She sighed as she did this, for it seemed like putting off her old life altogether.
“It’s better so,” she said to herself; “I know now that Gilbert must have thought me false to him from the very first. I can understand his cold reserve now, though it used to puzzle me so much. He changed almost immediately after our marriage.”
Eleanor Monckton grew very pensive as she remembered that she had been perhaps herself to blame for the altered manner and no doubt equally altered feelings of her husband. She had neglected her duty as a wife, absorbed in her affection as a daughter; she had sacrificed the living to the dead; and she began to think that Richard Thornton’s advice had been wiser than she had believed when she refused to listen to it. She had been wrong altogether. Classic vows of vengeance were all very well in the days when a Medea rode upon flying dragons and slaughtered her children upon principle; but a certain inspired teacher, writing a very long time after that much-to-be-regretted classic age, has declared that vengeance is the right of divinity alone, and far too terrible an attribute to be tampered with by fallible mortals, blindly hurling the belts of heaven against each other’s earthly heads.
She thought this, and grew very melancholy and uncomfortable, and began to fancy that her impulses had been about the worst guides that she could have chosen. She began to think that she had not acted so very wisely in running away from Tolldale Priory in the first heat of her indignation, and that she might have done better perhaps by writing a temperate letter of justification to Gilbert Monckton, and quietly abiding the issue. But she had chosen her path now, and must stand by her choice, on pain of appearing the weakest and most cowardly of women.
“My letter is posted,” she said to herself. “Gilbert will receive it to-morrow morning. I should be a coward to go back; for, however much I may have been to blame in the matter, he has treated me very badly.”
She wiped away some tears that had come into her eyes as she took the rings from her wedding finger, and then began to play again.
This time she dashed into one of the liveliest and most brilliant fantasias she could remember, a very pot pourri of airs; a scientific hodge-podge of Scotch melodies; now joyous, now warlike and savage, now plaintive and tender, always capricious in the extreme, and running away every now and then into the strangest variations, the most eccentric cadences. The piece was one of Thalberg’s chef-d’œuvres, and Eleanor played it magnificently. As she struck the final chords, sharp and rapid as a rattling peal of musketry, Miss Barkham re-entered the room.
She had the air of being rather annoyed, and she hesitated a little before speaking to Eleanor, who rose from the piano and began to put on her gloves.
“Really, Miss Villars,” she said, “it is most incomprehensible to me, but since Mrs. Lennard herself wishes it, I——”
She stopped and fidgeted a little with the gold pencil-case hanging to her watch-chain.