Signora Picirillo sighed as she went down the steps before the church, and took her seat in the hired vehicle that was to take her back to the Pilasters.
“So Bloomsbury has seen the last of Eleanor,” she thought, sadly; “we may go down to see her, perhaps, in her grand new house, but she will never come back to us. She will never wash the tea-things and make tea and toast again for a tired-out old music-mistress.”
The dying glory of red and orange in the last sunset of September sank behind the grey line of the German Ocean, after the closing day of Gilbert Monckton’s honeymoon. Upon the first of October the lawyer was to take his young wife to Tolldale Priory. Mr. and Mrs. Monckton walked upon the broad sands as that low orange light faded out of the western sky. The lawyer was grave and silent, and every now and then cast a furtive glance at his companion’s face. Sometimes that glance was succeeded by a sigh.
Eleanor was paler and more careworn than she had looked since the day after her visit to the shipbroker’s office. The quiet and seclusion of the place to which Gilbert Monckton had brought his bride had given her ample opportunity of brooding on the one idea of her life. Had he plunged her into a vortex of gaiety, it is possible that she might have been true to that deep-rooted purpose which she had so long nursed in her breast; but, on the other hand, there would have been some hope that the delights of change and novelty, delights to which youth cannot be indifferent—might have beguiled the bride from that for-ever-recurring train of thought which separated her from her husband as effectually as if an ocean had rolled between them.
Yes, Gilbert Monckton had discovered the fatal truth that marriage is not always union, and that the holiest words that were ever spoken cannot weave the mystic web which makes two souls indissolubly one, if there be one inharmonious thread in the magical fabric. Gilbert Monckton felt this, and knew that there was some dissonant note in the chord which should have been such a melodious combination.
Again and again, while talking to his wife—carried away, perhaps, by the theme of which he was speaking, and counting on her sympathy as a matter of course—he had looked into Eleanor’s face, and seen that her thoughts had wandered far away from him and his conversation, into some unknown region. He had no clue by which he could follow those wanderings; no chance word ever fell from his wife’s lips which might serve as the traitor silk that guided ruthless Eleanor to Rosamond’s hiding-place. So thus, before the honeymoon was over, Gilbert Monckton began to be jealous of his bride, thereby fostering for himself a nest of scorpions, or a very flock of young vultures, which were henceforth to make their meals off his entrails.
But it was not the ferocious or Othello-like jealousy. The green-eyed monster did not appear under his more rugged and uncivilized form, finding a vent for his passions in pillows, poisons, and poniards. The monster disguised himself as a smooth and philosophical demon. He hid his diabolical attributes under the gravity and wisdom of a friendly sage. In other words, Gilbert Monckton, feeling disappointed at the result of his marriage, set himself to reason upon the fact; and was for ever torturing himself with silent arguments and mute conjectures as to the cause of that indescribable something in his young wife’s manner, which told him there was no perfect union between them. The lawyer reproached himself for his weak folly in having built a fairy palace of hope upon the barren fact of Eleanor’s acceptance of his hand. Did not girls, situated as George Vane’s daughter had been situated, marry for money, again and again, in these mercenary days? Who should know this better than Gilbert Monckton the solicitor, who had drawn up so many marriage settlements, been concerned in so many divorces, and assisted at so many matrimonial bargains, whose sordid motives were as undisguised as in any sale of cattle transacted in the purlieus of Smithfield? Who should know better than he, that beautiful and innocent girls every day bartered their beauty and innocence for certain considerations set down by grave lawyers, and engrossed upon sheets of parchment at so much per sheet?
He did know this, and in his mad arrogance he had said to himself, “I—amongst all other men—will be an exception to the common rule. The girl I marry is poor; but she will give herself to me for no meaner considerations than my love, and my truth, and my devotion; and those shall be hers until my dying day.”
Gilbert Monckton had said this; and already a mocking demon had made a permanent perch for himself upon this wretched man’s shoulders, for ever whispering insidious doubts into his ear, for ever instilling shadowy fears into his mind.