maxwell's object in living with Mrs. Vyner after the discovery that he did not really love her? Why did he not quit her, or at least allow her to quit him?
His vanity! precisely that: the same exacting vanity which prompted all his former actions, prompted this. He felt that she did not idolize him; he knew she would be glad to quit him;—and there was torture in the thought. Had she really loved him with passionate self-oblivion, he would have deserted her. As it was, the same motive which had roused his desire for her possession, which had made him force her to sacrifice everything for his sake, was as active now as then. If she left him, he was still, except for the one act of her elopement, as far from his goal as before.
It may seem strange that, not loving her, he should prize so highly the demonstrations of affection from her; but those who have probed the dark and intricate windings of the heart, know the persistency of an unsatisfied desire, and, above all, know the tyrannous nature of vanity. To this must be added the peculiar condition of Maxwell: the condition of a man intensely vain, who had never before been loved, and who had, as it were, staked his existence on subduing this one woman's heart.