“How can people act so contemptibly for the sake of money!” cried Eleanor, with sudden indignation.
The lawyer looked admiringly at her glowing face, which had crimsoned with the intensity of her feeling. She was thinking of her father’s death, and of that hundred pounds which had been won from him on the night of his suicide.
“No,” thought Mr. Monckton, “she cannot be mercenary. That bright impulsive creature could never be guilty of any deliberate meanness—and what could be a worse meanness than that of the woman who could marry a man out of sordid and mercenary motives, beguiling him by a simulated affection, in order to compass her own advancement?”
“If I have won her heart, in its untainted freshness,” thought Gilbert Monckton, “I must be content, though that girlish heart may seem cold. She will love me better by-and-by. She will learn to confide in me; she will learn to sympathize with me.”
By such arguments as these Mr. Monckton endeavoured to satisfy himself—and sometimes, indeed, succeeded in doing so—that his young wife’s absent and thoughtful manner was a matter of course; the thoughtfulness of a girl unused to her new position, and perhaps a little bewildered by its strangeness. But on the morning of the first of October, Gilbert Monckton perceived a change in Eleanor’s manner, and on that morning the demon familiar took up a permanent station upon the lawyer’s shoulder.
Mrs. Monckton was no longer grave and listless. A feverish impatience, a sudden flow of high spirits, seemed to have taken possession of her.
“You observe,” whispered the demon familiar, as Mr. Monckton sat opposite his wife in a compartment of the express train that was to take them to London, en route for Berkshire, “you observe the glow in her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes. You saw her turn pale the other day when she mentioned Launcelot Darrell’s name. You know what the young man’s mother told you. You can do the commonest sum in logical arithmetic, I suppose. You can put two and two together. Your wife has been wearied to death of the north, and the sea, and the sands—and of you. She is in high spirits to-day, and it is very easy to account for the change in her manner. She is glad to go back to Berkshire—she is glad to go back there, because she will see Launcelot Darrell.”
Mr. Monckton, with a cambric handkerchief thrown over his face, kept a covert watch upon his wife from between its artfully adjusted folds, and enjoyed such converse as this with the spirit he had chosen for his companion.
CHAPTER XXVII.
SLOW FIRES.
The new life which began for Eleanor Monckton at Tolldale Priory seemed very strange to her. The prim respectability of the old mansion weighed heavily upon her spirits. The best part of her existence had been spent in a very free-and-easy and Bohemian manner: and her improved position was at first more strange than pleasant to her. The well-trained servants who waited upon her in respectful silence, acknowledging her as their mistress, and obsequiously eager to give her pleasure, were very different people to the familiar landladies of those lodgings in which she had lived with her father, or the good-natured shoemaker-landlord at the Pilasters.