“Oh no, my lady—” began Parlett, but her mistress interrupted her, saying, quickly:
“Of course he always knew that his lordship might marry, and could not have been unprepared for such a possibility; but in order that he might feel no difference in his present position on that account, Lord Hurdly has settled on him what is really a handsome fortune—not only the income of it, but the principal also. I tell you this that you may understand that he is none the worse off, so far as money goes, through his cousin’s marriage to me.”
“Yes, my lady. I understand, my lady. Thank you for telling me,” said Parlett, somewhat nervously. “Of course every one knows that you have done him no harm, my lady, and we knew, of course, that his lordship would do the handsome thing by him.”
Somehow these civil, reassuring words smote painfully upon Bettina’s consciousness. When this woman spoke so confidently of Lord Hurdly’s doing the handsome thing by his former heir, she felt it to be the hollow tribute of a conventional loyalty, and the assurance that it was understood that she herself had done him no harm grated on her also. Now that she was quite alone and free to think things out, as she had shrunk from doing heretofore, and as, in the rush of the London season, she had been able to avoid doing, she felt a sense of compunction toward Horace that seriously depressed her.
Dismissing the housekeeper, she put on a shade-hat and went for a ramble in the park. How beautiful it was! What shrubs, what trees, what undulations of rich emerald turf! She could not in the least feel that she had any right in it all. But how must a creature love it who had looked upon its noble beauties from childhood up to youth, and on to manhood, with the belief that it would some day be his own! She could not stifle the feeling that she had wronged that being if by her marriage she should be the means of depriving him of such a fortune and position, and deep, deep down in her consciousness she had a boding fear that, if all things hidden could be revealed, it might be shown that in a keener sense than this she had also wronged him.
For marriage had been in many ways an illumination to Bettina. The revelation of her own heart which it had given her was one which she tried hard to shut her eyes to. Twice she had consented to the idea of marrying without love. Once she had actually done this thing. Only her own heart knew what had been the consequences to her. But of one thing she had often felt glad. This was that she had not entered into a loveless marriage with a man who had loved her as she had believed Horace did at the time he had so ardently wooed her. From such a wrong as that might she be delivered!
As her thoughts now dwelt on Horace and the circumstances of their brief past together, the memory of his honest, tender, self-forgetful attitude toward her recurred to her half wistfully, in contrast to her recent experiences. Lord Hurdly’s manner toward her had, in truth, changed from the very hour of their marriage. He no longer had the air of a solicitous suitor, but took at once that of the assured husband and master. It made her think what she had heard of his father and of his poor little mother’s history. Not that she could fancy herself becoming, under any circumstances, a Griselda; though she could without difficulty imagine him in his father’s rôle.
But what right had she, she asked herself, to expect to reap where she had not sown? She had married for money and position, and she had got them. What more had she expected?
Nothing more, perhaps; but in one point she had been disappointed—namely, in the power of these things to give her what she longed for, and what she could define only under the indefinite term happiness.