He sighed from irritation. It was not his fault. Yet he was a little disappointed in Ursula. He had thought hers was an essentially gentle nature, unassuming, unaspiring. Even not desiring to meddle and share in her husband’s affairs, because that, for a young girl, is impossible. A thoroughly womanly woman, who cried out in horror at thought of men’s work, such as sheep-slaughtering, or of men’s play, such as a fox-hunt; a woman who could be tacitly brave, on occasion, able to endure though unable to act. Thus had she revealed herself to him in the week of his swift immersion, his model woman, in a word. That is the worst of tumbling into love. You marry your model woman and have to live with your wife. Now, Ursula was far superior to Otto’s ideal. There is nothing more hopeless in human relationships.
He turned impatiently from himself and went down to the room where his bailiff was waiting. All that morning he had been weighed down by the prospect of this interview. No, he was not the man, in his gentleness of heart, to “set things right.”
“You can do as you like,” he cried, starting up from the other’s excuses and tergiversations. “You can go or you can stay. But never again, if I live”—his heart throbbed wildly as he bent that cruel, hated look of his on the sullen retainer—“never again, by God, shall you charge one and eight for a laborer’s wages while paying him one and five!”
CHAPTER XXVI
FREULE LOUISA
In the gray loneliness of Ursula’s married life there was, however, very little solitude. The house contained too many various elements for that. And county society, which was plentiful, took a great interest in her on account of the romance of her courtship. By the coincidence of the old Baron’s immediately subsequent death, she had come face to face with her whole circle of acquaintance, during the days of her début at the Manor-house, through the medium of that most trying of social functions, the visit of condolence. All these people knew her from her birth; many of them called her by her Christian name; it seemed to her, and to them, that she was masquerading. She was nobody’s cousin.
And the Matres Familias who looked regretfully at Otto—there were many such—could hardly be expected to look benignly on Ursula. But they all patronized her most amiably, and patted her on the back, and showed that they were trying to “make her feel quite like one of us.” And Ursula, who could not be unnatural, nevertheless strove hard to be natural—if any one fathoms what is meant by that combination of miseries! The whole lot of them studied her attitude, and compared her with what she was before her marriage, and endeavored to accentuate a difference. One dear old lady told her kindly “that she really did very well.” Another took her aside: “Do not be self-conscious, dear Ursula,” she said. “Just be yourself, my dear, just as you were formerly. We like you best like that.” Surely, there was no cause for the historic Lady Burleigh to “take on” so; before her marriage she had not resided in Stamford-town.