“Presently, when we have really done with this subject, my dear. I have other reasons—”
“Which you will spare me the hearing. My dear Priscilla, there are no reasons on earth which can justify me in turning this family out of their house, or you in asking me to do it. Let us hear no more about it.”
“But you must hear. I will be heard on a subject in which I have such an interest, Mr Rowland.”
“Ring the bell, my little fellow. Pull hard. That’s it—Candles in the office immediately.”
And Mr Rowland tossed off the last half of his glass of port, kissed the little ones, and was gone. The lady remained to compassionate herself; which she did very deeply, that she could find no means of ridding herself of the great plague of her life. These people were always in her way, and no one would help her to dislodge them. Her own husband was against her—quite unmanageable and perverse.
Chapter Thirty Eight.
The Victims.
If Mrs Rowland was dissatisfied with her success, while seeing that some resources of comfort remained to the Hopes and Margaret, a view of the interior of the corner-house would probably have affected her deeply, and set her moralising on the incompleteness of all human triumphs. There was peace there which even she could not invade—could only, if she had known it, envy. Her power was now exhausted, and her work was unfinished. For many weeks, she had made Margaret as miserable as she had intended to make her. Margaret had suffered from an exasperating sense of injury; but that was only for a few hours. Hers was not a nature which could retain personal resentment for any length of time. She needed the relief of compassionate and forgiving feelings; and she cast herself into them for solace, as the traveller, emerging from the glaring desert, throws himself down beside the gushing spring in the shade. From the moment that she did this, it became her chief trouble that Philip was blamed by others. Her friends said as little as they could in reference to him, out of regard for her feelings; but she could not help seeing that Maria’s indignation was strong, and that Hester considered that her sister had had a happy escape from a man capable of treating her as Philip had done. If it had been possible to undertake his defence, Margaret would have done so. As there were no means of working upon others to forgive her wrongs, she made it her consolation to forgive them doubly herself; to cheer up under them; to live for the aim of being more worthy of Philip’s love, the less he believed her to be so. Her lot was far easier now than it had been in the winter. She had been his; and she believed that she still occupied his whole soul. She was not now the solitary, self-despising being she had felt herself before. Though cut off from intercourse with him as if the grave lay between them, she knew that sympathy with her heart and mind existed. She experienced the struggles, the moaning efforts, of affections doomed to solitude and silence; the shrinking from a whole long life of self-reliance, of exclusion from domestic life; the occasional horror of contemplating the waste and withering of some of the noblest parts of the immortal nature,—a waste and withering which are the almost certain consequence of violence done to its instincts and its laws. From these pains and terrors she suffered; and from some of smaller account,—from the petty insults, or speculations of the more coarse-minded of her neighbours, and the being too suddenly reminded by passing circumstances of the change which had come over her expectations and prospects; but her love, her forgiveness, her conviction of being beloved, bore her through all these, and saved her from that fever of the heart, in the paroxysms of which she had, in her former and severer trial, longed for death, even for non-existence.