Our heroine had been wedded about three months—was she blessed in her second union more than in her first marriage?
My kind and gentle readers, she was not happy—yet she was content. But had she ever before indulged in any illusions, as regards Sir Percy, they must have quickly faded. Even on returning from the Church, his bride at his side, not one word of affection did the newly-made husband utter; of himself alone he spoke—his position, his future; but then, to be sure, he was turned of fifty, and as Byron observes, rather than one husband at that mature age,
“’Twere better to have two, at five-and-twenty.”
This was the beginning of sorrows.
Immediately after the breakfast, the impatient bridegroom, anxious, doubtless, to embrace the fair lady he dared now call his own, knocked at the door of her chamber, where, divested of her bridal costume, she was arraying herself in a becoming travelling toilette. When admitted, the grateful lover begged—now guess, dear ladies. I pray what——Why for the loan of a few hundred francs to pay his bill at the hotel. Rather early, methinks, to usurp marital rights over his wife’s purse. Poor Evelyn’s next fit of disgust was on the morrow of her bridal, when, in an elegant morning robe of the freshest muslin, her hair braided under the prettiest of caps, she with horror beheld Sir Percy enter the room, unwashed, uncombed, unbraced, and perfectly innocent of a clean shirt. Seating himself at the breakfast table, he commenced feeding, utterly unconscious of having committed an unpardonable crime against good manners. Unfortunate Evelyn! so refined, so fastidious, so exquisitely neat and clean in her personal habits, to be brought to this. “Oh! what a falling off was there!”
Sir Percy united in his own person those opposite defects which in others are usually compensated by corresponding virtues. He was at the same time a spendthrift, and the meanest of men. Hasty and imprudent, yet sly and cunning, with an appearance of frankness, he combined an utter disregard of truth. He seemed to lie for the pleasure of lying. His temper was alike quick, vindictive, and revengeful, and his character comprised the opposite qualities of weakness and obstinacy. A general lover of the female sex, he was utterly incapable of individual attachment. It was clear that the baronet had married for money, but finding that his wife contented herself simply with paying their mutual expenses, and refused to place her fortune in his power, he actually began to dislike her and made no secret of the feeling. One illustration I will give, and this is but a solitary instance of the extraordinary line of conduct pursued by Sir Percy towards her he had so recently sworn to love, protect and cherish during the term of their natural life.
Angered one night because Evelyn had left him a small portion of his own travelling expenses to pay, he rang up the servants of the hotel at midnight, and though we were to start on the following morning at break of day, he ordered his luggage to be transported and his bed made in a room at the most distant end of the corridor, thus making himself and his wife of a month, the laughing-stock of the hotel. We do not pretend the man was altogether devoid of good impulses; but the evil of his nature was strong—the good feeble. He was ungrateful, heartless, unprincipled. Evelyn had before known only the reverse of the picture; she had been adored, petted, spoiled. How could she conceive so exceptional a character as that of Sir Percy? How bear with him? Dear friends, she did bear with him, and she was not wretched, for she now knew that all trials are the just retribution for past sins committed, past duties unperformed. Alas! we cannot escape the past, still does it pursue us like an avenging spectre; and so she resolved to endure all, looking no longer to earth for bliss, living ever in the sweet calm and beauty of the inner life, which proceeds from the Christ who shines on the souls of all who will receive him as the pure and perfect law.
No longer spell-bound by her passionate love for D’Arcy, he was yet dear—dearer to her than ever, for to him alone she owed all her strength to bear, all her courage to do; through him she had been enabled to behold the radiant, the immeasurable life of the beyond, as the one great reality of our being, compared to which this earth life, did it last a century, is but as a span, a point in eternity, “a dream when one awaketh.” Oh, had she realized these blessed truths in earliest youth, how different might have been her fate! But, repulsed by narrow-minded sectarianism, miscalled religion, she had strayed without a guide in devious paths.
The idea of a future existence had then loomed darkly before her young imaginations as a vague terror, a portentous and lurid superstition forcing her to an unwilling lip-service of prayer. Now it was a glorious inspiration—hourly influencing her, and turning the common incidents of life into occasions for thanksgiving.
For she knew that the Infinite Father was calling his erring child home through her loves and through her griefs.