“Yes; he is full of work always. I thought he might have been content to take two or three weeks’ quiet reading in our sleepy old town, but he wanted to get back to the hospital. He will come back for a day or two when the whim seizes him. He has always been erratic in his pleasures, but steady as a rock in his work.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
“The heaviness and guilt within my bosom
Takes off my manhood.”
Lord Cheriton put the pistol-case under his arm and left the cottage. The case was covered by his loose summer overcoat, and anybody meeting him in the Park might have supposed that he was carrying a book, or might have failed to observe that he was carrying anything whatever. As it happened he met nobody between the West Gate and the house. He went in at the open window of the library, locked the pistol-case in one of the capacious drawers of the large writing-table—drawers which contained many of his most important documents, and which were provided with the safest lever locks.
When this was done he went to his wife’s morning-room, where she was generally to be found at this hour, her light breakfast finished, and her newspaper-reading or letter-writing begun.
“Where have you been so early, James?” she asked, looking up at him with an affectionate smile. “I was surprised to hear you had gone out before breakfast.”
He looked at her in silence for a few moments—lost in thought. The beautiful and gracious face turned towards him in gentle inquiry had never frowned upon him in all their years of wedded life. Never had that tranquil affection failed him. There had been no dramatic passion in their love, no fierce alternations of despair and bliss—no doubts, no jealousies. His girlish wife had given herself to him in implicit trustfulness, fond of him, and proud of him, believing in him with a faith second only to her faith in God. For three and twenty years of cloudless wedded life she had made his days happy. Never in all those years had she given him reason for one hour of doubt or trouble. She had been his loving and loyal helpmate, sharing his hopes and his ambitions, caring for the people he cared for, respecting even his prejudices, shaping her life in all things to please him.
Great heaven! what a contrast with that other woman, whose fiery and exacting love had made his life subordinate to hers—whose jealousy had claimed the total surrender of all other ties, of all other pleasures, had cut him off from all the advantages of society, had deprived him of the power to make friends among his fellow-men, had kept him as her bond-slave, accepting nothing less than a complete isolation from all that men hold best in life.
He looked at his wife’s calm beauty—where scarce a line upon the ivory-white forehead marked the progress of years—the soft, gazelle-like eyes lifted so meekly to meet his own. He compared this placid face with that other face, handsome, too, after its fashion—long after the bloom of youth had gone—but marked in every feature with the traces of a nervous temperament, a fiery temper, the face of a woman in whose character there were none of the elements of domestic happiness—or, in a word, the face of a Strangway, the daughter of a perverse and unhappy race, from whose line no life of happiness and well-doing had arisen within the memory of man.