But when she remembered that an open grave lay between her and Throckmorton, it was not something like anguish she felt—it was anguish itself. Here was a man she might have loved—a man infinitely worthy of love—this much she acknowledged to herself; and yet Fate had married her to a man she never could have loved. For at that moment she saw as by a flash of lightning the falseness of her marriage and her widowhood. She dared not think any longer; she could only throw herself on her bed, and try and stifle among the pillows her sobs and cries. And, remembering Beverley and Throckmorton and Freke, and his words to her that night, this gentle and soft-hearted creature sounded all the depths of grief, love, shame, hatred. She tried to pray, but her prayers—if prayers they could be called—were mere outcries against the inexorable and unpitying God. “Dear Lord, what have I done to thee that I should suffer so?”
The night wore on, the candles burned out, the fire was a mere red glow of embers. Anguish and despair, like other passions, spend themselves. Judith had ceased to weep, and lay on her bed with a sort of icy torpor upon her. Little Beverley, who rarely stirred in his sleep, waked up and called for his mother; but even the child’s voice had no power to move her. The little boy, finding himself unnoticed, crawled out of his small bed and came to his mother’s side. The sound of his baby voice, the touch of his little warm, moist hands, awakened something like remorse in her. She tried to help him up on the bed, but her arms fell helplessly—she, this strong young woman, was as weak as a child with the conflict of emotions. The boy, however—a sturdy little fellow—climbed up alone and nestled to her. She covered him up and held him close to her, and kissed him coldly once or twice. “My child, he killed your father,” she said to him, thinking of Throckmorton, and that perhaps, for the child’s sake, she might arouse some feeble spark of regret for the father—some dutiful hatred of Throckmorton. But she could do neither the one nor the other.
At last, as a wet, miserable, gloomy dawn approached, she fell into a wretched sleep. Judith’s unexpected fainting-fit was a very good excuse for her keeping her room for a day or two—a merciful provision for her, as, along with other new experiences, she found for the first time that her soul was stronger than her body, and that grief had made her ill. She expected, in all those wretched hours that she lay in her darkened room, that every time the door opened it would be Mrs. Temple coming with a ghastly face to tell her the dreadful thing that Freke knew; and the mere apprehension made her heart stand still. She, this candid and sincere woman, rehearsed to herself the very words and tones that she would express a grief and horror she did not feel. But when several days passed, and the explosion did not come, she concluded that Freke, for his own reasons, meant to keep it to himself.
For Freke’s part, he had no intention of telling anybody except Judith. He had no mind to bring about the storm that would follow his revelation. He meant to show Judith that gulf between Throckmorton and herself, and that was all. He would have been unfeignedly sorry had the hospitable doors of Millenbeck been no longer open to him.
When Judith came down-stairs, he felt a great curiosity to know how she would meet him. He himself was perfectly easy and natural in his manner to her; and she, to his enforced admiration, was equally self-possessed with him, although she could not always control the expression of her eyes. “What a Spartan she is!” thought Freke to himself. “She could die of grief and chagrin with a smile on her lips, and with her voice as smooth and musical as the velvet wind of summer.”
CHAPTER VII.
The autumn crept on. Freke had gone to Wareham, to Judith’s delight, but she found that she had rejoiced too soon, for he was at Barn Elms nearly every day. The still, silent enmity between Judith and himself showed itself, on her part, by a certain fine scorn—an almost imperceptible raising of her narrow brows, that was infuriating to Freke. Still, he could not shake her self-possession. She even listened to his talk, and to his captivating violin-playing, with a cool and critical pleasure. When, as often happened, his step was heard in the hall at twilight, and he would walk into the drawing-room or the dining-room, as if Barn Elms were his home, with his violin in his hand—for he kept one at Barn Elms—and seating himself would begin to play in his masterly way, Judith would listen as closely as Jacqueline. But the spell was merely the spell of the music. She could listen to the celestial thrilling of the strings, the soft lamenting, without in the slightest degree succumbing to the player—not even when Freke, playing a wandering accompaniment, like another air from the one he was singing, would sing some of Heine’s sea-songs, in which she could almost hear the sound of the wind as it rose and wailed and died upon the waves. When the music stopped, and Freke would look at her piercingly, she was no more moved by it emotionally than General Temple was, who pronounced it “uncommon fine fiddling, by George! Some of the tunes haven’t got much tune, though.” This unbroken resistance on Judith’s part piqued Freke immeasurably; but quite naturally, as it often is with men of his temperament, as he could not please her, he determined to spite her—and he did it by a silent, furtive courtship of Jacqueline. Of this, neither General nor Mrs. Temple suspected anything. In one sense, the girl had suffered from neglect. Beverley had been the favorite of both parents. He had been the conventional good son, the comfort of his parents’ hearts, while Jacqueline was more or less of a puzzle to both of them. In vain Mrs. Temple tried to interest her in household affairs; Jacqueline would have none of them. She shocked and mystified her mother by saying that she hated Barn Elms—it was so old and shabby, and there were not enough carpets and curtains in the house; and the hair-cloth furniture in the drawing-room made her ill. Mrs. Temple, who excelled in all sweet, feminine virtues, who would have loved and bettered any home given her, thought this sort of thing on Jacqueline’s part very depraved. The mother and the daughter did not understand each other, and could not. Judith’s superior intelligence here came in. Jacqueline loved her, and, while she obeyed her mother from sheer force of will on Mrs. Temple’s part, she rebelled against being influenced by her. Judith, on the contrary, without a particle of authority over Jacqueline, could do anything she wished with her. Mrs. Temple could only command and be obeyed in outward things, but Judith ruled Jacqueline’s inner soul more than anybody else.
The county people, outside of the Severn neighborhood, still held perfectly aloof from Throckmorton. This angered him somewhat, although, as a matter of fact, the people who did recognize him supplied him with all the company he wanted; for Throckmorton was always enough for himself, and depended upon no man and no woman for his content. He had bought Millenbeck and come there for a year, and a year he would stay, no matter what the Carters and the Carringtons and the Randolphs thought about it. Then he really had enough of company, and all the books and cigars he wanted, and plenty of the finest shooting, although he never killed a robin after that absurd promise he made to Jacqueline, but he never saw one without giving a thought to her and a grim smile at himself. And so the quiet autumn slipped away. Throckmorton felt every day the charm of exquisite repose. In his life he had known a good deal of excitement—the four years of the war he had been in active service all the time—and this return to quiet and a sort of refined primitiveness pleased him. He was charmed with the simplicity of the people at Barn Elms—the simplicity of genuine country people, whose outlook is upon nature. He had often heard that country people never were really sophisticated, and he began to believe it. Even in the stirrings of his own heart toward the place of his boyhood, after the lapse of so many busy and exciting years, he recognized the spell that Nature lays softly upon those whose young eyes have seen nothing but her. Throckmorton, in spite of a certain firmness that was almost hardness, was at heart a sentimentalist. He found content, pleasure, and interest in this lazy, dreamy life. Of happiness he had discovered that, except during that early married life of his, he had none, for he was too wise to confound peace and happiness. At forty-four, when his dark hair had turned quite gray, he acknowledged to himself that nothing deserved the name of happiness but love. But all these dreams and fancies he kept to himself, and revolved chiefly in his mind when he was tramping along the country roads with a gun over his shoulder, or stretched before a blazing wood-fire in the library at Millenbeck smoking strong cigars by the dozen. He managed to keep his sentimentalism well out of sight, not because he was ashamed of it, but because he respected it.