"How heavily you sighed just now!"
"Did I?" said Mr. Arundel, abstractedly. Then, after a brief pause, he said, in a different tone, "It is no use trying to hide these things from you, mother. The truth is, I am not happy."
"Not happy, Edward!" cried Mrs. Arundel; "but surely you––––?"
"I know what you are going to say, mother. Yes, mother, I love this dear girl Linda with all my heart; I love her most sincerely; and I could look forward to a life of unalloyed happiness with her, if––if there was not some inexplicable dread, some vague and most miserable feeling always coming between me and my hopes. I have tried to look forward to the future, mother; I have tried to think of what my life may be with Belinda; but I cannot, I cannot. I cannot look forward; all is dark to me. I try to build up a bright palace, and an unknown hand shatters it. I try to turn away from the memory of my old sorrows; but the same hand plucks me back, and chains me to the past. If I could retract what I have done; if I could, with any show of honour, draw back, even now, and not go upon this journey to Lincolnshire; if I could break my faith to this poor girl who loves me, and whom I love, as God knows, with all truth and earnestness, I would do so––I would do so."
"Edward!"
"Yes, mother; I would do it. It is not in me to forget. My dead wife haunts me by night and day. I hear her voice crying to me, 'False, false, false; cruel and false; heartless and forgetful!' There is never a night that I do not dream of that dark sluggish river down in Lincolnshire. There is never a dream that I have––however purposeless, however inconsistent in all its other details––in which I do not see her dead face looking up at me through the murky waters. Even when I am talking to Linda, when words of love for her are on my lips, my mind wanders away, back––always back––to the sunset by the boat–house, when my little wife gave me her hand; to the trout–stream in the meadow, where we sat side by side and talked about the future."
For a few minutes Mrs. Arundel was quite silent. She abandoned herself for that brief interval to complete despair. It was all over. The bridegroom would cry off; insulted Major Lawford would come post–haste to Dangerfield, to annihilate this dismal widower, who did not know his own mind. All the shimmering fabrics––the gauzes, and laces, and silks, and velvets––that were in course of preparation in the upper chambers would become so much useless finery, to be hidden in out–of–the–way cupboards, and devoured by misanthropical moths,––insect iconoclasts, who take a delight in destroying the decorations of the human temple.
Poor Mrs. Arundel took a mental photograph of all the complicated horrors of the situation. An offended father; a gentle, loving girl crushed like some broken lily; gossip, slander; misery of all kinds. And then the lady plucked up courage and gave her recreant son a sound lecture, to the effect that this conduct was atrociously wicked; and that if this trusting young bride, this fair young second wife, were to be taken away from him as the first had been, such a calamity would only be a fitting judgment upon him for his folly.
But Edward told his mother, very quietly, that he had no intention of being false to his newly–plighted troth.
"I love Belinda," he said; "and I will be true to her, mother. But I cannot forget the past; it hangs about me like a bad dream."