Mrs. Gurney's apology

by Mary Jary Gurney

I returned to Easton an altered being; but this feeling wore off somewhat in the routine, and in the necessities of married life—for his father’s death, occurring shortly after, you remember, involved many changes and responsibilities, which turned, in a measure, for a time, the current of my thoughts.

Afterwards succeeded, at constantly recurring intervals of a year or two, many other deaths in our families which tended to check my free indulgence of thought, till at last my feelings settled simply into a sense of a vague but awful responsibility of a violation of the social law.

You must recall the constant distress and trouble into which we were all plunged by the successive deaths of his sister Anna, his aunt Catharine, my father and the children. The family at I—— Hall, too, was a weight which never ceased to press upon my heart, and, indeed, upon my whole existence.

And so I lived, but not among the living. I had my inner life and my outward life—what, I doubt not, other women have had as well as this poor one at Catton. I drummed, in the old school-girl way, into my husband’s ears the set tunes for the piano, utterly unobservant of the music. I dressed in the same mechanical way to receive his relations, and thanked God when they were gone—and so underwent, beneath a conjugal yoke of continued kindness, a slow death. I entered into the life around me as an actress, real herself only when away from the stage of her action. I became the same that other women become, who turn from human faces to brute things for comfort. My early passion for horses and dogs proved then my consolation. I had to the full that mental nervousness which craves allayment in action. It would be impossible to admire a horse more than I had always done. It was an instinct of my nature, just as of Landseer’s, or of old Mary Breeze’s, of glorious memory; but I loved them now, for they were so much to me!

But when alone, immured, away from every one, I lived my fullest life. My imagination went away boldly, admiringly, lovingly, to other men. They were not objects of jealousy, dear E * * *, for they were dead.

I lived with the memories of the founders of our family—men who never sat upon the clerk’s stool, and could never have claimed the benefit of clergy—men with strong arms and stalwart frames, making their deeds of knightly prowess known in a hundred battles—with the memories of Hugh, and Walter, and Anselm, and Girard, and Reginald, and Matthew and John, who in the Holy Land fought at Prince Edward’s side, and rendered their red cross a terror to the Paynim. And my memory, only too tenacious, as you know, kept each noble form before me, with all the vividness of a present reality.

I lived with them, too, in their pastimes, in which—side by side with the Black Prince, in the eyes of their sovereign, and their gracious mistress, his Queen Phillippa, at the tournaments, held on the very spots where I daily rode—they mimicked their glorious achievements upon the veritable fields of blood which they had won.

I admired their splendid force, their brains not emasculate with such education as I saw around me, nor hampered with narrow trade tricks. I wondered what work they would be about if they were living to-day. I tried to imagine how any of the family could have got down, step by step, generation after generation, to studying Greek verbs, or calculating per cents.

Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a praying banker, but abroad in the free air, adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, in whatever way the time demanded, just as the man I love, simply and naturally, and yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of my buried hopes and desires, against the law and the power, the ignorance and the infidelity to human nature, of all around me. All things great are simple. In the crusades my ancestors adventured, they went a long way across the world. It was as far as the distance between groom and lady, but not further. They conquered what was their own by right of their nature and their belief, and with such a struggle as every one must undergo who undertakes the assertion of his right against social law.

They conquered theirs as he did also his own; and does not his seem an act like, or nobler, than theirs? Is the rescue of a dead body a worthier act than the rescue of a living soul?