“And,� continued Blair, with a smile that had more pain than mirth in it, “will you promise me to smile again, and to look as cheerful as you used to look when we were first married, and to get back that pretty colour that you once had in your cheeks? for I can’t stand such a woe-begone-looking wife another day.�
“I will promise you to be so young, so beautiful, so gay, that you will be amazed at me. I will not only smile, but laugh. I will never be jealous any more.�
“My dear, don’t say that,� said Blair, really smiling then; “you can’t any more help going into tantrums every time I look at a pretty girl than you can help breathing, and, besides, it diverts me very much.�
“Very well, then; only promise. You know you have never broken your word to me, and your word is all I want.�
“Then,� said Blair, after a pause, “I promise.�
He was still smiling, but there were drops upon his forehead. He was not unprepared for this, but it was a crisis with him. Elizabeth overwhelmed him with sweet endearments. Blair said truly, that it was the beginning of their second honeymoon.
Elizabeth bravely redeemed her promise. In one week a delightful change came over her. She tripped about the house singing. Her health returned with her spirits, and she regained in a few days what she had lost in as many weeks. Blair himself experienced a certain relief. He sat down one day and figured up the profits he had made out of his plantation within the time that he had kept his “horse or two,� and he was startled at the result. But for that “horse or two� he would have been a rich man. He anticipated some terrible struggles in the future against his mania, but if only Alabaster won—and he must win—Blair would have accomplished his object. He would have got the better of Skelton, he would have won enough—in short, he would be just at the point where he could give up with dignity and comparative ease the sport that had so nearly ruined him.
The eventful day came at last—the closing day of the spring meeting. There had been four days of racing in perfect May weather, with splendid attendance and a great concourse of strangers. Skelton’s stable had been very successful. Every day the two men met at the races and exchanged nods and a few words of ordinary courtesy. Sometimes Skelton drove over tandem; once he drove his four-horse coach, with Lewis Pryor on the box seat. He was always the observed of observers.
Mrs. Blair, on one pretext or another, refrained from attending the course upon any of the first four days, albeit they were gala occasions in the county; but on the final day, when the great match was to be run, her high spirit would not allow her to stay at home. She knew perfectly well that the whole county understood how things were with them, for in patriarchal communities everybody’s private affairs are public property. They even knew that Blair had promised his wife that this should be the last—the very last—of his horse racing.
The day was very bright even for the bright Southern spring, and there was a delicious crispness in the golden air. As Elizabeth leaned out of her window soon after sunrise the beauty and peace around her lightened her weary heart. Newington had long fallen into a picturesque shabbiness, to which Elizabeth was quite accustomed and did not feel to be a hardship. At the back of the house her window opened upon what had once been a prim garden with box hedges; but the hedge had grown into trees, and the flowers and shrubs had long ago forgotten to be prim. Violets, that are natural vagabonds and marauders, bloomed all over the garden. Of gaudy tulips, there were ranks of bold stragglers that flaunted their saucy faces in the cold east wind, which slapped them sharply. There was an arbour nearly sinking under its load of yellow roses, that bloomed bravely until the December snows covered them. Down the river the dark-green woods of Deerchase were visible, with an occasional glimpse of the house through the trees. The Newington house faced the river, and a great ill-kept lawn sloped down to the water. It was quite a mile across to the other shore, and the water was steely blue in the morning light, except where a line of bent and crippled alders on the shore made a shadowy place in the brightness. And this home, so dearly loved in spite of its shabbiness, she might have to leave. What was to become of them in that event neither she nor Blair knew. He understood but one way of making a living, and that was out of the ground. He was essentially a landed proprietor, and take him away from the land and he was as helpless as a child. He might, it is true, become manager of somebody’s estate, but that would be to step into a social abyss, for he would then be an overseer. In short, a landed man taken away from his land in those days was more helpless than could well be imagined.