No word of love as yet had passed their lips, and yet they understood each other. Indeed, so plain was the avowal of her looks, that a man less shy and suspicious than Maxwell would long ago have declared his passion, certain of a return. But he was withheld by the very fierceness of his passion, and by his horror at ridicule. Maxwell was one of those men who never enter the water till they can swim—who never undertake anything till they are certain of succeeding, held back by the fear of failure. One trait in his character will set this disposition clearly forth: he had a fine tenor voice, and sang with some mastery, but he never could be prevailed upon to sing before any one, except his family, because he was waiting till he could execute as well as Rubini or Mario. Meanwhile, he was intensely jealous of those who, not having reached that standard, did sing; and his scornful criticisms on their curious presumption, was nothing but miserable spite at their not having so sensitive a vanity as his own.
Maxwell was in truth a bad, mean-spirited, envious, passionate man, in whom vanity, ludicrously susceptible and exacting, fostered the worst of passions, jealousy and revenge. He was misanthropical: not because his own high-thoughted soul turned from the pettiness of mankind with intolerant disgust,—not because he had pryed too curiously into the corruptions of human nature, without at the same time having been fortunate enough to know familiarly all that is great, and loving, and noble in the human heart—but simply because his life was a perpetual demand upon the abnegation, affection, and admiration of others, and because that demand could not, in the nature of things, be satisfied. It has been said that a man who affects misanthropy is a coxcomb, for real misanthropy is madness. Not always madness: seldom so; it is generally inordinate and unsatisfied vanity. A man hates his fellow-creatures because they, unwittingly, are always irritating him by refusing to submit to the exactions of his vanity: he construes their neglect into insult, their indifference into envy. He envies them for succeeding where he dare not venture; he hates them for not acknowledging his own standard of himself. Maxwell was one of these.
Conceive such a man suddenly caught in the meshes of a brilliant coquette like Mrs. Meredith Vyner! Conceive him after two years of angry expectation, during which she has never bestowed a smile on him which was not unmeaning, now awakening to the conviction that his merits are recognised, that his love is returned, that he has inspired a guilty passion!
The guilt added intensity to his joy: it was so immense a triumph!
What a pair! Love has been well said to delight in antitheses, otherwise we might stare at the contrast afforded by this little, hump-backed, golden-haired, coquettish, heartless woman, and this saturnine, gloomy, stupid, bad-hearted man.
Poor Meredith Vyner could not comprehend it. The evidence of his eyes told him plainly how the case stood; but his inexperienced mind refused to accept the evidence of his senses. What could she see in so grim and uninteresting an animal? Marmaduke was quite another man; affection for him was intelligible at least; but Maxwell! And what could Maxwell see in her? Why, she was the very contradiction of all he must feel in his own breast!
In that contradiction was the charm: Maxwell did himself instinctively, but involuntarily, that justice; he would assuredly have hated a duplicate of himself, even more intensely than he hated others.
Meredith Vyner endeavoured once or twice to come to an "explanation" with his wife; for he was master in his own house, and would be, or he was greatly deceived. But she answered him with a few galling sarcasms (adding general allusions to the miseries of young wives subject to the absurd jealousies of foolish, old men), and ending in—hysterics! There was no combating hysterics, and Vyner was always defeated.